Your second mistake could be assuming that people are eager for change.
And the marketer's third mistake is assuming that once someone knows things the way you know them, they will choose what you chose.
Put two loudspeakers next to each other, and the perceived sound isn't twice as loud–and ten times as many speakers certainly doesn't seem ten times as loud.
But when you hear an idea from two people, it counts for twice as much as if you randomly hear it once. And if you hear an idea from ten people, the impact is completely off the charts compared to just one person whispering in your ear.
Coordinating and amplifying the evangelists of your idea is a big part of the secret of marketing with impact.
"Where do Purple Cows come from?"
Continuing in our series, Bob at Arnold Architectural Strategies asked a question that was similar to many: What's the free prize, why don't you talk about it more and how do I use it?
In Free Prize Inside, my sequel to Purple Cow, I point out: As marketers, our instinct is to believe that we have to make a product or service that flies faster, jumps higher, costs less, works infinitely better and is generally off the charts at doing what the product is supposed to do. We get our minds around one performance metric and decide that the one and only way we can be remarkable is to knock that metric out of the park. So, hammers have to hammer harder, speakers have to speak louder and cars have to accelerate faster.
Nonsense. This is a distraction from the reality of how humanity chooses, when they have a choice.
We almost never buy the item we buy because it excels at a certain announced metric. Almost no one drives the fastest car or chooses the most efficient credit card. No, we buy a story.
The story is the thing that the product also does. It's the other reason we buy something, and usually, the real reason. Simple example:
You have a seven-year old daughter. The last time she unexpectedly woke up after going to bed was three years ago. Of course, you're going to hire a babysitter and not leave her alone, but really, what are you hiring when you hire a babysitter? Is it her ability to do CPR, cook gourmet food or teach your little one French? Not if she shows up after the kid goes to bed.
No, you're hiring peace of mind. You're hiring the way it makes you feel to know that just in case, someone talented is standing by.
If her goal is to be a great babysitter, then, good performance doesn't involve honing her CPR skills or standing at the door, listening to your daughter breathe. Good performance is showing up a few minutes early, dressed appropriately, with an air of confidence. Good performance is sending a text every 90 minutes, if requested, to the neurotic parents. Good performance is leaving the kitchen cleaner than she found it.
It sounds obvious, but it's rarely done. It's frightening to build and stand for 'other' when everyone else is making slightly-above-average.
The free prize is the other metric, the thing we want to talk about, the job we hire your product to do when we hire a product like yours. That's what we tell a story about.
A decade ago, I was walking through Union Square in New York. The farmer's market was on, and the place was jammed with early adopters. Fortunately, I was wearing a Google shirt, a rarity at the time, a gift from a gig I had done for them.
Across the way, a woman shouted, "Google! Do you work for Google? I love Google! Google is my best friend…" as she waltzed through the crowd toward me.
How many brands get a reaction like that?
Let me posit for a moment that most people aren't capable of loving a brand, not if we define love as a timeless, permanent state of emotion, connection and devotion. I do think, though, that people have crushes on brands all the time. And a crush can get a brand really far.
The first element of a crush is magic. When a product or service does something so unexpected, so inexplicable that we are in awe of what just happened, it feels magical. It might be the mystery of how a 1969 air-cooled Porsche made someone feel when being driven for the first (or hundredth) time. Or, more recently, it might be the surge that comes from connections found, the sort that Facebook used to deliver to new users all the time.
Sometimes that magic is almost Jungian–the roar of the crowd, the smell of flowers on your wedding day, the look in a student's eyes when she hears she got into Princeton. Other times the magic is literally that, the magic of Arthur C. Clarke and any sufficiently advanced technology (the sort of magic that woman in Union Square felt in 2002).
Remember back to the first time you saw an iPhone or tasted a warm donut–these are leaps in experience that connect us to a feeling of wonder we don't often experience, one that (sadly) decays over time.
The second element? Generosity. When the wizard happily shares his potion, when the device or the service is affordable, sold for less than it's worth. Not necessarily free—Harley Davidson motorcycles were never free, but the magic of being accepted by a generous tribe was more than enough to overcome the price of entry.
In software, particularly online, generosity comes naturally. Not only does Google find you what you seek, not only does Twitter let you broadcast to your world, but they appear to do it at no charge at all. Magic and generous at the same time.
It's difficult for the day laborer, the replaceable freelancer, the commodity supplier to earn a crush, because they are cogs in the system… selling the expected, for a fair price. We complete our transaction with you and then move on, even steven.
The crush, in contrast, goes far beyond delivering what's expected. The crush builds value for both sides, delivering a quantum leap in the urgency of the interactions. Ask David Cassidy…
Here's where the famous, "don't be evil" mantra kicks in. When it was first uttered at Google, it meant, "don't be like Microsoft was." In particular it meant, "don't use the magic we're creating in one place to allow us to be ungenerous, and in particular, don't use our magic in one place to eliminate choice in others." When Microsoft used the hegemony of the Windows OS to force people to use IE, they were being 'evil'. They traded their magic and stopped being generous.
Crushes don't last forever. You need to keep adding magic and generosity.
A marketing-driven organization is run by the Marketing department. It revolves around what marketers do.
A market-driven organization is driven by what the market wants, regardless of what the marketing department feels like doing.
(And of course, there are organizations driven by Sales, by Shareholder Relations and by Operations and Tech too. Even a few that seem to be run by the Employee-happiness Department. Not many, though. Even in these organizations, the option remains: you can be market driven instead. The first step is to choose your market…)
Not because it's the holidays or because you get a tax deduction.
Not because someone is going to match your funds or because your neighbor won't be able to enter a marathon if you don't.
