Ultimately, The Dip is a marketing book, because the thesis is that being seen as best in the world, whatever ‘best’ and whatever ‘world’ means, is the single greatest contributor to success in marketing. There are three reasons why this is more important than ever:
SELECTION: Getting into Harvard or being crowned Miss America are valuable achievements for just one reason: they make it easy for everyone to see you won. Someone adds value by performing a selection process, and the lucky ones who get picked, the anointed, win. The marketplace values this because we’re too busy to do the selecting ourselves.
ACCESS: Because of the web, we don’t have to limit our choices to the Yellow Pages or who’s nearby or who was recommended by a friend. As a result, with far more choices, we can pick the very best choice, not the most convenient one.
PYRAMIDS: Many systems only work when there are a lot of entries but just a few winners. Whether it’s the US Open or the economics of the local gym, it’s the effort and expense of the non-winners that supports the benefits of the winners. These pyramids are getting more common because of the winner-take-all nature of our world. Digg wouldn’t work if there were only a few stories a day submitted. It’s the stories that don’t make the front page that make the front page winners succeed.
April 6, 2007
If you haven’t seen Mark Hurst’s new book, you should check it out. If you’re using RSS, then your friends need it. If you’re not, then you do, but first, subscribe to my RSS feed!
You can get a free pass to the Future of Online Advertising conference if you’re one of the first five to email Ryan.
Guy Kawasaki posted about the Effort Effect last month. It’s a good recommendation, the book makes a lot of sense.
Federico points out scientific research that proves my thesis about Powerpoint.
Scientists (different ones) have discovered that only a single gene is responsible for the difference in size between a dachsund and a great dane.
Have you noticed that some Google results now include StumbleUpon reviews via a prominent little icon?
Have you ever recommended a doctor?
On what basis?
Did you do an analysis of the outcomes of his treatments along a wide range of patients and compare those outcomes to similar doctors in the same community?
Or was it based on his bedside manner or even how polite his receptionist was?
And what about the accounting firm or law firm or personal trainer you were talking about the other day?
Is it possible that people recommend a Mac so often because of things that having nothing to do with a side-by-side analysis of the speed of data entry in Word?
All a rhetorical way of pointing out that businesses (and people) do two things. Most of focus on just one (at least when we’re doing the task at hand) which is the task at hand. But, there’s something else that’s far more important, something disconnected from what’s produced but certainly related: how you made the customer feel.
How’s this for a 98% rule: By a factor of three, what you do is not nearly as important as how it makes people feel.
If you buy that, then the question is this: why do you spend almost all your time on the wrong thing?
The candidates for president have already raised more than a hundred million dollars. After only three months. Every single one of the top five candidates demolished the record set eight years ago.
The reason is simple: once a market gets understood, the desire to be the winner in a winner takes all event encourages people to up the ante.
Imagine playing poker with a bunch of kids. If you give each kid $200 in fake chips and play no-limit, they start betting with $1 or maybe $5 bets. Pretty soon, though, one of the kids will figure out that if he bets all his money, he can make an impact, and perhaps eliminate the other players. Without the risk of losing real money, he instantly goes to 11 on the impact meter. Everyone else follows suit. Hypercompetitiveness.
During the first dot com boom, it became clear after a year or two that the company that could lose the most money the fastest (while attracting some metric… traffic, customers, whatever) would be deemed the winner by Wall Street. Hence the rapid success of theglobe.com, the debacle of pets.com and the insanely high price paid for bluemountainarts. It’s not rational, but it’s true.
As the internet makes it easier for people to keep score of market share, bestseller lists and more, the benefits to being seen as #1 continue to increase. Which means that this trend to being hypercompetitive, whether or not its rational, is going to get more and more common.
The long term hasn’t gone away. Not at all. Winning in the long run is far more important. At the same time, it’s essential to note that many markets have set up short-term screens that make it impossible to survive in the long run if you’re not seen as a possible market leader (the best in the world) early on.
April 5, 2007
A friend just sent me a book he worked on. It’s a terrific book, but it has an astonishingly mediocre (if that’s possible) cover. I can just see how the cover came to be. There were proposals and meetings and compromises and a deadline. As the deadline loomed, the compromises came more often, until they ended up with a cover that didn’t match the power of the book.
They should have just shipped a cover that was blank.
