The restaurant in town closed about six months ago. For weeks, there was a sign about renovations. Then a new sign, this one promising big things. Then, of course, the "for rent" sign from the broker.
A software service I used for a while sent me a note today that read:
Please note that the service has reached end of life and is scheduled to be decommissioned on Monday, December 3rd. Once the service has been taken down, all content will be deleted. It is very important that you transfer your data to another service provider prior to this date to avoid data loss.
That’s it. The entire note.
One last example: someone I hired a while ago changed her mind after the first day. She never showed up again. Didn’t answer calls or email. Just vanished. Not dead, just a chicken.
It seems to me that you ought to say goodbye with the same care and attention to detail and honesty you use to say hello. You never know when you’ll be back.
November 17, 2007
For as long as I can remember, marketers have been using misogyny to sell products, get votes and attract viewers.
It’s sort of astonishing… in my lifetime, we’ve seen the end of public (but certainly not private) attacks on people because of race or mainstream religion (fringe beliefs and sexual orientation are still fair game, apparently)… but trying to humiliate half the population because of their gender seems just fine.
That may be changing. There’s a significant backlash about John McCain’s handling of a question earlier in the week. If the questioner had used a similar epithet about a black person or someone from Poland, they would have been shown the door. At least I hope so.
And now Robert Greenwald has put together a really disturbing (NSFW) video of misogyny and pornography as broadcast on Fox News.
As Hugh Hefner demonstrated with Playboy fifty years ago, objectifying women was a shortcut to cash. And all you have to do is visit Las Vegas to see it happening in every hallway, on every billboard. What is now becoming clear is that many of the people in your market won’t stand for it any longer. One more shortcut, gone.
November 16, 2007
Yasmina at Acumen needs help, and it just might be the most important job you ever do.
Acumen Fund is hiring for a new associate who can work with them on community building, new media, and communications… this individual would join the Portfolio Strategies team which focuses on sharing knowledge and influencing how the world tackles poverty. The associate would be primarily responsible for using the internet, video, and a range of tools available for building community to share what Acumen Fund is learning about effective ways to bring critical goods and services to people living in the developing word who make less than $3 per day. Acumen Fund wants to engage a wide range of communities in our work, and will reach out to those that care about social entrepreneurship, strategic philanthropy, and solving the problem of global poverty.
Experience building on-line communities or working in communications, media, or video would certainly be beneficial in the role; however we are also looking for someone who is a self-starter and eager to learn new skills and bring their creativity to the work.
Acumen is the single best organization I have ever worked with. The smartest, most focused, kindest people doing the most important work I can think of. I don’t run posts like this often, because, after all, it’s not a job board… but this is the real deal.
November 15, 2007
In case you had any doubt that human beings are irrational creatures, driven by stories, consider the case of the gift card.
Christmas has become a holiday about shopping, not about giving. Case in point: the $100 gift card, now available from banks, from stores, even in a rack at the supermarket.
Last year, more than $8,000,000,000 was wasted on these cards. Not in the value spent, but in fees and breakage. When you give a card, if it doesn’t get used, someone ends up keeping your money, and it’s not the recipient. People spent more than eight billion dollars for nothing… buying a product that isn’t as good as cash.
Along the way, we bought the story that giving someone a hundred dollar bill as a gift ("go buy what you want") is callous, insensitive, a crass shortcut. Buying them a $100 Best Buy card, on the other hand, is thoughtful. Even if they spend $92 and have to waste the rest.
The interesting thing about stories is that the inconsistent ones don’t always hold up to scrutiny. Consumer Reports and others are trying to spread a different story. One that sounds like this:
Gift cards are for chumps.
If enough people talk about this new story, people will be embarrassed to give a gift card. It’s a waste. It’s a scam. It’s a trap for the recipient.
The irony is that the gift card companies could easily spend, say, half the profits and create a wonderful, better story… where every $100 gift card also generates two or three dollars for a worthy cause. That would resonate with a lot of people… But I think it’s unlikely.
If I were a creative non-profit, I’d start marketing alternative gift cards. They would consist of PDF files you could print out and hand over to people when you give them cash. It could say,
"Merry Christmas. Here’s your present, go spend it on what you really want. AND, just to make sure we’re in the right holiday spirit, I made a donation in your name to Aworthycause."
Stories come and go. It’s up to marketers to spread the good ones.
Marketing spends a lot of time concealing things.
Take this box of Whole Wheat Ritz crackers. The #1 ingredient? White flour.
Or consider the fine print read in a hurry at the end of the car ad or the fact that most bottled water comes from the tap… Most contracts are designed to conceal as much as to reveal, which is one reason lawyers get a bad rap.
If you set out to conceal as a marketer (airbrushing a photo, leading with your strengths, staying within the letter if not the spirit of the law) it's easy to invent creative new ways to achieve your goals. It sure feels as though you can stay ahead of the game.
A different technique is starting to gain traction, though. Working to reveal instead of conceal. My fish monger in Grand Central has started placing signs in front of each fish. They describe exactly where the fish came from, whether it's healthy and how endangered it is. You'll never see fine print saying "previously frozen." They don't have any fine print. The first few times you visit the stand, it's actually off putting. It takes the romance and pleasure out of buying the fish, because you realize that there's a cost to it. The meat guy across the way doesn't have pictures of cows being slaughtered, does he?
But after a while, because the information is out there, because smart fish buyers already know some fish is endangered, the signs give you power. They allow you to make smart choices. They send a message to the customer about the honesty and intent of the seller. They build trust.
