When John Cage published 4'33'', a piece of silent music, there was much consternation. Years later, it's still easy to joke about the absurdity of a piece of music consisting of four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence.
And when the first internet companies that proposed free as a business model (free email, free social networks, etc.) started to gain traction with investors, there was an even louder chorus from those that cried foul.
When (part of) your marketplace embraces a 'new' that makes no sense to you, it's essential you understand the point of view that's leading people to embrace this new idea. No, you don't have to cheer it on, collect it, support it or pretend you think it's the greatest breakthrough ever. But yes, you probably need to understand why other people were touched, inspired or found something worth talking about.
Can you explain to me why some people wait in line for that car or that new restaurant? Do you understand why this person is being talked about online or promoted at work? Does it make sense to you that this canvas sells for five times as much as that one?
Denigrating art you don't understand doesn't hurt the art–it reveals something about your willingness to learn.
June 26, 2013
Differentation by marketers has a long and obvious history. When you see competition, you differentiate.
Buy mine, I can prove it is different.
They offer X, I offer Y. They cost this, I cost that.
The thing is, differentiation is selfish. It's the act of the marketer with intense interest in his segment of the market, it's inside baseball, deeply thought through reasons why someone should buy my thing instead of their thing.
Most customers, of course, don't have the same selfish view of the market, the same obsessed knowledge of features and benefits.
Differentiation is not the purple cow. This is in fact a willful misreading of what I've been writing about, usually by people who haven't read it…
Remarkable has nothing to do with the marketer. Remarkable is in the eye of the consumer, the person who 'remarks.' If people talk about what you're doing, it's remarkable, by definition.
The goal, then, isn't to draw some positioning charts and announce that you have differentiated your product. No, the opportunity is to actually create something that people choose to talk about, regardless of what the competition is doing.
June 25, 2013
Sometimes, marketing enables a pickpocket to steal a wallet–and be thanked for it.
Marketers are responsible for what we do, it's not an activity without effects.
Last year, just one of the big fast food companies made more than $1,300,000,000 in profit (billion with a 'b'). They've also paid their CEO nearly $200 million in salary in the last five years. Sometimes, a big profit is the sign that you're doing something right, creating real value for people able to pay. Sometimes, though, it means you're exploiting a weakness in the system.
The big food companies are brilliant, relentless, focused marketers. Marketing works. It gets people to take action, to change their minds, and most of all, to do more of what they might have had an inkling to do in the first place. Sometimes a lot more. When the ideas of marketing (and the products are part of the marketing, optimized for high consumption) are weaponized like this, they are extraordinarily effective at achieving their goals.
The side effects of this marketing are obvious: both short-term satiation and long-term health degradation. Kids on little league baseball teams may smile with delight when treated to a post-game feast, simultaneously, high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity all rise dramatically over time as a result of consistently consuming vast quantities of the products that these companies market. This is beyond dispute.
In some communities, 70% of the targeted population is now obese.
The challenge doesn't come from one slice of pizza. No, the failing is in abdicating the responsibility that comes from industrial scale. Organizations at scale do far more than give people choices… they change the culture, and must accept responsibility for the changes they choose to create.
If your organization uses terms like share of stomach or hires lobbyists, you've already made a decision to market in a way that changes the culture to benefit you and your shareholders.
What's fascinating is this: the marketing is so powerful that some of the people being hurt actually are eager for it to continue. This creates a cultural feedback loop, where some aspire to have these respected marketing jobs, to do more marketing of similar items. It creates a society where the owners and leaders of these companies are celebrated as risk-taking, brave businesspeople, not as the modern robber barons that they've become.
The cultural feedback loop can't be denied. The NAACP, which represents a population that is disproportionately impacted by the health costs these products create is actually allied with marketers in the fight to sell ever more and bigger portions to its constituents.
The crime continues because the money taken by corporations that change our culture is used to fund campaigns that conflate the essential concept of 'freedom' with the not-clearly-articulated 'right' to respond to marketing and consume stuff in quantities that would have been considered literally insane just three generations ago. And we like it.