Not because the kid is at the doorbell with those cookies or because it's pledge week.
And not because you read something that pulled your heartstrings.
Right now, for no good reason (and for every good reason), even if it's only $5. Pick whatever cause you care about. And tell a friend.
What if everyone did that, right now?
Generosity is its own reward. Go for it.
You've met people who are an accident just waiting to happen. What's the opposite of that?
What we're looking for in a boss, in a CEO to invest in, in a business partner, in a candidate, is formidability. Someone to be reckoned with. Not someone with all the answers, because no one has all the answers. No, we want someone who is magic about to happen.
This is the electricity that follows the star quarterback around. We aren't attracted to him because he's a stolid, reliable, by-the-book playmaker. No, it's the sense that he has sufficient domain knowledge combined with the vision and the passion to create lightning at will. Sarah Caldwell was the same way, bringing a sense of imminent possibility to the work she gave us.
They don't teach formidable in school. They teach compliance and rote and perhaps spin. They teach us to be on the alert for shortcuts and for ways to get away with less. Not surprisingly, the formidable leader takes the opposite tack in every respect. She's willing and eager to take the long way if it gets to the elusive destination. She doesn't need to spin because the truth as she knows it is sufficient.
There might only be two critical elements in the choice to be formidable:
1. Skill. The skill to understand the domain, to do the work, to communicate, to lead, to master all of the details necessary to make your promise come true. All of which is difficult, but insufficient, because none of it matters if you don't have…
2. Care. The passion to see it through. The willingness to find a different route when the first one doesn't work. The certainty that in fact, there is a way, and you care enough to find it. Amazingly, this is a choice, not something you need to get certified in.
Formidable leaders find the tough questions, and then, instead of being afraid to ask them, eagerly decide to seek out the answers. They dig in deep to the details that matter and ignore the ones that merely distract. They bite off more than others can chew but consistently avoid biting off more than they can (because they care so much, it hurts to admit that you've reached the end).
It's not a dream if you can do it.
Paul Graham gets full credit for coining the term. "A formidable person is one who seems like they'll get what they want, regardless of whatever obstacles are in the way." A must-read for startup CEOs.
Sooner or later, all big public media companies go in search of a choke point, the place where they can find a leg up in terms of attention and monetization.
FACEBOOK said to you and to everyone else: Build your content here on our site, and we'll make it easy for you to effortlessly share it with your friends and their friends and their friends. Over time, of course, the clutter leads to less sharing, and now you can pay them to promote your work to the very people who used to bump into it for free. They have control of a scarce resource (attention) and they're building a business around it.
LINKEDIN approached many bloggers over the last year and asked them to contribute original posts on their site. In exchange, they'd direct lots of their readers to the content. Of course, it's not hard to see how soon it will become an isolated garden, a platform they own and can charge a toll on. They have control of a scarce resource (attention) and they're building a business around it.
GOOGLE cancelled their RSS reader because RSS is a free, unchokable service, one that's hard to put a toll on. On the other hand, when you build on their platform, you become part of their ecosystem, a click away from all sorts of revenue. They have control of a scarce resource (attention) and they're building a business around it.
Worth noting that GMAIL has figured out (acting, it seems, on behalf of users) how to use tabs to differentiate between "primary" emails and "promotions." If you're used to getting this blog by email, odds are you haven't seen it in awhile, because even though it's not a promotion, even though you signed up for it, by default, it's in your promotions tab (easy to fix, by the way, just drag one of the emails to the primary folder). While this tabbing default probably saves you from emails that are actually promotions, it also provides Gmail with a choke point for the future, because the person who controls which tab an email arrives in is powerful indeed.
I could go on about other companies and other platforms, but you get the idea.
Again and again, we see that if you're not the customer, you're the product. "Free" usually means, "you're not in charge." The race continues to be one for attention.
Tim Wu's book on the history of this process is a must-read for anyone who makes media.
Just about all the big decisions, innovations and perfect solutions around you didn't start that way.
They weren't the result of a ten-person committee, carefully considering all options, testing the reasonable ones and putting in place a top-down implementation that went flawlessly.
[The idea behind Amazon, the Mailchimp logo, the medical approach to childhood leukemia, the cell phone, the microwave oven, ethical email marketing, Johnny B. Goode, the Super Bowl, Kiva, Buffalo chicken wings…]
No, they were the result of one person, a person in a jam or a hurry or somewhat inspired. One person flipping a coin or tweaking a little bit more or saying, "this might not work" and then taking a leap.
Inventing isn't the hard part. The ideas that change the world are changing the world because someone cared enough to stick it out, to cajole and lead and evolve. But even though the inventing isn't the hard part, it scares us away.
Before you tell yourself you have no right to invent this or improve that, remind yourself that the person before you had no right either, but did it anyway.
Every profession creates them. Doctors and lawyers, sure, but also speakers and programmers and rodeo riders.
The sophisticate is on one side of the chasm, and the hack, the amateur, the self-defeating noob is on the other.
The sophisticate knows how to walk and talk and prepare, but mostly, to engage with us in a way that amplifies her professionalism. We spend months at business school or med school or at boot camp teaching people to be part of that tribe, to establish that they are, in fact, insiders.
The people at the fringe booths at a trade show, the ones who get rejected from every job they apply to without even being interviewed, the ones who don't earn our trust or our attention–this isn't necessarily because they aren't talented, it's merely because they haven't invested the time or found the guts to cross the chasm to the side of people who are the real deal.
It's fun to make a fish-out-of-water TV show about the outsider who's actually really good at his craft. But in real life, fish out of water don't do very well.
Yes, acting like you are a professional might be even more important than actually being good at what you do. When given the option, do both.
