In study after study, respondents rate themselves as less racist than average, smarter than average, more generous than average.
And though they are never asked, I’m pretty certain that your customers also believe that they are righter than average as well.
At the airport yesterday, a woman at security said to the TSA official, "I’m a regular traveler, a frequent flyer and I know the rules. I want the fast line." A moment later, it was determined that the woman had two huge bottles of shampoo in her very large carry on. "No one told me that there was a restriction on liquids! Where does it say that?" she snarled, as she stood in front of the sign that said that…
Any time you ask customers to self-segregate, they will put themselves in the best line.
And just about any time you ask a customer to acknowledge that they were wrong, you will fail.
1. How did Economics get to be its own academic department? Surely, before Marx, it was part of the philosophy department, right? There are lots of fields that are subfields of something else (SEO, for instance, is part of ‘marketing’ and probably will be forever). Being your own department (in a company or a university) is a big deal. So, how exactly did it happen?
[Alan comes through with this article about Alfred Marshall. His life’s work appeared to be creating Economics as a department-worthy science.]
2. What’s the deal with brown rice? How do people become so attached to the social implications of food that they are willing to starve or suffer from malnutrition rather than take a step backward? The price of rice has soared, yet it seems like people are still demanding white rice, instead of the more nutritious (and almost certainly cheaper) brown rice. How high does the price have to go before people make a different choice?
[Dustin writes in with a great thought piece which concludes: "I don’t know where the breaking point is. At some point in the starvation chain, of course, people will eat whatever’s put in front of them. Bugs, live rodents, even, yes, human flesh. But war, famine, environmental disaster, and other cataclysmic events have rarely been enough to cause anything more than a short, non-systemic turn to substitutes, even when a long-term switch might be better in dozens of ways. After all, we humans eat so that we can make meaning, not the other way around."
To which I add: If people near starvation are willing to make choices based on self-esteem, I wonder what that says about those customers you think are focused only on the lowest price?]
3. Is there a web based service that permits the following: dozens or hundreds of people can participate in a live chat Q&A, probably with a moderator, along with a Skype-like audio function? Imagine how much cheaper and more effective large group conference calls could be. Skype limits conference calls to about 15, and it’s flaky at that size. This seems like an easy problem to solve extraordinarily well and even charge for…
[We’ve got Yackpack and dimdim. Thanks to Ross and Jayson. Two should be enough for now.]
Perhaps you haven’t heard of either term, but there’s no doubt you’ve seen or heard of both.
An easter egg is a hidden treasure, usually inside of a video game. For example, in an old version of the Mac, pressing certain keys brought up a picture of the Mac development team. In various games, you might find special levels, the names of various contributors or logos.
The magic of the easter egg is that it gives your most devoted users something to talk about. Hey, they say, try this… It demonstrates their insider status as well as making them feel generous when they share the knowledge.
Tom Bihn put one on a piece of luggage, which became so popular it turned into a fundraising t-shirt.
You should think about rewarding your obsessed users with an easter egg.
And the Rick Roll? You visit a YouTube video promising some sort of insight or riches or scandal, but instead, quite suddenly, you are confronted with an old music video instead.
The Rick Roll is perfect because two things happen: 1. It shocks, at least a little bit. Not painful, but fun. 2. You feel compelled to Rick Roll someone else. So it spreads.
For two days in a row, I’ve talked about outbound marketing that doesn’t feel like marketing. That’s because I want you to more broadly define what you need to do all day. If it touches the user, if it involves a story, if it’s part of the product, it’s marketing.
Some tips on creating useful serial numbers (yes, it matters). It’s easy to program your series and design your products to avoid these problems. That leads to happier customers who feel smarter:
Don’t use 0 or 1 or O or I in serial numbers that combine letters and numbers. 0O1I42 is asking for trouble.
Never run a string of more than three identical numbers in a row. 89355555232 is bound to be a problem.
Don’t be case sensitive.
Print the serial number larger than you think you need to. If you want the user to be able to read it to you, make it big. Then increase the size.
Think hard about whether you need a serial number at all. An email address is easier to remember and just as unique.
The number itself can carry useful data, like date of manufacture. If you’re selling to business users, figure out how to integrate the serial numbers with their systems so they can coordinate with PO and other data.
[David suggests you break up your long numbers with dashes. 108-23-2219.]
With computers doing the heavy lifting, you can use serial words instead of serial numbers. If you have a combination of two words in a row, 100 words times 100 words is 10,000 combinations.
Related: when doing Captchas, consider using combinations of words instead of random letters. CowNerd is just as hard for a computer to crack, but more fun (and easier) for your users.
Why not make your serial number database public? Think about how many cool easter eggs you could bury online for people to look up on their product? (For example, a photo of the team putting my product into the box). I could upload my picture to go with it, or you could offer a prize to the first group of five consecutive product owners who found each other. Just a thought about organizing your followers…
The goal is to make it easy, make it fun and encourage people to become obsessed.
Fear is a powerful driver of decisions Without fear, no one would use seatbelts… you don’t use them because they’re fun, you use them because you worry about what would happen if you crashed without them.
The challenge of marketing with fear isn’t efficacy. Of course fear marketing works. The challenge is ethics and brand.
I got a note from Rob McGinley at Chubb Insurance today. Not a note, actually, but an official envelope, with the extra touch of bold red writing on the top of the official looking letter. Chubb, it turns out, is happy to sell me insurance against home invasion, carjacking, etc. The $110 a year includes coverage for psychiatric care and "reward money leading to the apprehension of the perpetrator."
