Especially online, where there are so few cues and so few choices.
This page of color choices will change your life. A lot. For the better.
[PS Michael recommends this page from Adobe. And finally, this and this came in as well… who knew?]
When I walked into my hotel room the other night, I was amazed to discover that no less than 18 lights were on (all traditional bulbs) and that the heat was set on three different thermostats to a toasty 75 degrees in honor of winter.
Then, when I got home, the $125 watch I had ordered from Amazon was waiting for me. The box for the watch contained four pamphlets, a small velvet bag, a cleaning cloth and was more than 10 inches by 3 inches by 3 inches in size. It weighed well over a pound–just the presentation box, not the watch.
In both cases, I don’t think I would have noticed or cared just a few years ago. Today, both feel wrong. Not all of your customers will feel this way. Many will embrace willful waste as a sign of confidence or luxury. But as more customers change their worldview about waste, you need to consider who you’re talking to and what you’re saying.
The other night I stayed on the 67th floor of the very tall Westin hotel in Atlanta.
At 5 a.m., the power went out. With a speech to give, I did the only thing a dedicated speaker could do: I put on my coat, grabbed my suitcase and walked down 67 flights of stairs. (The power was still out at 8 a.m. No one got stuck in the one working elevator, but I still made the right choice).
Next time, I’ll sleep closer to the ground. Trading the view for safety and convenience is now a no-brainer.
[*spelled wrong on purpose. This post is from three years ago, and I thought it was worth another look:]
Everybody already knows how powerful the brain is. Take a sugar pill
that’s supposed to be a powerful medicine and watch your symptoms
disappear. Have a surgeon not perform bypass surgery on your heart (link.) and discover that the angina that has been crippling you vanishes.
The placebo effect is not just for sick people anymore.
Why do some ideas have more currency than others? Because we believe
they should. When Chris Anderson or Malcolm Gladwell writes about
something, it’s a better idea because they wrote about it.
Even as your culture of ideas and marketing enters its long–tail,
open-source, low-barrier, everyone-has-a-blog era of mass publication,
we still need filters. Would your iPod sound as sweet if everyone else
had a Rio? Would your Manolo Blahniks be as cool if everyone else were
wearing Keds?
Arthur Anderson audited thousands of companies, and those audits gave us confidence in those companies, made them appear more solid, which, not surprisingly, made
them more solid. Then, post Enron, the placebo effect disappeared. Same
companies, same auditors, but suddenly those companies appeared LESS
solid, which made them less solid.
The magic of the placebo effect lies in the fact that you can’t do
it to yourself. You need an accomplice. Someone in authority who will
voluntarily tell you a story.
That’s what marketers do. We have the “placebo affect.”
(* The knack for creating placebos.) Of course, we need to persuade
ourselves that it’s morally and ethically and financially okay to
participate in something as unmeasurable as the placebo effect. The
effect is controversial and it goes largely unspoken. Very rarely do we
come to meetings and say, “well, here’s our cool new PBX for Fortune
1000 companies. It’s exactly the same as the last model, except the
phones are designed by frog design so they’re cooler and more
approachable and people are more likely to invest a few minutes in
learning how to use them, so customer satisfaction will go up and we’ll
sell more, even though it’s precisely the same technology we were
selling yesterday.”
Very rarely do vodka marketers tell the truth and say, “here’s our
new vodka, which we buy in bulk from the same distillery that produces
vodka for $8 a bottle. Ours is going to cost $35 a bottle and come in a
really, really nice bottle and our ads will persuade laddies that this
will help them in the dating department… nudge, nudge, know what I
mean, nudge, nudge…”
It would be surprising to meet a monk or a talmudic scholar or a
minister who would say, “yes, we burn the incense or turn down the
lights or ring these bells or light these candles as a way of creating
a room where people are more likely to believe in their prayers,” but
of course that’s exactly what they’re doing. (and you know what?
there’s nothing wrong with that.)
It’s easier to get people to come to a meeting about clock speed and
warranty failure analysis than it is to have a session about
storytelling.
We don’t like to admit that we tell stories, that we’re in the
placebo business. Instead, we tell ourselves about features and
benefits as a way to rationalize our desire to to help our customers by
allowing them to lie to themselves.
The design of your blog or your package or your outfit is nothing
but an affect designed to create the placebo effect. The sound Dasani
water makes when you open the bottle is more of the same. It’s all
storytelling. It’s all lies.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
In fact, your marketplace insists on it.
eBay is basically an auction online. It’s a great idea, I wish I’d had it, but it’s still an auction, same kind we’ve had for a million years.
Jeff Jarvis points us to a new feature in Google Docs. Think this through for a moment:
You send an email to your permission list. It points to a spreadsheet online. People can fill it out without logging in. You get the summarized data back, and can present it as a chart, a graph or just run with the numbers themselves. The depth of analysis you can generate is far deeper than a simple poll. My guess is that 99% of the people who use it will do a simple one dimensional poll. It’s more powerful than that.
