Earlier in this series, I wrote about the failure of Survival putting me at the end of my publishing rope, publisherless. Then I self-published Purple Cow (the original, now-out-of-print edition came in a milk carton) and the self-referential marketing, combined with great reader buzz, got me back into the good graces of the publishing world. That wasn't my goal, but in retrospect, it had a big impact on my output as an author.
Josh asks, "How do you turn something that is considered to be a commodity into a Purple Cow, when the lowest price is the only thing that seems to matter to customers?"
If you tell me that price is the only thing that matters to customers, I respond that nothing about this product matters to them.
When something matters to you, you talk about it, care about it, research it, tweak it… If all that we've got to care about is the price, then the price is the discussion, not the item itself.
Businesses have worked overtime to turn things into commodities, telling us that they sell what the other guy does, it's the same, but cheaper. No wonder we've been lulled into not caring.
Every time you say, "all they care about is price," you've just said, "they don't really care, they just want to get the buying over with, cheap."
The thing is, it doesn't have to be a commodity if you don't want it to be. It's easy to forget, but before the smartphone, cell phones were treated as a commodity as well. And that's the opportunity in every industry, in every segment, for any product or service that has become a commodity. [Edited out the Nucor reference, per insight from Professor Len Sherman.]
No, you can't magically make it interesting to all. But yes, with enough effort and care, you can find those that are interested enough if what you create that they'll choose to talk about it.
And if you can't, go make something else. Something that people will choose to care about and talk about.
We sell commodities by choice.
August 5, 2013
As soon as we measure something, we seek to improve the numbers.
Which is a worthwhile endeavor, if better numbers are the point of the exercise.
The other path is to focus on colors, not numbers. Instead of measuring, for example, how many people click on a link, we can measure how something you wrote or created delighted or challenged people… You can see the changes in emotion, or dignity improved or light shed.
The questions we ask change the thing we make. Organizations that do nothing but measure the numbers rarely create breakthroughs. Merely better numbers.
There's a debate raging in my town over whether or not to replace the existing planted-grass school football field with what used to be known as Astroturf. One side has already won a crucial victory: the local paper calls the new alternative, "turf."
Turf is what we call a racetrack, or half a fancy dinner (surf and…). Turf is short and punchy and feels organic. If they had called it 'plastic' or 'fake grass' or 'artificial turf', every conversation would feel different before we even started.
What to call the new diamonds that are being manufactured in labs, not dug out of the ground under horrible conditions? Some want them to be called 'artificial diamonds' or not diamonds at all. Others might prefer 'flawless' diamonds (because they are) or 'perfect'.
Is it a 'course', a 'group' or a 'club'? It might be all three, but the word you choose will change the anchor and thus the leverage that word has going forward. Are you a 'consultant', an 'advisor' or a 'coach'?
Engineers and doctors and other scientists seem to think they're skipping all of this when they use precise, specific language. But the obvious specificity and the desire to scare off untrained laypeople is in itself a form of leverage.
For politicians and others that want to re-invent the language for their own ends–you can work to plant your hook anywhere you choose, but if you torture the meaning and spin, spin, spin, you risk being seen as a manipulator, and all your leverage disappears. If your hook finds no purchase, you have no leverage.
On the other hand, the great brands (Pepsi, Kodak, etc.) planted words that meant nothing and built expensive fortresses around their words, words that now have emotional power.
The only reason words have meaning is because we agree on what they mean. And that meaning comes from associating those words with other words, words that often have emotional anchors for us. This isn't merely the spin of political consultants. It goes right to the heart of how we (and our ideas) are judged.
August 4, 2013
Jumbo was the famous elephant that PT Barnum exhibited. His name came to stand for the big story, for the audacious claim, for making quite a noise.
You probably need more Jumbo in the story you're trying to tell.
Mumbo, on the other hand, is deliberately obfuscating the facts. Mumbo is manipulation, the creation of placebos that don't scale or the extension of power without the facts to back you up.
No more mumbo please.
Feel free to quote me on that the next time someone brings you a big heaping plate of hype.
[In fact, Mumbo-jumbo was probably a term that was xenophobic when it was first used more than a century ago (having nothing to do with elephants but probably something to do with an exotic religion), but I think it has evolved to have more to do with technology and slick salesmanship now.]
Mumbo just doesn't last as long as it used to.
August 3, 2013
When people first encounter this brilliant poster about the state of our government, they are transfixed, then transformed.
Newly updated, Jess continues to make a ruckus in offices, schools, homes and government agencies. Feel free to post one in the office of someone you voted for (or didn't).
