When was the last time you excitedly told someone about Fedex?
They’re perfect. The only time we notice them is when they screw up.
And that fancy restaurant with the four star reviews? They’ve got the fine linen and the coordinated presentation of dishes… it costs hundreds of dollars to eat there, but it’s okay, because they’re perfect.
Which is a problem, because dinner consists of not much except noticing how imperfect they are. The second course came five minutes later than it should of (ten, even!). The salad was really good, but not as perfect as it was last time. And the valet parking… you had to wait in the cold for at least ninety seconds before your car came. What a let down.
A let down?
The place is a gift, a positive bit of karma in a world filled with compromise. And all you can do is notice that it’s not perfect.
As the quality of things go up, and competition increases, it’s so easy to sell people on perfect. But perfect rarely leads to great word of mouth, merely because expectations are so hard to meet.
I think it’s more helpful to focus on texture, on interpersonal interaction, on interesting. Interesting is attainable, and interesting is remarkable. Interesting is fresh every day and interesting leads to word of mouth.
I think our Fedex delivery person is interesting. I like her. I talk to her. And yes, it changes my decision about who to ship with. I also think that Spicy Mina is an interesting restaurant. So far from perfect, it’s ridiculous. But I talk about it.
January 18, 2008
The post2post tour continues: Spinning Silk, Brand Mix and Make it Great. Thanks, guys.
January 17, 2008
Along the way, some people in search of the remarkable have resorted to gimmicks to get the word out about their work. Gimmicks might work fine if you run a chain of fast food restaurants or a website, but gimmicks certainly get in the way of building a reputation if you’re a lawyer or a doctor.
So, where to draw the line?
If a product or service adds value for the consumer, it’s not a gimmick. Toll free customer support, for example, was seen as a gimmick when it came out in the 1960s. At least by competitors. Now, of course, it’s required.
Banks open on Sundays? Well, it seems like a gimmick at first, until customers realize that they can’t live without it. Then it’s not a gimmick any longer.
Or consider a doctor who has completely reinvented the way he practices medicine. If it works, it won’t be a gimmick. Because both sides with benefit, for the long haul.
As you sit down to consider ways to be more remarkable, the challenge is to be worth talking about… at the same time you are adding value for the person who’s talking about you.
A workaholic lives on fear. It’s fear that drives him to show up all the time. The best defense, apparently, is a good attendance record.
A new class of jobs (and workers) is creating a different sort of worker, though. This is the person who works out of passion and curiosity, not fear.
The passionate worker doesn’t show up because she’s afraid of getting in trouble, she shows up because it’s a hobby that pays.
The passionate worker is busy blogging on vacation… because posting that thought and seeing the feedback it generates is actually more fun than sitting on the beach for another hour. The passionate worker tweaks a site design after dinner because, hey, it’s a lot more fun than watching TV.
It was hard to imagine someone being passionate about mining coal or scrubbing dishes. But the new face of work, at least for some people, opens up the possibility that work is the thing (much of the time) that you’d most like to do. Designing jobs like that is obviously smart. Finding one is brilliant.
January 16, 2008
I visited the new Apple store in NYC on 14th Street yesterday. This one isn’t as flashy as the one in midtown, and it has a fairly annoying design flaw. The two front doors don’t close. Push them open, walk away and the door stays open.
On one visit, they had two full-time employees standing there, walking over to each door to close it. At the time, I figured it was actually a design feature… they had a doorman. How quaint.
Yesterday, though, with the temperature outside about 45, they just left both doors open.
I asked Jeff, the employee greeting visitors, "why don’t you guys keep the door shut?" After all, it seems extremely wasteful. Al Gore is on the board, but even if he wasn’t, it must be costing them a fortune.
Jeff told me that people complain all the time and it can’t be fixed.
Obviously, not everyone complains all the time. Perhaps it’s just a few a day. But the people who complain, care. And it’s the customers that care that actually have a huge impact on your business.
If no one cares, you’ve got trouble. Goal one is getting people to care. Goal two: listening to them.
January 14, 2008
And CNET hates Google
And newspapers hate Craigslist
And music labels hate Napster
And used bookstores hate Amazon
And so do independent bookstores.
Dating services hate Plenty of Fish
And the local shoe store hates Zappos
And courier services hate fax machines
And monks hate Gutenberg
Apparently, technology doesn’t care who you hate.
January 13, 2008
Thanks to John Moore (again) for giving me a chance to be funny. With straight lines like that, I could go far…
Unless you just started, your organization is different than it used to be. It has evolved.
The marketing you do, the decisions you make, the hurdles you have to go through probably have vestiges of the old model. Sometimes, like the little feet on the back of a whale, it’s easy to ignore the vestiges. Other times, it’s entirely possibly that they prevent you from achieving your goals.
Example: years ago, Prodigy, the original big online service, reflected its origins from Sears, CBS and IBM when they unveiled chat and discussion boards. Every single message posted was read by a censor before it went online. At one point, they had literally hundreds of full time editors sitting in an office tower outside of NY, painstakingly reading every single post.
Example: the production values of an HD TV show are lost in the YouTube environment, yet plenty of studios and advertisers are having trouble giving up the staffing and hierarchy that served them so well in the other medium. So the vestiges remain, slowing down the entire process (and making it a lot more expensive.) 25 people to film a three minute clip is just silly, but it makes sense if you look back at how they got there.
Example: local banks with limited hours were the norm just a few years ago. The move to online hasn’t changed the way they all see the world… it’s a skeleton staff at night, because that’s the way it always was.
If you’re working hard to work around a vestige, maybe it makes sense to work just as hard to get rid of it all together.
