Marketing, permission and positioning
Has argued for thirty years that interrupting strangers is a worse business than earning the attention of a few people who care.
Photograph: Joi Ito · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Godin's contribution is the shift from interruption to permission: rather than buying attention from people who did not ask, build a group who want to hear from you and treat that permission as an asset you can lose.
He also gave the language of the 'purple cow' — that being remarkable is a distribution strategy rather than a compliment, because remarkable things get talked about and unremarkable ones need advertising to move at all.
The awkward half of his argument is that being for everyone means being remarkable to nobody. He pushes hard on choosing a 'smallest viable audience', which most owners resist because it feels like turning away revenue.
Pick the smallest group you could serve and still have a business, then make something they would genuinely miss. It is counter-intuitive and it is the fastest route to word of mouth, because a small group who care talk to each other and a large group who mildly approve do not.
An email list of people who chose to hear from you is worth vastly more than the same number of bought contacts, and it depreciates every time you send something they did not want. Treat it like a relationship with a balance you can overdraw.
His long-running argument against polishing: the work does not exist until it meets someone. Most of what stops a small business is not the quality of the idea but the number of weeks it sat unshipped.
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Owners who are tired of paying for adverts that do not work, and anyone building something for a specific group rather than a mass market.
It is deliberately short on tactics. If you want the settings for a particular ad platform, look elsewhere and come back for the strategy.