August 2, 2013
I define non-clinical anxiety as, "experiencing failure in advance." If you're busy enacting a future that hasn't happened yet, and amplifying the worst possible outcomes, it's no wonder it's difficult to ship that work.
With disappointment, I note that our culture doesn't have an easily found word for the opposite. For experiencing success in advance. For visualizing the best possible outcomes before they happen.
Will your book get a great testimonial? Write it out. Will your talk move someone in the audience to change and to let you know about it? What did they say? Will this new product gain shelf space at the local market? Take a picture.
Writing yourself fan mail in advance and picturing the change you've announced you're trying to make is an effective way to push yourself to build something that actually generates that action.
One reason this is difficult is that we've got a false humility that pushes us to avoid it. The other is that when we're confronted with this possible success, we have to confront the fact that our current plan just isn't that good (yet), that this site or that menu item really isn't as good as we need it to be.
If you expect rejection, it's a lot easier to ship lousy stuff. Said that way, it's clear that this is a ridiculous strategy. Better to make it great now rather than mourn failure later.
Go ahead, write yourself some fan mail, in advance.
You probably have better things to do than to analyze the basic trait of the Three Stooges, so I will do it for you.
They have impulse control problems.
It's not that they are evil or even particularly selfish. No, the challenge all three Stooges face is that they do whatever comes into their minds, immediately. If they want to lash out or poke or twist, they do. If they think it might be effective to make money running a plumbing company, they don't consider, they merely do it.
Stoogecraft is what happens when people or organizations in power do what feels right in the short run without thinking at all about the alternatives or the implications. It's the result of fear or boredom or a misplaced focus.
Every customer service horror story is an example of stoogecraft at work. Every business development deal gone awry because of personalities, greed or miscommunication is a result of the same thing. When we don't say what needs to be said, postponing it for later, we're playing the Stooge game.
Humans being human. People who can do what they want doing what they (think) they want.
Short-term thinking used to mean a rake to a face. Now it leads to dead ends, broken promises and success avoided.
August 1, 2013
Seeing it
and
Taking it
Most organizations that stumble fail to do either one. The good news is that there are far more people than ever pointing out the forks that are open to us. The "this" or "that" alternatives that each lead to success if we're gutsy enough to take one or the other.
Alas, taking the fork is even more difficult than seeing it.
July 31, 2013
The easiest quick opportunity remains the same: Yuppie Information.
What information can you offer the connected and the curious that they don't already have? This group is not only the most eager group of early adopters around, but they are so digitally connected that reaching them is easier than ever before.
No, it's not going to change the world, not right away anyway. But yes, if you're hoping to quickly work your way up the adoption curve, offering timely information to connected, educated, urban youth is in fact a great place to start.
On the other hand, the green fields and real wins will come from connections, mesh businesses and leadership for groups that aren't as peripatetic or spoiled as the digital yuppies.
July 30, 2013
Approximately a million web years ago, I wrote a book about web design. The Big Red Fez was an exercise in shooting fish in a barrel. There was a vast and deep inventory of bad websites, sites that were not just unattractive, but ineffective as well.
The thesis of the book is that the web is a direct marketing medium, something that can be measured and a tool that works best when the person who builds the page has a point of view. Instead of a committee deciding everything that ought to be on the page and compromising at every step, an effective website is created by someone who knows what she wants the user to do.
Josh Davis and others wanted to know if, after more than a decade, my opinion has changed. After all, we now have video, social networks, high-speed connections, mobile devices…
If anything, the quantity of bad sites has increased, and the urgency of the problem has increased as well. As the web has become more important, there's ever more pressure to have meetings, to obey the committee and to avoid alienating any person who visits (at the expense of delighting the many, or at least, the people you care about).
Without a doubt, there are far more complex elements to be worked with, more virality, more leverage available to anyone brave enough to build something online. But I stand with a series of questions that will expose the challenges of any website (and the problems of the organization that built it):
- Who is this site for?
- How did they find out about it?
- What does the design remind them of?
- What do you want them to do when they get here?
- How will they decide to do that, and what promises do you make to cause that action?
The only reason to build a website is to change someone. If you can't tell me the change and you can't tell me the someone, then you're wasting your time.
If you get all of this right, if you have a clear, concise point of view, then you get the chance to focus on virality, on social, on creating forward motion. But alas, virtually all organizational sites are narcissistic and (at the same time) afraid and incomplete.
Answer your visitor when he asks, "Why am I here?"
July 29, 2013
