What do the Dubai port deal, the numa numa video, Danish cartoons and yellow wristbands have in common?
They all spread because they were easy to spread. At the same time that climate cancer languishes in the background, voters inundate Congress with phone calls about the port deal. And pundits are surprised–shocked!–at how irrational the public is.
Actually, our behavior as people is pretty easy to predict. We like things that are simple, not complex. Issues where we can take action without changing very much. If a marketer brings us a new idea, it’s either ignored or it’s a problem. A problem because we have to do something with the idea. Buy the new suit, trade in for the new car, install a new IT solution or change the way we feel about an issue.
The best problems, as far as a consumer is concerned, are those that can be solved quickly and easily, with few side effects.
Bite sized doesn’t mean small, though. When the stakes are high enough, people are willing to do really big things (like join the Army), if they believe that those big things are in and of themselves sufficient to have an impact on the problem. It’s bite sized, but a big bite.
Why are millions of Americans going to die of preventable diabetes and heart disease every year? Because the action needed to avoid the problem isn’t bite sized. And why did blogging take three years to really take off? Same reason.
March 10, 2006
Do you trust eBay?
Of course, eBay isn’t one organism… it is a collection of millions of people, some not so nice.
Do a search to buy an LCD monitor. You’ll find thousands of them. So sort by price. Wow, here are a whole bunch for $20, Buy it Now. Wow. Then you look and see that it’s not really a monitor, it’s a list of LCD wholesalers. $20 for a few sheets of paper. Who needs that? And there are more than a few people selling this list. Why?
Okay, let’s try a different category. Here’s one, 19 inches, new in the box, a Dell, only $50 Buy it Now. Wow! Wait, the shipping is $230…
It took me years to realize why people looked at me funny when I told them I was a marketer.
They don’t like us or trust us. No surprise, really.
March 9, 2006
Of course, you’ve heard the objection. "It just costs too much."
Today’s Times reports that 411 accounts for more than a billion calls a year–at just one provider. That’s more than a billion dollars a year being spent for a service that is truly a commodity–you want the number, here it is, bye.
And yet, Easy411 provides precisely the same service to callers for half the price. Why doesn’t everyone use them? Because it’s not just the price. It’s the hassle and the set up and the "I didn’t get around to it" nature of saving a few bucks.
Example 2: check out the parking lot at Costco. Lots of $40,000 or more cars and SUVs in the lot, people who wasted a few shekels worth of gas to drive out of their way to invest an hour of time to save a dollar on a big jar of pickles. These are the same people who will spend an extra $100 on an airplane ticket to save a few minutes in getting home after a meeting.
My point, and I do have one, is that price is a signal, a story, a situational decision that is never absolute. It’s just part of what goes into making a decision, no matter what we’re buying.
Robin Benson points us to The $39 Experiment: Asking Random Companies for Free Stuff.
The gimmick is that someone asked 100 companies for free samples and chronicled the response.
Here’s the surprise: most companies took no action at all.
And a few companies wrote back and said "no."
What does it cost for Del Monte to get someone to notice one of their products, to get someone to think about a product or to even buy one? Now, compare this to the cost of sending someone (who took the time to write) a coupon or two and a letter.
The first takes money. The second takes a little thought and a tiny bit of time.
Marketers shouldn’t fall for every scammer that comes along. But if someone chooses to pay attention, there are countless ways you can invite them to spread the word on your behalf.
Sometimes marketers are so busy yelling at people they don’t even notice inviduals who take the time to raise their hands.
The Grapple is a fuji apple filled with artificial grape flavoring (or maybe real grape designed to taste artificial.) It is remarkable only in the sense that it is such a bad idea and tastes so awful that people cannot help but comment on its stupidty. CiN Weekly – Grape apple=grapple.
March 8, 2006
Peter Payne writes in his newsletter from Japan:
Time and time again I’ve noticed the power the
opinions of gaijin have to effect change in Japan, whether it’s asking to have
a non-smoking section added to a restaurant or pointing out that the restroom
was not as clean as it could be (things Japanese would say "it can’t be
helped" about). Just today, while going to lunch, we spotted a young woman
driving with her 4-year-old daughter who was standing up in the front seat.
The idea of child carseats are still somewhat alien to Japan, a country that
only passed its first carseat law in 1999, and children playing inside moving
cars is something I’ve seen all to often. When we stopped at a light I went
into "seigi no mikata" (champion of justice) mode, got out of the car, and
publicly reprimanded the mother, telling to put her damn child in a seat belt,
at the very least. She immediately complied, embarrassed at being lectured
while people in the surrounding cars looked on.
###
Of course, it’s not just Japan and it’s not just car seats. There are countless things in your products and services that are there because it can’t be helped. As soon as you open yourself to interactions with the market (real interactions, not deniable forms) you discover that a lot of stuff can be helped.
No, not that kind.
Apple is now starting to sell 16 tv shows for one low low price. You get the fresh one, and the rest are delivered as they become available.
A long time ago, I called this the milkman’s return. Home delivery of milk was a great idea because it spread the cost of making a sale over many, many items.
It’s too easy to focus on the one-shot. Instead, someone in the serial business understands that once you’ve got subscribers, you can spend all your time finding products for your customers instead of searching for customers for your products.
Gary Dietz coins a new phrase: Armadillo Marketing.
Hard shell on the outside, gooey inside. Marketing you do for yourself or your client, not because it works in spreading your message to the outside world.
Brett Newhall points us to this photo.
Yes, Sony tried to run this ad in a subway station.
A spokesman for JC Decaux said, "We leave it to Metrolink and the Advertising Standards Agency to decide whether something is appropriate, that isn’t our role."
Could be a great way to start the eulogy at a funeral.
One of the most popular lenses on Squidoo is about a pro wrestler named Rey Mysterio. It happens to be a really good lens, but hey, it’s about a guy in a mask.
So why is it getting so much traffic?
It turns out that a Google search ("reymysterio" no spaces) turns up this lens as the second match.
This economy of spelling leads to thousands of organic visits. Most of those visitors leave happy, because the lens tells you just about everything you’d ever want to know about Mr. Mysterio.
The good news for Google investors is that the efficiency of using google.com means that many people (perhaps most people) start their online journey on Google, even if they know the url. (www.reymysterio.com is a site about the wrestler). That’s one reason why ads on a search page are worth so much more than ads in most other places online… you reach people on their way to somewhere else. But you already knew that.
When we were developing Squidoo, I can assure you that no time whatsoever was spent discussing how we might attract the pro wrestler community. But the long tail is once again at work, and if Squidoo succeeds, it will be because of the proximity of tens of thousands of topics just like this one.
