Probably worth reviewing at your next marketing meeting (or every marketing meeting)… There's a three-step ladder:
Awareness
Education
Action
Awareness is when someone knows you exist. The knock-knock part of the knock-knock joke, the person who has another interest and trust to want to know more.
- Awareness is sexy
- You don't need to be known by everyone (or even most people) merely the right ones
- Awareness probably isn't as much of your problem as you think it is
- Awareness-seeking is addictive (and easy to measure)
Education is the story we tell, the transfer of information and emotion from us to the aware consumer.
- Most marketers are too self-absorbed to educate well
- Education takes time
- Education takes many forms, but without a doubt, experience is the most trusted and high-impact way to educate
Action is the last step, but the only one that the CFO is measuring. If you sacrifice the first two steps to boost this one, you'll regret it.
- Natural actions happen more often than ones that require a leap
- Anticipated action generates fear
- "Later" is a much more likely response than "no"
- Most people aren't going to act, but if you treat them well, they might just tell their friends (see awareness & education)
November 25, 2014
We expect authors, painters and singers to identify themselves, to sign the work they do.
And surgeons and lawyers as well.
What about managers, committee members, engineers and everyone else who makes something? Who made this policy? Who designed this menu? Who approved this project?
If you're not proud of it, don't ship it. If you are, sign your work and own the results. We'll know who to thank. If you work for a place where work goes unsigned (internally, in particular) it's worth asking why.
November 24, 2014
One of the milestones every entrepreneur passes is when she stops thinking of people she hires as expensive ("I could do that job for free") and starts thinking of them as cheap ("This frees me up to do something more profitable.")
When you get rid of every job you do that could be done by someone else, something needs to fill your time. And what you discover is that you're imagining growth, building partnerships, rethinking the enterprise (working on your business instead of in it, as the emyth guys would say). Right now, you don't even see those jobs, because you're busy doing things that feel efficient instead.
November 23, 2014
Marketing works best when the effort you put into it is a little more than you think you need and a lot more than the market expects from your project.
And projects work best when the amount you need to get done is a little less than the resources you have available.
Marketing rewards a taut system, a show of confidence, the ability to be where you need to be with a true story that works.
Projects reward slack, the ability to keep your schedule and your quality, to watch the critical path and to make smart decisions.
The common errors, then: Pick too big an arena for your marketing, and seem underwhelming. And pick too big an agenda for your project, and run out of slack.
You have a bushel basket. The generosity of overflowing it makes it much more appealing when it's on the shelf. But when your job is to transport those apples, overfilling it even a little makes it likely you won't get to where you're going.
Make unexpectedly big promises. Keep them. Show up with enough resources to do both.
November 22, 2014
In a competitive market, if you do the work to lower your price by 10%, your market share grows.
If you dig in deep, analyze, reengineer and make thoughtful changes, you can lower your price another 10%. This leads to an even bigger jump in market share.
The third time (or maybe the fourth, or even before then), you only achieve a 10% savings by cutting safety, or quality, or reliability. You cut corners, certainly.
The last 10% costs your workers the chance to make a decent living, it costs your suppliers the opportunity to treat their people with dignity, and it costs you your reputation.
The last 10% isn't worth it.
We're not going to remember how cheap you were. We're going to remember that you let us down.
November 21, 2014
I can't think of a single time that an individual or an organization has created a brand-new worldview, spread it and then led that tribe.
There were Harley-type renegades before there was Harley Davidson. There were digital nomads before there was Apple. There were pop music fans before there were the Beatles and Rastafarians before Marley.
Without a doubt, a new technology creates new experiences. But the early adopters who gravitate to it were early adopters before we got there.
Our job is to find the disconnected and connect them, to find people eager to pursue a goal and give them the structure to go achieve that goal. But just about always, we start with an already existing worldview, a point of view, a hunger that's waiting to be satisfied.
November 20, 2014
A friend explained to me all the reasons for her upcoming Kickstarter campaign. The machine she wanted to buy was sorely needed, it would increase her productivity and also make her day significantly easier–it made perfect business sense.
These are all great reasons to borrow money from a bank or a professional investor. They aren't good reasons to crowdfund.
No, the right question is, "how will the new financial relationship I offer to my biggest supporters enhance their lives?" There's a huge amount of emotion and story we tell ourselves before we send in money to crowdfund something. Almost none of it involves how it will help the organizer's business goals.
For many hammer-wielding entrepreneurs in search of money, crowdfunding looks like a nail. But we're seeing again and again that engaging directly with fans and friends in this way is more about connection and the audience's role in making a difference than it is about cash.
[Also on this topic.]
November 19, 2014
Your employees notice when you take action. And when you don't.
When a storm hits your company, the instinct is to wait it out, to seek shelter, to work to set an agenda, not to let the outside world set it for you.
And sometimes this works. But even if the storm passes, your employees remember. They remember the standard you've set and the way things are around here.
Every time we give someone the employee of the month parking space for perfect compliance, or fire someone for creating a culture of disrespect, we send a message.
Action or inaction are both forms of leadership and standard setting.
November 18, 2014
John Koenig calls it vemödalen. The fear that you're doing something that's already been done before, that everything that can be done has been done.
Just about every successful initiative and project starts from a place of replication. The chances of being fundamentally out of the box over the top omg original are close to being zero.
A better question to ask is, "have you ever done this before?" Or perhaps, "are the people you are seeking to serve going to be bored by this?"
Originality is local. The internet destroys, at some level, the idea of local, so sure, if we look hard enough we'll find that turn of a phrase or that unique concept or that app, somewhere else.
But no one is asking you to be original. We're asking you to be generous and brave and to matter. We're asking you to step up and take responsibility for the work you do, and to add more value than a mere cut and paste. Give credit, definitely, but reject vemödalen.
Sure, it's been done before. But not by you. And not for us.
A major Magritte show ran at the Art Institute of Chicago. It was fascinating to see all of his greatest hits in one place, nicely curated and hung.
Unlike the Louvre, photography was forbidden, which got me thinking about ideas, photos and originals.
In front of the Mona Lisa are hundreds of people, all taking a picture, sometimes with their cameras held overhead to get a better view. Why? What's the point of taking a picture of the most famous, most photographed painting in the world? You're certainly not going to take a better picture than you can find online with a few clicks.
It feels obvious that people aren't capturing the painting, they're capturing the moment, their proximity with a celebrity. "I was there, here look." Can you imagine going to the Louvre and walking right by the Mona Lisa? (I did this once, and I confess it wasn't easy). I mean, she's famous.
Magritte was an artist who worked in ideas, not in craft. A photo of his painting is totally sufficient to get the point he was trying to make. The paintings themselves almost feel like ghosts, like non-digital represenations of the purity of his original idea, the one we saw a thousand times before we ever walked into the museum.
By forbidding photography, the museum does nothing at all to protect copyrights, but instead creates a different sort of intimacy. Is this a famous painting? Can I prove I was here?
The most useful impacts of a show in real life, I think, are the juxtapositions created by intelligent curation and display. Missing for me was any connection at all to the other people in the room, the buzz of celebrity, the tribal aspect of, "oh, hey, you're here too?"
For those of us who work in ideas (which is most of us, now) the real question the Magritte show asks is, "if your ideas spread far and wide, do we need to see the original?"
When the idea is famous enough, what is the original, anyway?
November 17, 2014