Once you embrace the idea of revealing as much as you can (consider Amazon's policy of selling the cheaper used copies right next to the new ones, as well as featuring ads from competitors on the same page) it's a lot easier to live and thrive online.
[Jess sends us this post from her blog. Apparently, Monsanto has made it against the law for Pennsylvania dairies to reveal what's in (and not in) the milk they sell. Astonishing.]
November 14, 2007
In just about every business, the last mile accounts for the bulk of the cost of the service or good being sold. Retailers get half. Insurance people get commissions. Distributors make their share.
When the internet drove the cost of some things to zero, the equation could change, because you don’t need to pay a messenger when your offer is so irresistible. So, free email could be free not just because it’s so cheap to run and because you have ad revenue, but because you don’t need much of a marketing effort to get the word out.
As we enter a new stage of post-industrial businesses, it’s easy to forget to build in the cost of the messenger. A great idea isn’t a great idea unless you can pay someone to help you spread it, to help you overcome our natural inclination to ignore you or to say "no," purely out of habit.
If you’re not going to plan on paying the messenger, your offering better be so remarkable and have such a viral story that your investment in product eliminates the need for media and sales.
November 13, 2007
[Somehow, this post disappeared. I’m trying again!]
(Almost) everyone wants choice
Choice makes some people stressed and unhappy. But it also makes lots of people happy. And now people have the choice
By
itself, a bias for choice is interesting but not particularly
surprising. What’s surprising is the magnitude of this desire. My
favorite example is the comparison of a typical Barnes & Noble
store with Amazon. If you examine the sales of the 150,000 titles in a
big store, you’ll see that they account for perhaps half of Amazon’s
book sales. In other words, if you aggregate the millions of poorly
selling titles on Amazon, they add up to the total sales of all the
bestselling books in the physical world put together.
Another
way of looking at it: More people watched more video on YouTube last
week than watched the top ten shows on network television.
Another
way: A quick look at your grocer’s beverage aisle will prove to you
that Coca-Cola is no longer the most popular soft drink in the country.
The most popular soft drink is "other": none of the above.
The mass of choices defeats the biggest hit.
This
curve shows up over and over. It describes travel habits, DVD rentals,
and book sales. Give people a choice and the tail always gets longer.
Always.
The Long Tail has been around forever, but only now does it really matter. That’s because of several trends working together:
a. Online shopping gives the retailer the ability to carry a hundred times the inventory of a typical retail store.
b. Google means that a user can find something if it’s out there.
c. Permission marketing gives sellers the freedom to find products for their customers, instead of the other way around.
d. Digital products are easy to store and easy to customize.
e. Digital technology makes it easy to customize non-digital goods.
The question isn’t, "Is this real?" The question is: "What are you doing about it?"
The rest of the series is here.
November 12, 2007
According to a Times interview with the head of Tempurpedic, you don’t know.
That’s how they built a built a billion dollar company. By getting 2% of a market that doesn’t care about brands to care about them. A typical marketer looks at this and says, "great marketing! You branded a product in an unbranded marketplace."
I actually don’t think that’s what really happened. I think what happened is that every single product in the mattress market was perceived as the same, so there was no reason to care about which brand, because, frankly, it didn’t seem to matter. Like brands of gasoline or milk.
Many marketers are excited about a brand-free market. They walk in wads of cash and try to buy share. They believe that the brand can build the product. That’s backwards.
When you change the product enough, branding happens.
There are two traps here:
first, entering a brand-free market where people have been trained to ignore the various competitors is really expensive, because people aren’t listening, no matter how great your offer is. I think Tempurpedic got a little lucky.
and
second, believing that you can have the brand before you have the product. You almost certainly don’t have the money to pull that off.
He also said that 95% of his customers have recommended his product to others. Not the brand, not the experience, but the product. I have, it’s true. I’ve recommended a thousand dollar mattress to someone. Go figure.
November 11, 2007
I think it’s time you put up a blog for internal use.
Use a password if you like.
Use it as an internal diary, a way of tracking each day so that a month or a year from now, you can look back at where you were and how you dealt with the issue of the day. Even if no one else on your team reads your blog, the act of creating it will be worthwhile.
Perspective is worth a lot more than it costs.
November 10, 2007
Here’s a quick way for the mainstream media to enrage people: In a New York Times review of Ron Paul’s latest TV commercial, Julie Bosman concludes, "The advertisement accomplishes what the Paul campaign said was its modest goal: to introduce Mr. Paul to voters in that state, where he is emerging as a potential spoiler in the Republican primary."
But this isn’t a post about politics, it’s about spoiling things.
When you’re trying to sell something new, particularly in a business to business setting, there are always people like Julie Bosman. They are the defenders of the status quo.
They have an important job to do: to point out to everyone the risks of change. To identify potential spoilers.
You don’t have to like Ron Paul’s politics to be annoyed at this (I’m not voting for him), particularly if you’re an agent of change, someone who tries to sell growth or new ideas or even a product.
The thing is, being annoyed at it doesn’t do you any good at all. The status quo police aren’t going to go away, and in fact, they are often a big help in that most of your competition is held at bay by them.
So, how do you persuade the status quo police to stop treating you like a potential spoiler? You don’t. I don’t think you have a prayer. Instead, you create an environment where her colleagues and her family persuade her.
The establishment didn’t like the microcomputer (the president of Digital Computer thought it was dumb), the iPod or even Nike sneakers. The establishment didn’t like Jimmy Carter’s chances the first time out either. You can spend all your time selling the establishment, or you can just work around them. Sell to people who are listening. Create stories that spread, from the converted to the skeptical.
Go spoil something!
November 9, 2007
