There's a version of marketing happening right now where the goal is to be seen. More content, frequency and formats.The logic goes: if enough people notice you, something will eventually stick. It rarely does.
I've been sitting with something Seth Godin said in an interview and it hasn't left me. The idea is simple but it cuts through a lot: attention is only worthwhile if it leads to trust. Not reach or impressions. Not a spike in followers that flatlines within a week. Simply trust.
And the problem with building a strategy around attention is that attention is borrowed. It's rented real estate. Someone gives it to you for a moment, then takes it back the second something more interesting appears.
The brands that actually hold their ground understand this. They're not optimising for eyeballs. They're building something that people want to be part of. There's a difference between a brand chasing cultural relevance and one that creates the conditions for culture to form around it.
Nude Project, Vacation and Umbro all come to mind here. Three very different brands, but all three know who they are and what rooms their communities are in. Their marketing, when you look at it properly, is the product. The community and their unique point of view. The things they refuse to do matter just as much as the things they choose.
Godin's framing has always been about permission. The idea that the most effective form of marketing is when someone invites you in rather than you interrupting them. The brands that last are the ones people actively seek out, return to, and recommend without being incentivised to do so.
Most brands are playing a completely different game. They're publishing at volume, measuring surface-level metrics, and calling it strategy. Every output optimised for reach. No patience for anything that doesn't generate an immediate signal. And you can feel it. There's a hollowness to high-frequency, low-investment content that audiences have become fluent in reading. They don't need to articulate why something feels thin. They just move on.
The pizza shop analogy Godin uses is the one I keep coming back to. There are places with a queue around the block not because they're good at social media, but because they made something worth putting on social media. The marketing is downstream of the thing. That sequence matters enormously.
What I'd argue is that the attention game has become a race that most brands can't afford to win. Even if you get the attention, holding it requires even more volume and more spend. All you're doing is maintaining a flame with increasing amounts of fuel.
The question worth asking isn't how do we get more people to notice us. It's what are we building that people actually want to find and share.
So Seth, if you're reading this. My morning espresso is up, tipped your way for this one.
A shot of the good stuff.
Shot of the good stuff.