[I'll write the previous paragraph's point again here to be clear: we've decided that consumers ought to have the right be manipulated by marketers. So manipulated that we sacrifice our long-term health in the face of its power.]
We ban accounting that misleads, and we don't let engineers build bridges that endanger travelers. We monitor effluent for chemicals that can kill us as well. There's no reason in the world that market-share-fueled marketing ought to be celebrated merely because we enjoy the short-term effects it creates in the moment.
Every profession we respect has limits created and enforced by society. Doctors and undertakers and actuaries live with these limits because it's clear that building for the long run benefits all of us. Sure, it might be fun or profitable to take a shortcut, but it's not the right thing to do. The rules make it more likely we don't race to the bottom as we cut those corners or maximize our profits.
The question is this: are you responsible for the power in your hands? If so, then we need to own the results of our work. If not, someone else needs to step in before it's too late. No sustainable system can grant power without responsibility.
Just because marketing works doesn't mean we have an obligation to do it. And if we're too greedy to stop on our own, then yes, we should be stopped.
[It seems like you could make one of three objections to this line of reasoning:
1. Marketing doesn't work, it's not powerful, it can't get people to do things not in the long-term interest.
2. Marketing does work, but marketers ought to have the right to sell anything they want, and they're not responsible for what they do.
3. If we regulate the dramatically obvious bad cases, we're on a slippery slope to regulating everything.
It seems to me that all three of these straw horses don't hold up under scrutiny.]
June 24, 2013
The fearless person is well aware of the fear she faces. The fear, though, becomes a compass, not a barrier. It becomes a way to know what to do next, not an evil demon to be extinguished.
When we deny our fear, we make it stronger.
When we reassure the voice in our head by rationally reminding it of everything that will go right, we actually reinforce it.
Pushing back on fear doesn't make us brave and it doesn't make us fearless. Acknowledging fear and moving on is a very different approach, one that permits it to exist without strengthening it.
Life without fear doesn't last very long–you'll be run over by a bus (or a boss) before you know it. The fearless person, on the other hand, sees the world as it is (fear included) and then makes smart (and brave) decisions.
June 23, 2013
You work at one, or the other.
At the lab, the pressure is to keep searching for a breakthrough, a new way to do things. And it's accepted that the cost of this insight is failure, finding out what doesn't work on your way to figuring out what does. The lab doesn't worry so much about exploiting all the value of what it produces–they're too busy working on the next thing.
To work in the lab is to embrace the idea that what you're working on might not work. Not to merely tolerate this feeling, but to seek it out.
The factory, on the other hand, prizes reliability and productivity. The factory wants no surprises, it wants what it did yesterday, but faster and cheaper.
Some charities are labs, in search of the new thing, while others are factories, grinding out what's needed today. AT&T is a billing factory, in search of lower costs, while Bell Labs was the classic lab, in search of the insight that could change everything.
Hard, really hard, to do both simultaneously. Anyone who says failure is not an option has also ruled out innovation.
June 22, 2013
The most indisputable truth of outbound marketing: Frequency improves compliance.
If you promote something twice to one hundred people it will lead to more sales than if you promote it once to two hundred people.
Frequency galvanizes attention and improves trust. (At least one kind of trust).
The curse, of course, is that the best members of your audience, the ones who are listening the most carefully, have to be bored/annoyed at the messages that show up after they take action. Some people pledge the first day of pledge week, or buy the book the day it comes out. Those folks don't want or need to hear the message again.
Worse, frequency creates a culture of less engagement. Since we know that just about every important issue, opportunity or warning is going to be repeated a few times, we don't engage as much. Why bother to listen, we say, they'll just repeat it.
The line between frequency and annoying is thin indeed. You believe in what you sell or you wouldn't make it, wouldn't devote yourself to it, wouldn't sell it. At some point, though, the frequency of repetition stops being helpful enthusiasm and starts being selfish. And, alas, there's no easy formula available. Jay Levinson likes to say that you should change your marketing not when the staff, your family or your agency tells you to–but when your accountant does.
