Have you ever been at a banquet or in a boutique or at a concert or a meeting or a company where the vibe was incredibly positive?
I think you know what I mean. A time and place where there was an overflow of positive energy. You felt surrounded by possibility, or people who believed in you, or just felt like buying (or eating, or talking) a lot.
The vibe changes everything. It’s a place you want to work, or a restaurant you want to come back to. I remember the first time I walked into Fast Company’s offices. I remember the original Legal Seafoods. And I remember, just a few weeks ago, the buzz in the lobby of the PDF conference in NY.
If vibe is so important, why does it sound flaky to worry about it? Who’s in charge of the vibe at your place? Could it be better? A lot better?
Changing the vibe isn’t always possible, but most of us rarely try. From physical layout to organization to what leaders say and do… it matters. Sometimes, it’s all that matters.
…be opposed to euthanasia but in favor of the death penalty? …be in favor of the impeachment of Bill Clinton but not of George Bush? …be worried about global warming but fly in a big private plane? …be in favor of the impeachment of George Bush but not of Bill Clinton? …be opposed to amnesty for illegal aliens but in favor of a pardon for Scooter Libby? …be in favor of military intervention in Darfur but not in Iraq? …be opposed to big government but want the government to control public speech? …be in favor of banning medical marijuana but opposed to government regulation of cigarettes? …be opposed to judicial meddling, except in cases where you disagree with the current laws?
Easy. Because people aren’t consistent. Sure, you say, each of the examples above isn’t fair. They don’t match. They don’t line up. [Smart people are lucky: they can hold seemingly contradictory ideas in their head while they look more deeply into the facts and make good decisions… it’s called nuance.]
We
don’t eat dessert cause we’re on a diet, but we put blue cheese
dressing on our salad. We don’t pay extra for first class, but refuse
to give up a seat to get bumped from a flight, even though the reward is
a thousand dollars. We curse the spam that clutters our email boxes but
turn around and authorize millions of pieces of junk mail to go out to
support our new business.
The local hardware store owner curses the existence of Home Depot but buys his family’s clothes at Wal-Mart. The vegetarian wears a leather belt…
Everything is a special situation, everything begs for inconsistency. If all we did was market to computers, life would be a lot simpler, but a lot less interesting.
The new in-flight entertainment systems are all digital. The recently installed model on Air Canada remembers the volume that the person before you used. Which means that mine was set for 11.
Several agonizing seconds later, I was able to rip off the headphones.
Design often needs to be remarkable. But it also needs to be smart.
[Rick writes in the next day:
I’m in the maple leaf lounge at the Toronto Airport. Sitting with two of the execs who worked on this project for Air Canada. I showed em your post and said “well?”
[cue depressing music]
They are still having a debate on this (45 minutes later), deciding if they should put this into the update/rev plan. One guy actually said, "who puts on a headset without check volume first?"
Like every other person in the audience of this video, I found his performance stirring and even moving. But I was unsettled by a few things. First, that Cord, the blogger who posted the video, felt like the singer had no confidence. I completely disagree. Bad teeth doesn’t mean no confidence. His posture on stage makes it clear that he has completely mastered his craft.
But the real takeaway for me is how small-minded, snarky and downright mean the three judges are. Even (or especially) when they are surprised by his performance, they act as if they somehow deserve to sit in judgment of him.
They don’t. Critics rarely do.
The market is a harsh critic. It’s not always fair and it can be demoralizing. Fortunately for us, Paul ignored all of them until he had pushed through the Dip.
When you are sitting right on the edge of something daring and scary and creative and powerful and perhaps wonderful… and you blink and take a step back.
That’s the moment. The moment between you and remarkable. Most people blink. Most people get stuck.
All the hard work and preparation and daring and luck is nothing compared with the ability to not blink.
So, people are upset because of the non-ending of the Sopranos. People are always upset when a TV show ends with a big finale, because it never meets the hype, never meets the expectations. If HBO had been quiet about it, hadn’t done the full page ads and the radio shows and the newspaper articles, it would have been fine. Expanded expectations led to big disappointment.
The paradox: if expectations hadn’t been raised, fewer viewers would have tuned in.
My main site has been down off and on over the last few weeks. I apologize to those of you who have been frustrated by this. My expectations of web.com were fairly high–I thought that after all the years I’d been using the company they acquired, they’d do a better job. I was disappointed. We’re moving on.
I visited webex today to prepare for a web conference I’m doing in a few weeks. Again, lots of high expectations (big company, lots of promotional effort) and was amazed to see a workaround about Firefox on the screen. The workaround didn’t work. I was even more amazed to discover that the version I was using doesn’t even bother to support the Mac.
I’m not one of those Mac whiners who say that everyone has to support my little boutique OS. If they had lowered expectations by clearly stating the incompatibility in the first moment, I wouldn’t have been happy, of course, but at least I wouldn’t have sat there for ten minutes, blaming myself for not understanding it.
In each case, the paradox is at work. On one hand, you want to raise expectations, because without doing that, you diminish trial. On the other hand, you want to exceed expectations, because that’s what generates word of mouth.
As word of mouth becomes an ever more important component of marketing, the scales are tipping. Undersell, overdeliver. It’s the strategy that works in the long run.
Every marketer has a choice… to make the first interaction the best of the experience, or the worst (least best).
150 years ago, we had pretty much settled on all of the protocols and conventions of the American democractic system. We had figured out the steps and rules of electing a president.
Before radio, before TV. Before planes or cars. Before computers or voting machines. Before YouTube.
Since mass democracy is essentially an exercise in communication and marketing, the fact that this essential process is frozen in time is a problem.
Here’s a few why not questions:
Why not have six-hour long debates, and do them once a week on Cspan, with the highlights diced and sliced and put on any number of online or offline channels?
