My new favorite word is "awkward."
It’s awkward to talk to your boss (who has way more experience than you do) about teaching her agile programming.
It’s awkward to call a religious or political leader on their intolerant comments.
It’s awkward to bring up pre-need burial services with an older person. (What a great oxymoron, by the way).
It’s awkward to challenge a co-worker who has a negative attitude, or is constantly surfing myspace.
It’s awkward to ask a new lifeguard recruit at the beach to prove she can actually swim.
It’s awkward to ask the owner of the restaurant to turn off the TV behind the bar.
It’s awkward to create a product that changes the status quo.
It’s awkward to demonstrate your amazing insights when it might threaten those that are looking for stability instead.
The reason we need to be in search of awkward is that awkward is the barrier between us and excellence, between where we are and the remarkable. If it were easy, everyone would have done it already, and it wouldn’t be worth the effort.
August 16, 2006
…and one of them is wrong. (More from JFK).
"You must be feeling really frustrated."
What a great thing for a gate agent to say to a frustrated traveler. I saw it used three times in ten minutes, and it worked every time. It enabled the agent to get on the same side of the conversation, it allowed the customer to let off some steam and got both sides moving.
On the other hand,
"Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part…"
This is true, of course, unless your goal is to make the person happy, or, at the very least, get rid of them. There were all sorts of clueless people at the airport today, cutting lines, yelling, getting angry just because they didn’t leave enough time. Not the airline’s fault, that’s for sure.
Yet the best way to handle the situation is not to persuade, convince or bully the person into admitting that they were wrong. No reason to teach these people a lesson, because they’re not going to learn a lesson anyway.
August 15, 2006
First lesson from a short visit to JFK today:
Regardless of what you think of the timing or the efficacy of the ban on liquids on airplanes, certainly you’d know about it, right? I mean, if you were scheduled to take a plane in the next few days, how could you not know about it? And then, once you got to the airport, passing the big signs on the doors of the terminal, passing the big garbage cans, passing the person at security reminding you, then, certainly, you’d know, right?
Of course not.
I saw, at the last stage of security, the TSA guys grabbing dozens of bottles of Gatorade, gel, etc., out of people’s bags. Not here and there, but gallons.
Never underestimate the ability of the public to ignore you. They can and they will.
John Sawatsky of ESPN knows how to ask questions, and he thinks you don’t.
You need to ask questions every time you interact with a consumer, a job applicant, a co-worker with a great idea or even someone sitting next to you during an interminable wait for the airplane.
I found John’s seven rules in a search cache. Here’s a summary of what doesn’t work:
1. Asking a question with no query
Examples: "Your neighbors don’t like you." "Some people think you killed your wife."
2. Double-barrelled questions
Like: "Is this your first business? How did you get started?" You’re unlikely to get answers to both. One question at a time.
3. Overloading
Ask: short, simple questions. "What is it like to be accused of murder?"
4. Adding your own remarks
Again, this is not the time or place to say that you hate Chryslers… You’re not being interviewed.
5. Trigger words
One famous example of this was when TV reporter John Stossell asked a pro wrestler about the "sport” by volunteering this about the fighting: "I think it’s fake." The pro wrestler hit him–twice. "Was that fake?" he demanded…
6. Hyperbole by the questioner
Overstatement typically causes the interview subject to counterbalance by understating…
7. Closed query (Yes or No question)
If the question begins with a verb, its most likely a closed question — and will generate a one word answer.
Good starting point on John: American Journalism Review.
August 14, 2006
On Friday, September 8, I’m going to do a call-in Q&A session, beginning at 10 am New York time.
You can call in from anywhere in the world using a standard phone
line. I’ll probably visit some websites as we talk, but no technology
is required.
Attendance at the session is limited to 31 people, and I’ll stay on
the phone all day if I need to. Everyone is guaranteed a shot to
contribute.
The goal is to give people a chance to ask specific questions
(about your organization, your site or your kewpie doll collection,
whatever). The session will be off the record, and no archive will be
available. I’ve never done this kind of thing before, but it promises
to be pretty interesting, useful and perhaps provocative (in a good
way).
You don’t have to send me a fee to attend. Instead, sometime between today and August 23, you need to buy 11 copies of my new book
at Barnes & Noble. Not the online site, but a retail store. B&N
is doing a big promotion, and I want to repay the favor by sending a
few dozen heavy hitters to the store to buy copies for their teams. If
you don’t live near a store, call one and they’ll ship em.
I wrote this book as a way for my blog readers to share some of my
ideas with their non-blog-reading colleagues. This promotion is sort of
a way to jumpstart that.
Just email me if you’re
interested in buying the books and coming and I’ll send you my fax
number. First 31 people to fax over a receipt get a seat. If I get more
response, I’ll do a second session a week later.
[UPDATE: some readers have explained that the whole BN retail process is too logistically difficult. My goal in this promotion was to do something fun, not painful. So, if you find yourself stuck, feel free to us this link instead. Thanks to everyone for all that driving around…]
It’s true: the vast majority of successful products are hardly remarkable.