I was incensed by this.
My clueless broker didn’t understand why. "It’s just like flood insurance," he said. Actually, it’s not. It’s not because: 1. Floods can be solved with money. Your house gets flooded, money can replace it. 2. The odds of a flood are fairly significant, in the scheme of things.
Scaring people (scaring good customers) to make $100 is stupid. It hurts your brand. It makes it less likely they’ll open the envelope next time. And most of all, it’s wrong.
You can do it, no one can stop you. You shouldn’t do it, though, because you burn brand trust and you can’t get it back.
Why not sell shark attack insurance? After all, almost a handful of people died last year from shark attacks.
[Andy sends this one along. Robots eat old people’s medicine:]
If I could only share one piece of personal finance advice to grads or to just about anyone, it would be this:
Only borrow money to pay for things that increase in value.
It’s a short list: your business, your house and your education, mostly. Stocks if you’re smarter than me. That’s pretty much it.
If you have credit card debt, you’re in big trouble. Your bank account has a huge leak in it, and it’s getting worse. Hence the urgency.
If you have credit card debt, that means that every time you spend money (even cash), you’re borrowing money to do so. And so, if you’re going out to dinner or buying a new pair of shoes, you’ve just broken the single most important rule of personal finance. You’re spending borrowed money on stuff that is decreasing in value.
This is an emergency. It’s an emergency because every single day you wait, the problem gets worse. A lot worse.
My suggestion: Go to defcon 1, and do it immediately. Shift gears to live well below your means. That means: No restaurants No clothes shopping No cable TV bill No Starbucks
It means: Take in a tenant in your spare bedroom Carpool to work Skip vacation this year
Eat brown rice and beans every night for dinner. Act like you have virtually no income.
The result? You’ll save $5,000 to $20,000 a year. Send all of it to the credit card company. Do this until you’re debt free, the faster the better.
There. Now you’re rich. Now you get interest on your savings instead of paying the bank. Twenty years from now, this emergency action will translate into perhaps a million dollars in the bank, depending on how much you earn and how serious you are.
Like you, I’d heard scares about cell phones increasing the risk of brain cancer. While this is a scary story, it’s not so vivid. After all, it takes years to get brain cancer, there are countless factors involved and it’s impossible to test. It’s hard to visualize and easy to rationalize.
Popcorn, on the other hand, is a totally different story.
I’m just wondering… can you find a story this vivid for your product or service? Pass the bluetooth headset, please. [Won’t get fooled again? Stephen writes in and says the video is a hoax. And I found a video online of a repeat of the experiment that didn’t work. Snopes is silent on the matter, pointing out that eggs don’t cook, but nothing about popcorn.
If it’s a hoax, it’s not ethical marketing, but it’s still vivid.]
So, very soon, you will own a cell phone that has a very good camera and knows where you are within ten or fifteen feet. And the web will know who you are and who your friends are.
What happens?
Well, when you take a photo, you can automatically send it to the clowd. The clowd can color correct and adjust the photo based on the million other photos it has seen just like this. [Debbie wonders, isn’t it called a "cloud"? I guess I was subconsciously coining a new term–which I so rarely do–this time, combining crowd and cloud into something new. I think I like it, even if it is a bit artificial].
The clowd can figure out that this was the high school graduation (same time, same location), and realize that you were there with fifty of your closest friends, and automatically group the photos together… leaving out the people it’s obvious you don’t like.
The clowd can also find pictures taken of the same person, but by other people, and show them to you. Or cooler still, introduce you to those people. So, you take a picture of Keith Jarrett at Carnegie Hall and the clowd introduces you to other people who took his picture in ther places. (No, you shouldn’t have to tell the clowd it’s Keith, it should know. But yes, you will opt in to all of this… you ask before it takes these matchmaking liberties).
Wait. Alex suggests that this is the yearbook of the future. What an antiquity the yearbook we all own is. What happens when every student builds her own yearbook all year long? The clowd grabs your pictures, your friends’ pictures, pictures that the group has admired. It grabs the teachers you’ve written about, but leaves out the ones you’ve never interacted with. And everyone gets a different yearbook, of course.
PS your privacy is fairly shot. See a dangerous driver? Send a video snippet to the clowd. The clowd collates that with a bunch of other shots of the same driver… busted.
And the clowd also knows where you are, camera or no camera. So it can tell you when your old friend is just two gates away from you, also wasting time at the airport waiting for her flight. Or it can do Zagats to the ten thousandth power by not only suggesting the best nearby restaurant (based on your food circle of friends) but can also integrate with Open Table and only recommend restaurants that actually have room for you. Or it can let restaurant owners do yield management and find you a table at a good enough restaurant at the best possible price…
[And Dave points out that facial recognition lives in the clowd as well. Take a picture of someone and the clowd tells you who it is…]
This is going to happen. The only question is whether you are one of the people who will make it happen. I guess there’s an even bigger question: will we do it right?
Not a process or an approach. Not a treatment or an attempt. Not a best effort or a thoughtful response.
They want their problems cured.
Doctors, of course, can rarely provide a cure. Neither can accountants or marketing consultants. But that’s what gets sold, cause that’s what people want to buy.
We fool ourselves constantly. We know, deep down (or not even so deep) that there’s no real cure out there, but that’s what we pay for anyway.
June 5, 2008
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