Marketing, a shift in Perspective — Reignite the Soul, with a touch of Humanity

9 min readJan 19, 2021

As I embark on the journey, exploring the world of Marketing in the Digital Era it unraveled what I knew it to be vs what it is. It brought about a complete change in perspective for me, with regards to Marketing.

Here I embrace the shift for the ones who are keen. For the seeker in you, for the one who constantly looks for that element of humanity that makes all the difference.

Be the change you wish to see in the World

“Marketing is the act of making change happen. Making is insufficient. You haven’t made an impact until you have changed someone.” — Seth Godin

Godin says, we want to be a part of the positive force by helping our customers and not scam our customers into buying a product they may not need or want. This is the difference between good marketing and bad marketing.

Traditionally Marketing meant identifying what the consumers want and finding a way to communicate our products to fulfill their needs.

The old way of doing marketing such as ‘buy ads — get distribution — sell product — buy ads’ is no longer effective. The only way to stand out from the crowd is to stop-advertising and start innovating.

Traditional marketing used simple techniques for advertisements which depend on printing advertisements industry.

Once upon a time…

Marketers spoke about the 5 P’s of Marketing. If you got all your P’s right then nothing could stop you from succeeding.

But then, something happened and now the old P’s just aren’t enough anymore.

What on earth would birth a Purple Cow? Well it’s Seth Godin

Seth talks about how there isn’t a chance a Purple Cow by the roadside would ever go unnoticed the same as how something remarkable would never go without a remark.

It’s no longer about the old rule, to play it safe by creating safe, ordinary products and then market them but rather the new one, to create remarkable products that the right people will seek out.

“Be genuine. Be remarkable. Be worth connecting with.” — Seth Godin

Marketing online, is when the work to serve our audience arrives in an electronic form. The act of marketing aided by the digital tools — SEO, tricks, tips, code and guesswork.

We also call this Modern/Digital Marketing.

Let’s look at the Frameworks which would help us put the concepts of Digital Marketing into the context of Modern Marketing.

The Integrated Digital Marketing framework is an engine which drives and executes the n^CATT Funnel, they go hand in hand to get the desired results.

The CATT Marketing Funnel

The basic marketing strategy is the CATT Framework

Wealth=n ^ CATT

In the formula, “n” refers to our Niche. A niche is our area of focus which we intend to serve, particularly well. We look at how do we arrive at our niche further in the article.

For Example Digital Marketing, Content Writing, Self Development, Travel, Food

Our success and wealth depends on it. We are going to serve the people who belong to our niche, they are our people, our tribe. Solve their problems or approach a starving market with our product or services.

[C] Content: We create content for those who we intend to serve, will read, value, and benefit from. “What’s in it for them?” is THE question. Their needs, challenges and opportunities are the ones we are looking to address. This also means we need to have our audience well researched. We can offer content in the form of blog posts, email, videos, webinars, etc.

[A] Attention: Now, that we have the content, it’s time we drive traffic to it. Valuable content is worth nothing if it’s not recognized. It’s imperative to drive our tribe towards our content. To ensure that we reach out to as many as we can, we use social media, SEO, referrals, and paid ads.

[T] Trust: Building trust with our tribe is our primary goal. Trust is the prime factor that motivates someone to take action. We gain trust by constantly providing them with valuable content, engaging with them through personalized messages, and re-engaging them with ad campaigns.

[T] Transaction: The process to convert our leads into potential customers. We already engaged with our niche audience, our tribe, we grabbed their attention and gained their trust. Next, we nurture them with our product or service with an intend to address their main question. At this point, they are more likely to carry an inclination and thus conclude to become a natural sale.

The Integrated Digital Marketing Framework

Content Marketing, plays a major role in the Integrated Digital Marketing framework. We use Paid Advertising, SEO, and Social Media to drive traffic to our valuable content instead of pitching our audience directly to the product or the sales page. Once our audience chooses to engage with our content, other marketing techniques come in to play.

Once a person signs to our newsletter, we can interact with him and build trust eventually by sending him emails every time we write a new blog, this is Email Marketing. Once we start getting enough traffic, our website is automatically optimized to appear in the search engine results. We are more likely to get engagement through social media and this creates brand awareness.

After gaining the trust of our target audience, the product starts to sell itself. Now on, we will require very little effort to convince anyone to purchase our product or service because we already have reached a level where the marketing takes place without our knowledge and we start driving sales consistently.

“Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve their problem. Marketing helps others become who they seek to become”. — Seth Godin

Godin’s Framework encapsulates Marketing as,

1. Creating or inventing a product worthy of telling a story about, with a contribution worth talking about.

2. Designing and building it in a way that the focus group of people will particularly benefit from and care about it.

3. Telling a story that matches the built-in narrative and dreams of that tiny group of people, the smallest viable market.

4. Spreading the word, creating the buzz.

5. Finally, showing up. Regularly, consistently, and generously, for years and years — to organize, lead and build confidence in the change we seek to make.

“The other kind of marketing, the effective kind, is about understanding our customer’s world view and desires so we can connect with them” — Seth Godin.

Scaling the Niche, Finding your Tribe

Challenging the Status-Quo

Playing it safe, is risky

Seth challenges us to think about who we consider our business or creative heroes. The ones we look up to or aspire to be like, more often than not are the ones who are “specific”.

For Eg: Martin Luther King Jr. leading the American civil rights movement.

Playing safe is risky, which is why, we need to stand for something. That something may not matter to all, but will matter to us and the specific audience we are looking to provide value for.

Marketing to the smallest viable market

Will narrowing our niche limit our customer base, will limit our income?!

The idea of focusing on a niche seems scary to most of us.

In fact, Narrowing our niche gives us the higher earning potential.

Scaling within our chosen niche starts by marketing to our smallest viable market.

“Everyone is not your customer.” -Seth Godin

We need to constantly think about what are we building? Who are we building it for? And, what change are we hoping to make?

“If we can say ‘specifically, it’s for people like these’, then we can make something that will overwhelm them with goodness. And then we’ve solved an interesting problem and they will tell others.”

Narrowing Down the Niche

Working backwards, looking at whom we would enjoy working the most with. Which customers, products or industries would come naturally to us? Which problems would we most enjoy solving?

Once we decide on those two aspects, we further narrow down on the specifics of each of the following audience demographics: Gender Age range, Occupation, Income level, Pain points

Once done, we would have a fairly specific category of a person narrowed down. This is our “User Persona / Customer Avatar” the one we wish to serve “Our Tribe”.

Now let’s go after it fearlessly!

Personal Branding

The Mass Trust Blueprint

The Mass Trust Blueprint very well defines the journey of building our Personal Brand.

The steps towards the evolution of a personal brand:

Learn: Learn a new skill, the concepts, facts and procedures. Understand the concepts, recall the facts and practice the procedures to master the particular skill. Learning new things is a skill we should develop for life, this not only allows us exposure but also helps us grow better.

Work: Ideas are worth nothing until executed. Success lies in massive action. Put your skill to work by implementing it in the real world and get the desired results.

“There’s not a thing as a million dollar idea, just million dollar execution”

Blog: It’s imperative to develop the habit of writing regularly, the more, the better. Our content should engage with our audience. Each piece of content should have a specific goal in mind. Our customers will start recognizing us, our brand once they’ve encountered it several times.

Consult: Once we have developed our personal brand over a period of time through our blog posts, we start consulting other businesses rather than working for just one. This not only boosts our confidence and skill but helps us take steps further in our journey.

Mentor: Step forward to mentor the ones who would like to learn the skill we have mastered. By teaching our skill to others, we are more likely to enhance our knowledge and scale our understanding to a whole new level.

Startup: Finally, we could launch our own product or service taking into consideration the amount of knowledge and skills we developed so far. It shall be a unique combination of skills, experience, and personality that we would want our followers to see.

The cycle keeps moving, because we never stop learning new things and the Mass Trust blueprint applies every time we master a new skill.

Welcoming The Element of Humanity

We seek to change, to bring in the change!

The small kindnesses that smooth our interactions and help other people feel as though you’re aware of them, the ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ ones.

The kindness of dignity gives someone the benefit of doubt, to see for who they are or can become, the realization that all of us have a voice in our heart, a story to be told and dreams to be realized.

And then there is,

The kindness of not having a focus on the personal short-term gain, but to build something for the community, doing work that matters, finding resilience and an anti-selfish path forward.

Kindness isn’t always an easy choice. The urgent race to the bottom, to easily measured metrics and scarcity, is distracting. But bending the arc toward justice, toward dignity and toward connection is our best way forward.