As I walked to the Union Square market today, carrying two thermAsnap™ cooler bags, I thought about the bags. This company appears to be doing exceptionally well. They have a huge profit margin, very strong distribution in fish and ice cream stores and supermarkets, and they keep growing (hey, their website even has videos).
But the product is poorly designed. The thermAsnaps come UNsnapped all the time. The graphics are abysmal. The copy includes the helpful reminder that you shouldn’t put hot and cold items together in the same bag.
It doesn’t matter. Not one bit. They’re still doing great.
The lesson? I think that there are two. The first is that setting out to win in an overlooked market by sewing up distribution and eliminating reasons for your distributors to switch is a fine plan when it works. And the second is that there are plenty of markets where competition is thin and becoming a slave to fashion not only isn’t necessary, it’s not even a good idea. You don’t always have to show up on the "what’s hot" list to be successful.
Remember, too, not to put your hot and cold items in the same bag at the same time, please.
What’s worth more, a daily skin tightening cream that makes a patient feel firm and supple and thin, or a tummy tuck that actually makes a patient thin?
What’s more more, a KPMG study, performed by 30 analysts, that demonstrates a plant must be closed, or an organizational pscyhologist spending time with the management team so that they gain enough confidence and communication skills that they actually grow the business?
What’s worth more, a divorce lawyer (who creates something permanent) or a mediator, who sometimes saves a relationship?
Are placebos worth more than surgery? Is an inspirational management book worth more than a Wall Street banker?
I was talking with a plastic surgeon over dinner, and the chasm couldn’t have been more clear. Western medicine is arranged around the permanent, the measurable, the knife. Yet people, many of them anyway, would rather spend money on the potion or the lotion that somehow promises a more magical solution.
Until robots on the factory floor get a checkbook, we’re still going to be busy selling to people, not machines. And people care a lot more about first impressions and psychological satisfaction than they care to admit.
So, I started my morning with a dozen ears of local corn from the farmer’s market, waiting to be cooked.
I did a google search and was delighted (okay, stunned) to find this lens as the fourth site listed. A quick look led me to this post, all about sustainable vegan cooking in Las Vegas. The post was perhaps the fifth piece of media I’d seen in the last week that referenced just how far food travels to get to us. The average food item goes about 1,500 miles from where it’s grown to where it’s consumed.
This has probably been true for decades or more, but now it’s on the radar. Now people are writing about it, blogging about it, challenging grocery stores about it. It’s on our list, at least for now.
Why not a year ago or five years ago?
One mistake marketers make is a little like the goldfish that never notices the water in his tank. Our environment is changing. Always. Incrementally. Too slowly to notice, sometimes. But it changes. What we care about and talk about and react to changes every day. Starbucks couldn’t have launched in 1970. We weren’t ready.
Two challenges to keep in mind: get faster at getting to market so you can time the waves right. And be more open to watching the waves so you can have the right story for the right market at the right time. When we’re ready.
August 13, 2006
There is no friction at a free PR press release site (PR Leap). It doesn’t matter who you know or how many phone calls you can afford to make… all press releases here are listed for free… though the paid ones move up.
The friction issue reminded me of an article about getting a parking spot at certain Metro North train stations. In order to be "fair", the railroad requires people to wait in line once a year (first come first served) to get a permit. The thing is, getting to a decent spot in line requires camping out all night. While this is fair in the sense that money is not an issue, the idea that everyone values their time the same seems sort of backwards.
August 12, 2006
Most of the changes you make in your product are designed to grow your market share… to get you new customers (by having them switch from the competition) or to grow the market (by having people enter your market) or to keep people from leaving in a churning market.
So, how do you get them to make the switch?
I think it might be useful to think of two kinds of innovations.
Call the first kind, "another brick in the wall." I was listening to two guys online (sorry, can’t remember where) discussing PDF printing. The first was talking about various shareware and freeware ways to get Windows to create PDF files. The second pointed out that it was built in already to the Mac.
First guy said, "Yeah, I’m going to give up all of my hardware and software and switch just so I don’t have to install a piece of freeware…"
That ability on the Mac is another brick. Build enough bricks and soon enough, it is enough to switch.
The second kind we can call, "game changers." These are the remarkable innovations that make not switching painful. The sort of free prize inside that reminds the unswitched that not having switched yet is painful. It doesn’t have to be a totally recasting of all that a product stands for. Interesting for me to note that Time Machine might be Apple’s latest game changer. It promises to relieve so much pain and anxiety in a certain class of user that for an informed chooser (and that’s not as big a category as any marketer wishes it was) it might just mean a whole new decision.
The other lesson here is this: game changers are rare. If you are swinging for the fences all the time, looking for one, you might end up striking out a lot. Bricks, on the other hand, are the way most industries are won.
August 11, 2006
