Here’s the thing: every single one of these policies is something that you’d be willing to do for a good customer anyway.
So, rather than taking the posture of "I hate you and I don’t trust you," why not start with this one?
LL Bean has been doing it for a hundred years. It works.
Just down the street, the proprietor yelled at us for taking a photo. At a t-shirt store. Sheesh. Wanna guess where we bought our overpriced souvenirs?
When times are good, buying things is a sport. It’s a reward. The story we tell ourselves is that we deserve it, that we want it and why not?
When the mass psychology changes and times are seen as not so good, the story we tell ourselves changes as well. Now, we buy out of defense, to avoid trouble. Or we buy because something will never be as cheap again. Or we buy smaller items for the same sense of reward.
Of course, the two different extremes can lead you to buy the very same thing. It’s not the thing so much as it’s the story.
Starbucks was the indulgence of a confident person happy to blow $4 on a cup of coffee. Starbucks can become the small indulgence for the person who just traded down to a small rented apartment.
The challenge for marketers is to figure out how to change the story they are living so that their customers can change the story they tell themselves. What you make, where you make it, who makes it, how it’s priced and sold and … it all adds up to a perception. If you change these elements the story will change too.
I had the good fortune to speak to a large gathering of real estate agents last week. Here’s my best advice (everyone knows an agent or two, so feel free to forward this along).
Plan A: You should quit selling real estate.
I’m serious.
Quit being an agent. Get a job doing something else.
Some of you have been waiting to hear that. My pleasure.
…
Now, if you’re still with me, you’ll be glad to know that the competition for attention just got smaller. The agents who built their business on low interest rates, easy money and speculation (the order takers) have left the building.
The ones that are left, that’s you, can consider Plan B:
If you’re not going to be able to make a living by taking orders, by selling houses the way everyone else does, by using the never-ending rise in real estate prices to make sales, then what are you going to do? Whining is not an option.
In fact, I think this is an extraordinary opportunity for you.
Without a frenzy, without short-term competition, you can actually build assets that will pay off for the long run. I have two in mind:
The first is to become the expert in what you do. Which means micro-specialization. Who is the single-best agent for condos in your zip code? Or for single family homes for large families? Who is the one and the only best person to turn to if you’re looking for investment property in this part of town?
As I wrote in The Dip, you’re either the best in the world (where ‘world’ can be a tiny slice of the environment) or you’re invisible.
This means being Draconian in your choices. No, you can’t also do a little of this or a little of that. Best in your world means burning your other bridges and obsessing.
"I have no time!"
Of course you have that time available. Remember nine months ago when you were three times as busy with incoming calls as you are now? Invest that time in building up your expertise and becoming the person people who don’t even like you turn to for insight.
Or, consider this: Take half your office (the half made vacant by the people following Plan A) and turn it over to local groups. Let the active (and nascent) clubs and organizations meet in your office. Not once in a while. Regularly. All the time. Become the hub. Because, after all, you’re the mayor.
The second asset to build is permission. It turns out (according to the NAR) that 91% of all Realtors never contact the buyer or the seller of a home after the closing. Not once. Wow. Someone just spent a million dollars with you and you don’t bother to call or write?
The opportunity during the current pause (and yes, it’s a pause) is to find, one by one, the people who would benefit from hearing from you and then earn the right to talk to them. Earn the right to send them a newsletter or a regular update or a subscription to your blog. NOT to talk about what matters to you, but to give them information (real information, not just data) that matters to them. Visit dailycandy.com to see an example of what people like to hear.
The opportunity is to reinvent the way you interact with citizens, with prospects, with the mildly interested and with your past clients. The opportunity, in other words, is to stop waiting around for the phone to ring and instead figure out how to do what you do best… connect buyers and sellers in a way that makes them both confident.
Some of you will stick with the standard business card with the standard photo, the standard office and the standard ad strategy and the standard approach to making the phone ring. It’s going to be a long haul if that’s your route.
I’m betting, though, that the best of you will end up with a business model that will survive, thrive and prosper. Best time to start is right now.
And in the end, cynicism is a lousy strategy.
Yesterday’s post led to some good email about Human Resources.
Understand that in days of yore, factories consisted of people and machines. The goal was to use more machines, fewer people, and to design processes so that the people were interchangeable, low cost and easily replaced. The more leverage the factory-owner had, the better. Hence Personnel or the even more cruel term: HR. It views people as a natural resource, like lumber.
