Seth Godin's smallest viable audience: why specificity beats reach for SMEs

Who Seth Godin is, and the core idea

Seth Godin is an author and long-time blogger on marketing. His book This Is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See was published by Portfolio (Penguin Random House) on 13 November 2018. The publisher's description centres on building trust and permission with a target market, deciding who a product is for and who it is not for, and using marketing to solve other people's problems rather than to steal attention.

The idea at the heart of the book appears in its table of contents as the smallest viable market, with two chapters devoted to it. On his blog Godin has used related terms: the minimum viable audience (2017 and 2019) and the smallest viable audience (2022). The labels vary; the argument stays the same.

The argument in brief

Godin's reasoning runs in four steps.

• Aiming at everyone backfires. In his 2017 post he argues that trying to appeal to the largest possible audience waters down the product and the message until they stand out to no one.
• Pick the smallest group that can sustain you. He suggests choosing the smallest market that can keep you going and that you can adequately serve, even though this cuts against conventional business thinking.
• Design for that group. If you must delight a specific group and cannot rely on anyone else, you stop compromising. Your quality, your story and your impact improve.
• Let them spread it. In his 2019 post he notes that delighting this audience has two effects: it turns out to be larger than expected, and its members tell others.

"When you seek to engage with everyone, you rarely delight anyone." — Seth Godin, Seth's Blog (2017)

His 2022 post adds an important nuance: focus takes more effort, not less. You cannot wait for random strangers to discover you. You have to decide who the work is for and what it is for, then create enough value that those people share it with peers who think like them. The aim is to become the kind of provider people would miss if you disappeared. Elsewhere, in a 2018 post titled It's not for everyone, he puts the goal plainly: to serve the right people, not everyone.

Why it matters for SMEs

Most small and mid-sized companies cannot buy mass reach. When they try to sound relevant to everyone, their website copy, ads and proposals become generic, and generic messages are easy to ignore and hard to remember. A clearly defined audience changes almost every downstream decision: which features to build, which price to charge, which channels to use, which language and imagery to choose, and which leads to turn away.

This is particularly relevant for companies working across markets, such as European brands selling to Chinese-speaking consumers or Chinese companies entering Europe. Trying to address all Europeans or all Chinese consumers at once usually means addressing nobody well. A narrower starting point, defined by need, situation and outlook as much as by geography, gives the business something specific to be known for.

A practical playbook

1. Do the sustaining arithmetic. Divide the annual gross profit you need by the gross profit from a typical customer per year. The result is roughly how many customers would sustain you. It is often smaller than founders expect.
2. Describe the group by situation and outlook, not just demographics. What problem are they trying to solve, what do they already believe, and what would they tell a peer about a good solution?
3. Write down who it is not for. Name the customers you will happily lose. This is what makes your choices visible.
4. Make one promise that group cares about. Test it in a few customer conversations before rewriting your website.
5. Remove compromises made for imaginary customers. Cut features, messages and offers that exist only to appeal to people outside the group.
6. Design for sharing. Give customers a reason and an easy way to recommend you to people like them: a useful guide, a referral mechanism, a community or simply a memorable experience.
7. Measure depth before breadth. Track repeat purchase, referrals and how many customers would be disappointed if you closed, not just traffic.
8. Expand from strength. Once the core group is well served and talking about you, widen to adjacent groups one at a time.

Limits and tensions

Godin's advice can be misread as a licence to stay tiny. His own condition is the smallest market that can sustain you; if the numbers do not work, the audience is too small. His argument is also mostly about what you make and for whom, rather than about media buying.

It sits in apparent tension with the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute's evidence that brands grow mainly by reaching more buyers. Byron Sharp, for example, has advised marketers to reach everybody and stay always on. In our view the two ideas work at different levels. Godin helps you decide which market to compete in and what to stand for. Once that market is chosen, reaching as many of its potential buyers as possible still matters. Godin also warns against aiming for the average:

"if you aim for mass (another word for average), you'll probably create something average." — Seth Godin, Seth's Blog (2019)

FAQ

Sources

• This Is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See — Seth Godin / Portfolio, Penguin Random House, 2018
• This is marketing: table of contents — Santa Clara University Library catalogue
• In search of the minimum viable audience — Seth Godin / Seth's Blog, 2017
• The minimum viable audience — Seth Godin / Seth's Blog, 2019
• The smallest viable audience — Seth Godin / Seth's Blog, 2022
• It's not for everyone — Seth Godin, 2018 (blog post mirrored on Goodreads)
• Prof Byron Sharp skewers Binet, tells marketers to sack agencies preaching share of voice — Mi3, republished by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, 2022