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I could picture this comment chain almost as soon as the story was posted. I'm with Ardit20, had anyone else posted the story, it would have been dismissed as a

by koepked 17y ago

I could picture this comment chain almost as soon as the story was posted. I'm with Ardit20, had anyone else posted the story, it would have been dismissed as a rant, but when people see sethgodin.typepad.com, it becomes a valuable insight.

mechanical_fish 17y ago
had anyone else posted the story, it would have been dismissed as a rant And that would have been a mistake, because this isn't really a rant. Its formal structure is that of a complaint, but in fact it is a short essay, in complaint form, about the nature of branding and company culture. Why doesn't this count as a rant? There's no hard and fast rule. But one sign is that the company is unnamed and unidentifiable. There is a very good chance that it is fictional, or that it is a composite archetype that doesn't correspond to any specific company. None of which would change the meaning of the essay in the least.
- omouse 17y ago
  Stop playing semantic games and just agree that this post by Godin sucks.
- netsp 17y ago
  In fact, I think that on HN a sethgodin post is more likely to piss people off. BTW, I think that it's a bad sign how quickly these shallow dismissive comments rise to the top here. If you prefer arguments to be presented in a a logical form fine, but the information remains the same. It's not patentable, but it's worth thinking about if you feel like thinking about that sort of thing. Here's the translation: A brand is presented as a brand. A way of of thinking about a collection of things (people, products, procedures, history) as a single thing. It is the psychological equivalent to a legal entity. A kind of Anthropomorphism. You can say: "Apple (the brand) did X" when obviously the reality is that a bunch of people or policies 'do'. This is a useful metaphor for letting customers interact with you. When you leverage a brand, you are working this metaphor to your advantage. But you can't say we (the brand) have excellent customer service & still say they (individuals making it up) are responsible for that bad product.
aristus 17y ago
In that case, would it be fair to say that Seth knows how to build a brand? :) I rarely learn something deep or insightful from his posts, except perhaps the power of a consistent message. But you can't deny that, at least when it comes to promoting the brand Seth Godin, he's pretty good.
Confusion 17y ago
Had anyone else posted this story, then nobody would make such silly accusations as suggesting that another commenter responds in a particular way merely out of adoration of the author of the story. For the record: before I started reading Hacker News, I didn't know who Seth Godin was. I've never read any of his books and I haven't read any of his blogs besides the ones linked here, nor do I intend to. I'm not really interested in marketing and I share the general adverseness programmers feel versus 'marketing types'. All of that doesn't mean that the guy doesn't make sensible points. It certainly doesn't mean we should deride him for stating 'obvious' things in a ranting manner, where we would loudly applaud the exact same behaviour in a software engineer. Hell, we do that half the time when Linus goes batshit again.
derefr 17y ago
And that's a problem with us, not with the valuable rant. This will get philosophical, sorry. When we hear a "wise person" say something, we assume it has meaning, no matter how meaningless it may seem. This is why Zen koans are meditated upon, while incoherent babblings of toddlers are not. This says nothing about the objective value of the koan or the babbling, but rather the subjective value it holds to the listener. The "wisdom" metadata, the color of the text if you will, makes it valuable in that it forces our brain to create an insight for itself that could be rationalized to fit the content of the rant. It becomes a sounding board, a way of finding inner knowledge you weren't consciously aware of. This is valuable, at least to me.

by koepked 17y ago

mechanical_fish 17y ago

had anyone else posted the story, it would have been dismissed as a rant And that would have been a mistake, because this isn't really a rant. Its formal structure is that of a complaint, but in fact it is a short essay, in complaint form, about the nature of branding and company culture. Why doesn't this count as a rant? There's no hard and fast rule. But one sign is that the company is unnamed and unidentifiable. There is a very good chance that it is fictional, or that it is a composite archetype that doesn't correspond to any specific company. None of which would change the meaning of the essay in the least.

omouse 17y ago
Stop playing semantic games and just agree that this post by Godin sucks.
netsp 17y ago
In fact, I think that on HN a sethgodin post is more likely to piss people off. BTW, I think that it's a bad sign how quickly these shallow dismissive comments rise to the top here. If you prefer arguments to be presented in a a logical form fine, but the information remains the same. It's not patentable, but it's worth thinking about if you feel like thinking about that sort of thing. Here's the translation: A brand is presented as a brand. A way of of thinking about a collection of things (people, products, procedures, history) as a single thing. It is the psychological equivalent to a legal entity. A kind of Anthropomorphism. You can say: "Apple (the brand) did X" when obviously the reality is that a bunch of people or policies 'do'. This is a useful metaphor for letting customers interact with you. When you leverage a brand, you are working this metaphor to your advantage. But you can't say we (the brand) have excellent customer service & still say they (individuals making it up) are responsible for that bad product.

aristus 17y ago

In that case, would it be fair to say that Seth knows how to build a brand? :) I rarely learn something deep or insightful from his posts, except perhaps the power of a consistent message. But you can't deny that, at least when it comes to promoting the brand Seth Godin, he's pretty good.

Confusion 17y ago

Had anyone else posted this story, then nobody would make such silly accusations as suggesting that another commenter responds in a particular way merely out of adoration of the author of the story. For the record: before I started reading Hacker News, I didn't know who Seth Godin was. I've never read any of his books and I haven't read any of his blogs besides the ones linked here, nor do I intend to. I'm not really interested in marketing and I share the general adverseness programmers feel versus 'marketing types'. All of that doesn't mean that the guy doesn't make sensible points. It certainly doesn't mean we should deride him for stating 'obvious' things in a ranting manner, where we would loudly applaud the exact same behaviour in a software engineer. Hell, we do that half the time when Linus goes batshit again.

derefr 17y ago

And that's a problem with us, not with the valuable rant. This will get philosophical, sorry. When we hear a "wise person" say something, we assume it has meaning, no matter how meaningless it may seem. This is why Zen koans are meditated upon, while incoherent babblings of toddlers are not. This says nothing about the objective value of the koan or the babbling, but rather the subjective value it holds to the listener. The "wisdom" metadata, the color of the text if you will, makes it valuable in that it forces our brain to create an insight for itself that could be rationalized to fit the content of the rant. It becomes a sounding board, a way of finding inner knowledge you weren't consciously aware of. This is valuable, at least to me.