Here are things that you can now avoid:
- The annual review
- The annual sales conference
- The big product launch
- The grand opening of a new branch
- Drop dead one-shot negotiation events
The reasons? Well, they don't work. They don't work because big events leave little room for iteration, for trial and error, for earning rapport. And the biggest reason: frequent cheap communication is easier than ever, and if you use it, you'll discover that the process creates far more gains than events ever can.
February 17, 2010
I love this definition from Wikipedia:
In printing, a cliché was a printing plate cast from movable
type. This is also called a stereotype. When letters were set one at a time, it made sense to cast a phrase
used repeatedly as a single slug of metal. "Cliché" came to mean such a
ready-made phrase. The French word “cliché” comes from the sound made
when the matrix is dropped into molten metal to
make a printing plate.
To save time and money, then, printers took common phrases and re-used the type.
Along the way, they trained us to understand the image, the analogy, the story. Hear it often enough and you remember it. That training has a useful purpose. Now, you can say 'Festivus' or 'There is no I in team…" or "that took real courage" when describing a golf shot, and we immediately get it. Monty Python took a cliché about the Spanish Inquisition and made it funny by making it real. The comfy chair!
The effective way to use a cliché is to point to it and then do precisely the opposite. Juxtapose the cliché with the unexpected truth of what you have to offer. Apple does this all the time. They point out the cliché of a laptop or a desktop or an MP3 player and then they turn it upside down. Richard Branson takes the expected boredom of a CEO and turns it upside down by doing things you don't expect.
I often use the Encyclopedia of Clichés to find clichés that then inspire opposites. It's a secret weapon and it's all yours now. Have fun.
February 16, 2010
Many brands and idea promoters are in a hurry to rack up as many Facebook fans and Twitter followers as they possibly can. Hundreds of thousands if possible.
A lot of these fans and followers are faux. Sunny day friends. In one experiment I did, 200,000 followers led to 25 clickthroughs. Ouch.
Check out the graph on the left. The curves represent different ideas and different starting points. If you start with 10,000 fans and have an idea that on average nets .8 new people per generation, that means that 10,000 people will pass it on to 8000 people, and then 6400 people, etc. That's yellow on the graph. Pretty soon, it dies out.
On the other hand, if you start with 100 people (99% less!) and the idea is twice as good (1.5 net passalong) it doesn't take long before you overtake the other plan. (the green). That's not even including the compounding of new people getting you people.
But wait! If your idea is just a little more viral, a 1.7 passalong, wow, huge results. Infinity, here we come. That's the purple (of course.)
A slightly better idea defeats a much bigger but disconnected user base every time.
The lesson: spend your time coming up with better ideas, not with more (faux) followers.
February 15, 2010
Find an emotion that needs social approval in order to be easily expressed.
Hook it into something you sell or do.
Discover other organizations that would benefit from the holiday as much as you would.
Voila! Mother's Day/Valentine's Day/Festivus/New Year's. It doesn't have to be a national one, of course, just one for your tribe.
All the great religious holidays started as secular or pagan holidays first, because they filled an essential social need. Spring is here! It's dark out!
And if your project/product/cause isn't worthy of a holiday? Time to find a new one.
February 14, 2010
This was sort of shocking, at least to me:
I was talking to a religious leader, someone who runs a congregation. She made it clear to me that on many days, it's just a job. A job like any other, you show up, you go through the motions, you get paid.
I guess we find this disturbing because spiritual work should be real, not faked.
But isn't your work spiritual?
I know doctors, lawyers, waiters and insurance brokers who are honestly and truly passionate about what they do. They view it as an art form, a calling, and an important (no, an essential) thing worth doing.
In fact, I don't think there's a relationship between what you do and how important you think the work is. I think there's a relationship between who you are and how important you think the work is.
Life's too short to phone it in.
February 13, 2010
Madecasse has a lot going for it. It’s delicious chocolate. It’s made in Africa (the only imported chocolate made on the continent with local beans). The guys who make it are doing good work and are nice as well.
The question I asked them is, “does your packaging do its job?”
I don’t think the job of packaging is to please your boss. I think you must please the retailer, but most of all, attract and delight and sell to the browsing, uncommitted new customer.
Let me take you through the reasoning, because I think it applies to your packaging as well.
We start with this: if I’ve already purchased and liked your product, the packaging isn’t nearly as important. I’m talking here about packaging as a sales tool for converting browsers into buyers. (If you’re already a buyer, all I need to do is remind you what we look like). If word of mouth or other factors are at work, your package matters a lot less. But for a company this size, in this market, the package matters a lot.
Now, among people who haven’t bought, but might, understand that every one of them starts with a worldview. What are the beliefs and expectations and biases they have about the world?
In this case, it’s about someone in the market for high end chocolate. If your worldview is, “Hershey’s is the best, it reminds me of my childhood,” then I’d argue that this $4 bar isn’t for you no matter what they do with the package.
Perhaps you believe, “All that matters is how it tastes, and great chocolate looks a certain way,”
or perhaps, “I care about the origin of what I buy,”
or perhaps, “I want something out of the ordinary, unlike anything I’ve had before,”
or perhaps, “Chocolate is like wine. I am interested in vintages and varietals,”
or maybe, “Chocolate should be fun. Enough with the seriousness.”
As you can see, no package can optimize for all of these people. You can compromise your packaging, try to appeal to everyone, muddy your brand promise and hide your story. I think that’s sort of what the existing packaging does and I’m not sure it’s smart.