Now, what else do we need?
How about a simple system that lets you run a new kind of auction for an event with limited seating? Say you want 200 people to come to a networking event, the sort of thing that’s no fun if only a dozen or two show up… Instead of charging $50 a ticket, why not charge $1 for the first five tickets, $2 for the next five, and on to $500 for the last ten? You’ll earn just as much (if not more) but reward the brave who sign up early. (The folks who like to wait until the last minute ‘to be sure’ end up paying for the privilege). It’s easy to imagine a simple interface to set up whatever graduated pricing model you’d like.
Or, how about a geography-based system for pricing? Many services are sold by a flat fee, but add a zip code and a map and it could completely change the pricing model.
Why don’t airlines have tools in place to make it easy to integrate charter flights with conventions so flights run when (and where) people are going? Flights for passengers instead of passengers for flights…
There was a lot of this discussed 9 years ago. The world wasn’t ready. It is now.
I guess my point is that this is just the beginning of using internet tools to change the world we interact with, as opposed to trying to make it easy to interact with the standard world using the Internet.
Many of us want fun and respect and love and success and kindness and hope. What brilliant marketers do is add the =.
A hundred years ago, food wasn’t much of an industry. Today, packaged, profitable, processed food has transformed every element of our culture.
The Super Bowl is a food holiday. Visit (if you must) the local supermarket on a Sunday morning before the big game. That’s the primary function of the event… to eat processed foods and beverages while hanging out with a group of people. Bonding via shared junk.
Same with a typical birthday party. Kids get validation from their friends (you came) and from their parents (yay, we get to eat junk.)
It’s not an accident that fried corn, sugared beverages, semi-trans fats and white flour have become essential parts of our culture. You can’t get elected in Iowa without pigging out at the Fair and you can’t host a party without stocking up on the chips. Somehow, food marketing became a story about respect. Few people say, "it’ll be fun… I’ll make a big bowl of brown rice and serve oatmeal cookies I made from scratch." Too weird. Too risky. People might not like you if you challenge the food dynamic.
There’s always been a cultural desire to conform. The difference is that now there’s money at stake, so marketers push us to conform in ways that turn a profit.
Marketers, brilliant, profit-oriented marketers, have had a century to teach us to associate respect and kindness and love with certain kinds of food.
And that’s why this post isn’t just a screed, it’s a lesson for marketers everywhere.
…Just as the jewelry and floral people have taught us that flowers and diamonds = love and that a respectable gentleman spends two months salary (!) on an engagement ring. Not an accident, of course. It’s too risky, marketers teach us, to send a handmade card or skip the jewelry and buy a research grant or pay for part of a school.
…Just as the car you drive somehow says something about who you are.
…Just as the college-industrial complex has taught us that the best colleges are the ones that are the most expensive (making them the hardest to get into, furthering the cycle),
…you have the opportunity to start down this road with what you make.
So I’m hoping that what you make is worthy. Marketing is a powerful tool especially when it associates a product with a desire and instinct we already have.
Marketing, when it works, transcends any discussion of the benefits of the product or the service.
Marketing, instead, is about the equal sign.
Many of us want fun and respect and love and success and kindness and hope. What brilliant marketers do is add the =.
Someone asked me the other day if posting a blog post every day is intimidating or a grind.
I view it as something I get to do. I spend most of my blogging time deciding what not to post.
The best work, at least for me, is the stuff you get to do. If you are really good at that, you’re lucky enough to have very little of the have to stuff left.
Before rejecting any model, you must learn it.
New organizations and new projects are so crisp.
Things happen with alacrity. Decisions get made. Stuff gets done.
Then, over time, things get soggy. They slow down. Decisions aren’t so black and white any more.
Why?
Here are some things that happen:
1. Every initiative, post launch, still has a tail of activity associated with it. Launch enough things and over time, that tail gets bigger and bigger.
2. Most projects either succeed or fail. Successful projects raise the stakes, because the team doesn’t want to blow it. There are more people watching, more dollars at stake, things matter more. So things inevitably get more review, more analysis and slow down. Projects that fail sap the confidence of the group. They want to be extra sure that they’re right this time, so, ironically, they slow down and end up sabotaging the new work.
3. The paper isn’t blank any more. Which means that new decisions often mean overturning old decisions, which means you need to acknowledge that it didn’t used to be as good as it was.
4. And the biggest thing is that there is a status quo. Something to compare everything to.
I’m not sure you can eliminate any of these issues. But, you can realize that they’re there. And you can be really strict about priorities and deadlines… it’s so easy to let things slip, rather than confronting the fact that you’re stuck and probably afraid. Speak up, call it out… and ship!
