All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low Trust World

by Seth Godin

Portfolio (2005)

While reading Seth’s new book Linchpin, I’m reflecting on his earlier inspiring work.

Every marketer tells a story. And if they do it right, we believe them. That belief makes their story true. In this concept, liars are storytellers. Marketers succeed when they tell us a story we embrace and share. We become a member of the marketers tribe and then pass this story onto our own tribe (much like writing this blog). It is up to the consumer and her tribe members to interpret the authenticity of the marketing. A marketer’s performance must live up to the effort we perceive. More authenticity generally equals good work, a more creative lifestyle, and more success.

Godin’s visionary yet short book is not hard reading. Read with care, it will fire off many ideas about our world and our responsibility to connect to it through our work and the sharing of our efforts.

Godin appeals to young people growing up in the Internet Age because he is spot-on with his understanding of the changing world of instant communication. However, All Marketers Are Liars is applicable to old folks like me who want to be tuned into the vitality offered by new business techniques being generated by our resourceful, “No BS” young folks who are making a difference in this rapidly changing business world.

A must-read for today’s small business person.

Read other blogs about Seth Godin’s books.

The Housing Boom and Bust by Thomas Sowell

Basic Books (2009)

While recently reading 2010 articles on how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are attempting to avoid strangulation, I’m reflecting on Sowell’s eye-opening book I read last summer. Sowell’s wisdom is a reliable cornerstone of stability among all the babble on economic solutions spewing from Washington.

Housing Boom is a plain English explanation of how we got into the current economic disaster that developed out of the housing markets. Sowell explains the evolution of the boom, pulling no punches when discussing the political culprits of either party, the financial damages they created or the BS used to escape their own responsibility for what happened.

Reading The Housing Boom and Bust has helped me have a defrosted view on how to better interpret the facts and lies flowing out of Washington, 2010. (Whatever that means is up to me.) However, I feel the more informed we are the more likely we are to put forth the right business decisions in our own little worlds.

Awareness as a whole could prevent us from being blindly led to dysfunction. Thomas Sowell’s easy-to-read book is a step in the right direction.

Reset: How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America

by Kurt Anderson

(Random House, 2009)

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From Tom Brokaw’s Forward:

“What has encouraged me greatly as I travel around the country, from the shaken baronies of Wall Street to the regional centers of commerce and back roads of rural America, is the common acknowledgment not just that a course correction is overdue, but that this is an exciting opportunity to construct a new model that will serve us better for the challenges ahead.”

Anderson’s long essay or short book includes perceptive interpretations about our evolving lifestyles, proposals about readdressing the meaning of the world around us and how we analyze fitting in to it. Anderson concludes that “the crisis should therefore prompt Americans now to call upon the old-fashioned, self-reliant, enthusiastic, common-sense part of themselves–that is, their true amateur spirit.”

While reading Reset, I couldn’t help but focus on Lemuria. With the downturn, we’ve addressed the crisis by tightening up and improving the bookstore. With a good and rightful motivated staff, we’ve worked hard to survive. We’ve corrected internal flaws, eliminated selfish personal malaise, and gotten more good books on the shelves (less crummy titles or just plain hoax books). We hope during this crisis we’ve given Jackson a better bookstore. We want to be ready to grow as the waters become smooth.

Reading Reset will prompt you to look at yourself, encouraging you to take the bull by the horns, turning those visions into actions using a renewed cultural perspective.

Free: The Future of a Radical Price

by Chris Anderson

(Hyperion, 2009)

Anderson proposes that “new free” goes beyond any marketing gimmick and sets the table for the growth of reputation economy with new methods of generating the power of free. He emphasizes ideas for competition when your competitors are giving away what you are trying to sell. Being an independent bookseller and facing the current $8.99 price war of bestsellers, it’s easy to understand why I picked this book up.

“New free” is not about “when you hear the word free, you reach for your wallet mentally.” “New free” is about providing an authentic service in a free way that might lead the customer to spend money indirectly.

Example: Lemuria Blog is a free information tool to help our readers to find the right book to read. Adding to our customer service, we hopefully lead our readers to the right reads. Using the Lemuria Blog can save wasted reading time, improve reading choices, and prevent misspent book-buying dollars. Being hypnotized by cheaply priced books may waste valuable reading time that can’t be replaced.

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and editor in chief of Wired magazine, relates what he observes now and predicts for the future in a most readable way. He understands the origins of free and how recent marketing has been used to produce business growth.

Free is a a useful book for anyone with an interest in the small business.