Like it or not, in most organizations HR has grown up with a forms/clerical/factory focus. Which was fine, I guess, unless your goal was to do something amazing, something that had nothing to do with a factory, something that required amazing programmers, remarkable marketers or insanely talented strategy people.
So, here’s my small suggestion, one that will make some uncomfortable.
Change the department name to Talent.
The reason this makes some people uncomfortable is that it seems like spin, like gratuitous double speak. And, if you don’t change what you do, that would be true.
BUT…
What if you started acting like the VP of Talent? Understanding that talent is hard to find and not obvious to manage. The VP of Talent would have to reorganize the department and do things differently all day long (small example: talent shouldn’t have to fill out reams of forms and argue with the insurance company… talent is too busy for that… talent has people to help with that.)
Microsoft and Google both have a very healthy focus on finding and recruiting Talent. McDonald’s recently announced that they want to hire people who smile more. The first strategy works, the second won’t. Talent is too smart to stay long at a company that wants it to be a cog in a machine. Great companies want and need talent, but they have to work for it.
That’s what it says on countless electronic and mechanical devices. "Don’t touch this," it says, "you’re way too dumb to open it… you’ll get hurt"
The problem, of course, is that pretty soon you start looking at the entire world that way. Whether it’s web design or Google analytics or backing up your hard drive or just talking to the guys in the plant about your new ideas, it’s really easy to see the world as a black box.
Here’s a simple secret of success: ignore the sticker.
Figure out how to use the tools that the most successful people in your field understand innately.
What do you call the people that marketers interact with? The ones who aren’t customers yet…
I was talking with Dan Pink on a conference call earlier and we
realized that "prospect" or "target market" are very marketing-centric
terms. The person is defined by the marketer, not the other way around.
Isn’t it interesting that there isn’t even a name for someone who doesn’t yet have a relationship with the marketer?
We settled on citizen. (Jackie and Ben used a variant on this in their latest book.)
Citizen recognized the power of this individual. Citizens are no
longer the weak, isolated pre-consumers in front of a TV set in 1971,
with few options. Now, citizens appear to be holding all the cards. It
sounds a bit pretentious, but then, so do most terms marketers use.
When you stop calling people ‘targets’ or ‘prospects’ and start calling them ‘guests’ or ‘citizens’, you can’t help but become a little more humble and a little more respectful. Try it, it works.
The mp3 of the conversation is here.
Like most creatures, people are stressed out. Almost all the time. And when we’re not, we seek out adventures and interactions to make us stressed. We get stressed about money, reputation, safety, relationships and whether we have to move our seat on the plane after we get on.
Stress is an essential part of the human condition. It rises when we’re about to buy something or sell something or interact with someone. We spend money to avoid it and we spend money to embrace it. And we almost never talk about it.
That thing you’re marketing… Does it add to stress or take it away? Is it stressful to talk about it? Buy it? Get rid of it? Is it more stressful not to buy it than it is to go ahead and buy one? Does it promise to reduce stress, but end up causing more?
Worth thinking about.
If you buy my product but don’t read the instructions, that’s not your fault, it’s mine.
If you read a blog post and misinterpret what I said, that’s my choice, not your error.
If you attend my presentation and you’re bored, that’s my failure.
If you are a student in my class and you don’t learn what I’m teaching, I’ve let you down.
It’s really easy to insist that people read the friggin manual. It’s really easy to blame the user/student/prospect/customer for not trying hard, for being too stupid to get it or for not caring enough to pay attention. Sometimes (often) that might even be a valid complaint. But it’s not helpful.
What’s helpful is to realize that you have a choice when you communicate. You can design your products to be easy to use. You can write so your audience hears you. You can present in a place and in a way that guarantees that the people you want to listen will hear you. Most of all, you get to choose who will understand (and who won’t).
Glenn sent me to the dieline blog.
Glenn’s site is filled with examples of work that a non-designer couldn’t say why it worked, but just knows that the hotel or product or whatever they’re looking at is professional and first rate and trustworthy. Great stuff.
The dieline blog is a wonderful collection of packaging insights. Once again, you might not have thought of it, but you’ll almost certainly get it, whatever ‘it’ is.
The funny thing is that design on the web is almost the opposite. Winning sites on the web almost always have terrible design and terrible logos. Unless I define terrible as ‘not working’. In which case the design is not terrible. In fact, it works so well it now seems to be clear that clunky, engineering-built design might just be the secret to success online.
