News
Persistence Pays Off
Student teaches Seth Godin a marketing lesson
September 28, 2006
Persistence pays off. It's a cardinal rule of marketing - and a rule taken to
heart by a student at Manhattanville College in Purchase.
Vanessa Racioppo was so taken with Seth Godin's book "All Marketers Are Liars," including his maxim that it's riskier for businesses to play it safe, that she took her own risk of sorts. She wrote a personal letter to the author asking if he would come speak on campus.
He agreed. Godin addressed Racioppo and her Principles of Entrepreneurship classmates, along with professor David Adams, Sept. 28 in the college's Reid Castle.
Godin offered a history of sliced bread to illustrate his first point: the value of promotion. It was Otto Frederick Rohwedder who thought to sell bread in slices in 1913, but not until Wonder Bread popularized it in 1930 did it catch on with consumers and rival companies.
"What Wonder understood, that Otto did not, is that if your idea spreads, you win," Godin said
Godin urged businesses and their owners to stand out from the "invisible" crowd of competitors by making themselves "remarkable," and discussed how buyers are now in more control than ever of whether, when and how they will receive promotional messages or "permission" marketing.