Knowing that you need to ship a blank cover if you can’t come up with something great focuses the mind and takes the edge of the conversations about compromise. If ‘good enough’ isn’t good enough, and if the alternative is certain failure, people will dig in and come up with something better.
It’s not just book covers, of course. Ethanol is the equivalent of this book cover. It feels like it might be a good enough solution to a range of energy problems. And once embraced, it serves as a bandaid, making the problem less urgent, "oh, we already took care of that," and allowing people to move on to something else.
Every quarter, your company ships new products or services. And every quarter, someone says, "under the circumstances," or "given the deadline" or "with the team we had available"… it’s the best we could do. I say ship nothing.
In a few of my seminars, I’ve encouraged marketers to refuse to market mediocre stuff if that’s the best the folks in R&D and production can bring you. The first time, they’ll be shocked. Your job will be at risk. But then you’ll notice something… the stuff gets better. Fast.
In Japanese car factories, this is called kanban. You trade production efficiencies for quality. If a part isn’t perfect, the worker refuses to install it. And the entire assembly line stops. Detroit was horrified by this idea. Keeping the assembly line going is the holy grail. Guess what? The line doesn’t get stopped very often. Things get better, fast.
[Ralph Bernstein, at Productivity Press, knows his stuff about Kanban. He writes:
In your posting, In praise of a blank page, your use of the word kanban is incorrect. Kanban refers to a type of visual control that signals an upstream operation to deliver what is needed. (The Wikipedia description to which you linked touches on aspects of the concept, but doesn’t get it exactly right.)
What you probably meant was andon.
An andon is a device that calls attention to defects, equipment abnormalities and other problems, or reports the status and needs of a system by means of colored lights. Typically, when a worker on a line encounters a problem, he or she will pull a cord that lights up the andon board and stops the line.
Also, it’s a little misleading to say that in such a system, you trade production efficiencies for quality. It’s a lot more efficient to stop and eliminate a defect immediately than to repair a finished product (or dozens of finished products) containing the defect. But you are right about one thing: with this kind of system, things do get better fast.
You may want to obtain a copy of the LeanSpeak dictionary, available on our website.
My response, which you’ve probably already guessed, was that this is what they taught us at business school!]
Accidentally discovered that an.com is empty/undeveloped. So is ot.com. And mo.com. Not to mention new.com.
Imagine walking down Fifth Avenue and seeing big empty lots. Not sure what these folks are waiting for!
April 4, 2007
I’ll be in Chicago on May 22nd. Click here for the sign up and here for the lens about it. This event is sponsored by WBBM Newsradio 780, Visa, Aetna, Verizon Wireless, Plante & Moran, Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, Crain’s Chicago Business, Maggiano’s Little Italy, Women and Children First bookstore. That’s a lot of sponsors…
And Matt came up with a very neat idea. If you want to go to Phoenix for an event, he’s challenging you to pledge that you’ll come if we do one. Worth a shot…
Ten years ago, in 2007, I published a book called The Dip. I chronicled much of the launch and some of the lessons of the book in this limited-edition blog.
Since its publication, it has sold hundreds of thousands of copies around the world. It was a NY Times bestseller for four weeks, and people tell me that page for page, it changed them more than any other book I've written.
I've kept the blog as is, a time capsule of that idea, one that still resonates…
This is my blog about my new book, The Dip.
Updates and news and riffs are on the posts below. A podcast, here. The charts are here.
I didn’t tell you about it until it had some content. Here it is: The Dip by Seth Godin.
You can subscribe here.
Thanks for reading. The blog post about the harp changed my life.
Most marketers will do just about anything to persuade people that buying their product is risk free. Hey, we even use terms like "risk free!" and "money back guarantee if not satisfied". Business to business sellers often rank risk as the #1 reason organizations don’t end up buying from them.
I wonder.
Word of mouth is directly proportional to risk. If I take a risk and it works out, I tell everyone. If there was no risk, it’s not interesting (remarkable) and that’s the end of that.
"You took quite a risk trying our service/believing in our product/sticking with us and we appreciate it."
Brand pioneers and early adopters are proud of their stance. It makes us feel good to share war stories. Be proud of your risk takers and they’ll return the favor. Create products that are riskier to adopt and if you can get over the hump, you’ll be rewarded with buzz.
April 3, 2007