I'll confess that I'm bad at this. I'm okay with gleefully saying, "I made this," but not so good at saying it two or three or yes, 19 more times.
I'd like to tell you that there's a magic solution to not repeating yourself as a marketer, to respecting the best and brightest of your tribe and being able to merely whisper about your new project. This approach works great if you focus on creating scarce goods (popular fine artists, jazz stars and small restaurants don't need to spend a lot of time reminding people about their soon to be sold out goods), but most of the time, as you work to reach the edges, frequency works.
Curse or not, the fact remains: frequency works. We're going to be stuck with it for a while, I fear.
June 21, 2013
It's not uncommon for teenagers to whine that there's nothing to do in this town.
Or for college students to talk about the limits of their institution, about the paucity of opportunities at the placement office or the lack of campus activities.
And of course, those that complain that the boss won't let me.
All three complaints are based on a view of the world that requires permission and easy access.
In the connection economy, the valuable asset is the ability to convene. When we are able to initiate, to make something happen and to be trusted, we not only create value, we create a life.
So in the post-obedience world, that means that the entire world is available, not just what's on campus or within a skateboard ride of your house. It means that the best jobs are off campus, and that the limits of any (every) institution are actually magical boundaries, because knowing where they are makes them easier to cross.
And crossing boundaries is where we thrive.
June 20, 2013
The irony of "getting in return for giving" is that it doesn't work nearly as well as merely giving. Giving because you care, because you have something to say and because it feels right. No Tat.
Bloggers who measure the return on investment of every word, twitterers who view the platform as a self-promotional tool instead of a help-others tool, and those that won't contribute to Wikipedia and other projects because there's no upside… these folks are all missing the point.
It's not that difficult to figure out who's part of the online community for the right reasons. We can see it in your writing and in your actions. And those are the people we listen to and trust. Which, of course, paradoxically, means that these are the people we'll choose to do business with.
Sure, you'll contribute a lot. But in the long run, it's possible that you'll get more than you contribute.
June 19, 2013
It's not between you and your boss, your critics, your editor, your competition, your spouse or some other outsider.
The essential confrontation, of course, is with yourself.
You are your own biggest critic.
And your own biggest competitor.
Now that it's easier than ever to pick yourself, the question is, "why haven't you?"
And now that it's easier to ignore the competition and become a category of one, the question is the same.
Our instinct is to externalize the forces that are holding us back, but in fact, that's not the problem, is it?
June 18, 2013
If you want to cool your house to 68 degrees fahrenheit quickly, setting the thermostat to 62 degrees isn't going to get it temperate any faster than if you set it to 68. It blows full cold until it hits the number, then it stops. (For those down under where it is winter, the opposite is also true–extreme thermostat settings won't warm you up any faster).
Frying pans don't work that way. Turning the temperature on the burner all the way up will certainly heat up that pan faster.
Ah, an analogy!
There is significant pressure on marketers to get it done fast. And so the inclination to spend a lot, to race around, to turn the thermostat to its most extreme state. Yelling, basically.
But all the yelling doesn't build your brand faster. In fact, it might do quite the opposite. Trusted brands don't get there by spending their whole budget on one Super Bowl ad. Valuable marketing campaigns are the result of time and user experience, not media and more media. Tweeting more often doesn't make your tweets have more resonance.
On the other hand, product design and user interaction definitely benefit from the frying pan approach. Extraordinary products, remarkable stories, intense connection via user interaction–these things actually do scale quickly.
The movie business has seduced itself into believing that they can turn the thermostat to absolute zero and use a massive media push to make a moribund movie work. They can't. They'd be far better off putting the risk and the effort into making movies worth talking about instead.
Social media is a marathon, a gradual process in which you build a reputation. The best time to start was a while ago. The second best time to start is today. But turning it up to 11 isn't going to get you there faster.
June 17, 2013