Why not use a chess clock style timing device so that each candidate can be free to answer a question for as long as she likes, but each candidate enters the debate with exactly the same amount of time to allocate?
Why not have the early state primary voters have the ability to vote for their four favorite candidates? It’ll reward consensus candidates that have a better chance of winning the election.
Or, with a small upgrade to voting machines, why not let voters rank all the candidates? It’s been shown to lead to better results.
Why not let us vote at ATM machines?
Why not run the final elections over the course of a week, announcing the balloting results at the end of each day? It would certainly increase turnout.
Why rely on geography as the primary mechanism for districts and electoral college votes? Our issues aren’t farm-based any more. Why not let me pick which ‘state’ I live in?
If I ran a party and wanted to increase my chances of getting elected, I’d figure out how to turn the primary process into something that was simultaneously more interesting and more likely to lead to large numbers of my party turning out to vote in the general election. Instead, it’s almost guaranteed to do the opposite.
The relevant lesson for you, even if you’re not an active citizen or if you live elsewhere? Is your organization just as stuck? Are there marketing dynamics that you’re not discussing, merely because there isn’t even a way to talk about them?
A friend is wrestling with his ability to be coached. For the coachable, "Turn right at the light" is seen as a helpful suggestion for someone lost in a strange town… the advice goes in, is considered and then acted upon. For someone wrestling with coaching, though, it’s like surgery. It’s painful, it has side effects and it might lead to a bad reaction.
Coaching happens all the time. Most often, it’s not from a boss or a professional coach. In fact, the best insights and advice usually come from informal or unexpected sources.
In fluid marketing and organization environments, where the world changes rapidly, coachability is a key factor in evolving and succeeding. Not because all advice is good advice. In fact, most advice is lousy advice. No, the reason coachability is so crucial is that without it, you don’t have the emotional maturity to consider whether the advice is good or not. You reject the process out of hand, and end up stuck.
Symptoms of uncoachability:
Challenging the credentials of the coach
Announcing that you’re being unfairly singled out
Pointing out, angrily, that the last few times, the coach was wrong
Identifying others who have succeeded without ever being coached
Resisting a path merely because it was one identified by a coach
Years ago, at the great Bolshoi Ballet, auditions for the troupe were conducted among 8 year old girls. That’s because it took ten years to become great. How did the auditions work? The teachers weren’t looking for the best dancers. They were looking for the dancers who took coaching the best. The rest would come with time.
I visited some friends for lunch at the annual book trade show in New York last week (recognize anyone in this photo?). There were so many people eating lunch next to the very lame cafe at the Javits Center that we were forced to eat on the floor.
There’s a lot of floor. In fact, there’s enough floor for at least 1,000 more chairs and tables.
You can’t see the overflowing garbage can next to us, or the ketchup smeared on the floor.
If something like this happened once a year, you’d probably be a bit forgiving. But this happens every single time the Javits Center hosts a large conference, which, of course, is exactly why the Javits Center exists… to hold large conferences.
No doubt, the poor guys who have to empty the jam-packed garbage cans curse at the short supply every day. And no doubt, the people who organize various conferences notice how few places there are to sit. The problem isn’t that they don’t know. The problem may not even be that they don’t care. The problem is that the mindset of the organization doesn’t include the sentence, "your job is to make things better."
I’ve been working on a video project and thinking about pricing. That led me to this chart, which is more conceptual than accurate.
Let’s go through it, starting with the stick on the left.
FREE stuff spreads. You don’t make any money from the thing you’re giving away, but you do get attention, which is worth as much, or more in many cases.
Charge even a penny, though, and the drop off is huge.
Jump over to the middle hump, the one without the question mark.
REASONABLE PRICING puts you right in the middle of the market. With reasonable pricing, you can move just a bit to the left or the right to find the sweet spot, the spot where you can balance money for promotion or shelf space or advertising against keeping your price low. Most of us are familiar with the shape of this curve in our industry. For example, hardcover books go for about $21. At $28, you have more money for co-op and ads, but sales go down a bit. At $19, you can’t promote much, but sales go up a bit.
Move a bit to the left to the first hump with a question mark.
REALLY LOW PRICING is a whole new world. That’s when something becomes cheap enough to be irresistible to someone who might not consider the category at all. This is what happens when MP3 songs go from 99 cents to 20 cents. This is what happens when you sell a hardcover book for $10. There’s no room for big promotion, at least at first, but as WalMart has shown us, you can get scale at the super low end and have plenty of profit left over to hire fancy PR firms and lobbyists and ad agencies.
The last hump, the one on the right, is usually unexplored.
REALLY HIGH PRICING is the domain of specialty markets and superstars. Elton John gets $300,000 to do a bar mitzvah. John Cleese offers training videos that cost $1000 for one DVD. This is the land of high service and extreme exclusivity.
What’s interesting about the four choices is that most organizations are only familiar with one. Ask them to try another and they freak out. They don’t even want to consider it.
I think real growth can come when you get out of your comfort hump and create a blend. Understanding how to live in multiple worlds and to balance them isn’t obvious, but the opportunities are worth it. Ben Zander’s brilliant book costs $10.20 at Amazon in hardcover. Buying the DVD costs $1495.00.
If he wanted to sell the DVD in large quantities, he’d need to price it differently and sell it in a different channel. But if he wants to work with trainers and the distributors who sell to them, he’s exactly in the center of that third hump.
Careful about the Y axis (volume). Units aren’t always the goal. (that’s why I said this chart was conceptual). FREE gets you the most units, REALLY EXPENSIVE the least. But depending on your objectives, units might not be the point.
It’s not important to know the right answer, which hump to choose, because there isn’t one. It”s essential to know the question, because there are four distinct choices, and not choosing is still choosing.
June 7, 2007
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