The alternative is to focus not on ALL the people in the market, but just a few. Winning hands down with 25% is plenty in this market, and perhaps in your market too.
You could figure out how to tell the delicious story, by referencing (copying the style of) other products in other categories that are already seen as delicious, at least by this audience.
You could tell the snobby varietal handmade story, and that’s been done many times as well.
Or you could tell a story that is yours and yours alone.
For example, the Madecasse story about made by Africans in Africa is very powerful, at least as powerful as fair trade, if not more (they keep four times as much money in Africa by selling a bar as they would if they just sold beans to other companies).
If that’s true, then why not put your workers on the label? Big beautiful pictures that would be an amazing juxtaposition against all the other abstract stuff in the store. Tell me the story of the worker on the back. Make each one different and compelling. Packaging as baseball card. I wouldn’t put a word on the front, just the picture. Now I not only eat something that tastes good, but I feel good. You’ve made it personal. The story on the back is about a real person, living a better life because I took the time to buy her chocolate instead of someone else’s. When I share the chocolate, I have something to say. What do you say when you give someone a chocolate bar? This package gives you something to say.
Or be fun and funny. Make the product itself almost a bumper sticker, something worth buying and talking about.
The two elements that must come together are:
- The story you can confidently tell and
- the worldview the buyer tells herself
When those align, you win. Happy Valentine’s day on Sunday.
If I sell you something, we exchange items of value. You give me money, I give you stuff, or a service. The deal is done. We're even. Even steven, in fact.
That's fine, but it doesn't explain potlatch or the mystery of art or the power of a gift.
If I give you something, or way more than you paid for, an imbalance is created. That imbalance must be resolved.
Perhaps we resolve it, as the ancient Native Americans did, by acknowledging the power of the giver. In the Pacific Northwest a powerful chief would engage in potlatch, giving away everything he owned as a sign of his wealth and power. Since he had more to give away, and the power to get more, the gifts carried real power, and others had to accept his power in order to engage.
Or we resolve it by acknowledging the creativity and insight of the giver. Artists do this every time they put a painting in a museum or a song on the radio. We don't pay for the idea, but we acknowledge it. And then, if it's particularly powerful, it changes us enough that we become givers, contributing to someone else, passing it along.
Sometimes we resolve the imbalance by becoming closer to the brand or the provider. We like getting gifts, we like being close to people who have given us a gift and might do it again.
And sometimes, in the case of international aid, we resent the rich giver, the one with so much more power, and thus create a cycle of dependence that does neither side any good. This sort of gift isn't much of a gift at all.
When done properly, gifts work like nothing else. A gift gladly accepted changes everything. The imbalance creates motion, motion that pushes us to a new equilibrium, motion that creates connection.
The key is that the gift must be freely and gladly accepted. Sending someone a gift over the transom isn't a gift, it's marketing. Gifts have to be truly given, not given in anticipation of a repayment. True gifts are part of being in a community (willingly paying taxes for a school you will never again send your grown kids to) and part of being an artist (because the giving motivates you to do ever better work).
Plus, giving a gift feels good.
February 11, 2010
Too many people, when asked for their opinion, dissemble. Instead of giving an opinion, they push back. They ask,
- What do you think?
- Did you do any research?
- Can we do a focus group?
- What did Will say?
- There's a typo on page three
- How long do we have to study this?
- Can we form a committee?
This is the work of the resistance. This is your lizard brain, hiding. It feels safe. It's not.
You're an expert. If nothing else, you're an expert on life, on your opinion, on being a consumer. When I ask you for your opinion I'm not asking you for the right answer. I'm asking you for your opinion.
February 10, 2010
Can you factor this? 
If you're like most people, you get a little queasy at the thought. And when you were in tenth grade, you surely wondered why they were bothering you.
(the answer is (x-2) times (x-2), in case you were curious.)
It turns out that the real reason you needed to do this work was to be able to play with numbers in your head. Abstract numerical thought is an important skill among educated people.
Which brings us to TED, a conference held every year in Long Beach. It's going on right now.
Watch a few TED videos and try to get ahead of the speaker. They have an idea…it's probably a conceptual tricky idea, one with a lot of moving parts. And there is a lot of shorthand and arm waving … basically, it's similar to a quadratic equation. If you need the other person to slow down and explain every little bit, you've missed the point. The point is to do abstract conceptual thought. To get in practice taking the accepted status quo and questioning it, at least for a little while, at least this or that part of it.
I think this is a skill, a rare one. The ability to be facile in the manipulation of ideas, both theoretical and established, is a valuable one, and I think the TED videos and art of reading books (at least the first ten minutes of each) are two great ways to getting better at manipulation of ideas. It takes practice, and it's worth it.
I sat in a meeting last week with someone who was 100% tactical. She couldn't let go of the urgency of the moment long enough to envision a different future, even for five minutes. The abstract conceptual part was missing from her part of the conversation.
The trick is to be able to leap to, "if we did A and B, would that get us C? Would C be a good thing? Is it possible to do A and B if we really commit?" and then move on to the next one. And that takes practice. Why wouldn't it?
BONUS: Hugh MacLeod, artist, good friend and creator of the cartoon above, has created four cube grenades about being a linchpin. These are limited editions, first come first shipped. (You can sign up for his free cartoon of the day).
February 9, 2010
