If you throw a bucket of water on a small campfire, you’ll succeed in putting it out.
Pour a bucketful of sake into one of those little glasses and you’ll waste most of it and ruin the table setting.
And try to use a bucket to refill a dried-out lake and not much will happen.
Relativity is everywhere we look. If you put in eight hours on a ten-hour project, you’ll fail. Put that much effort into a smaller, six-hour project and the client will be delighted.
The Grateful Dead remain one of the greatest bands in memory, partly because they relentlessly overfilled what was expected from a band. Those that seek to be the next Grateful Dead inevitably fail, because the standard has been reset.
On the other hand, a tech company that raises a lot of money to ‘change the world’ but merely delivers a really useful tool is seen as a failure.
The promise we make defines the quality that is expected. Market pressure and our own insecurity drive us to make ever bigger promises, but when the promise doesn’t match the deliverable, everyone forgets the effort and workmanship that was delivered.
The two challenges are:
Pick the right size bucket for the problem you’re trying to solve.
Make sure you have the resources to fill it all the way to the top.
A recent discussion about the challenges of direct-to-consumer marketing of a skincare product ended with one participant describing the hard part with, “nothing to ad.”
She was referring to how much the thread had covered, but the pun wasn’t lost on us.
Social media offered an irresistible promise to many folks who are looking to do “marketing”:
A business begins with the assertion that if they can get a committed new customer to start buying a high-margin product it would be worth at least $50 to them.
If it’s worth $50 to get someone to click over to your site, a social media site or search engine offers to sell that click for $40!
Buy as many clicks as you can, and you can grow your business.
Of course, this is a really good deal for the social media sites. They do very little and keep almost all the profit.
But competitive pressures make the really good deal into one that it’s hard for a company to live with. Now, instead of $40 to get a click, it costs $50 or $60 or $80. DTC companies end up raising baskets of money and spending just about all of it on social media and online ads, payments to influencers, etc, losing money on every customer.
Once committed, they’re open to trying just about anything. They listen to wise (but actually making-stuff-up) sales reps and consultants about what time to post, whether to use photos, color photos, testimonials, paid influencers, free samples and more. “Oh, you tried to scale your buy too fast, the algorithm can tell…” and all sorts of black box thinking that, from a distance, surely gives away the con of separating a hardworking brand manager from the money they control.
We’ve seen this before, many times, and it almost never ends well. There’s not much to ad.
That’s because the fundamental strategy cannot thrive in a competitive environment. Someone will always be willing to outbid you for attention. Someone will always be willing to lose just a bit more money than you.
The path forward is very different.
Your (current) customers need to bring you your (new) customers.
It’s not ironic but it is edifying to realize that this is EXACTLY how every one of the media companies you’re paying ad money to grew. They grew with word of mouth, not the sorts of ads they’re selling.
Facebook or that influencer–they didn’t grow by running ads and selling subscriptions. They grew when their users felt that it was in their own selfish interests to bring them new users.
As long as your project is built around the misguided myth of “getting the word out” and promoting itself to strangers, you will struggle. Someone always wins the spend-money-on-DTC-promo game, but it probably won’t be you. It’s simply a lottery where one of the spenders hits a magical level of critical mass and becomes buzzy. For the rest of us, there’s only the glorious work of creating a product and a situation that people think is worth talking about. It’s hard, it has dead ends, but it’s the work.
The formulaic attraction of category + money + media consultant = home run is a problem precisely because it’s a formula.
People don’t talk about your product or service because you have a gimmick or hype or because they care about you or even because a thoughtful analysis shows that it has the best features and price performance. They talk about it because they believe it’s good for their status, their affiliation with people they care about or their frame of mind.
[I wrote about this twenty years ago in Purple Cow, but people still look for the shortcut of ads, which is rarely a shortcut. And the conversation that inspired this post happened in the Purple Space.]
For the first time, the only time, everyone on Earth was in the same boat at the same time. We’ve long been divided by privilege, by caste, by accidents of birth or by organized hierarchies.
Sure, there have been events that struck us all at once. Landing on the moon caused us all to gasp simultaneously. But this time was different. Regardless of class or age or nationality, the situation was right there, in front of our face. And it didn’t go away in a few news cycles.
But the responses, of course, were not the same.
Some profiteered and hoarded, cutting the line and seeking a profit, regardless of the cost to others. Some embraced panic while others sought to fan it. Some showed up asking for help while others decided to see who needed help.
And that’s the first lesson of our pandemic. While events might be evenly distributed, responses and reactions rarely are. We are able to choose to see possibility. We are able to lead. We’re able to see beyond a day or a week into the future.
Not simply a few of us. Any of us.
That choice wasn’t dictated by class or station or race. It was a new decision, made each day, by people who chose to care. Volunteer firemen who showed up for the next alarm. Parents who sat with a kid instead of parking them in front of a device. Doctors who quieted their fears in order to save others.
This leads to the second lesson, which is the choice that is in front of each of us. Just as the pandemic created the opportunity to lead and to contribute, the future is knocking on our doors asking us to make a new decision.
For millennia, we’ve been using our resources to insulate ourselves from the weather. Some are luckier than others in their ability to find a safe haven.
We learned the hard way that our fragile industrial ecosystem isn’t quite as resilient as we hoped. We discovered that we aren’t actually as insulated from nature (and each other) as we might have expected. And we learned (perhaps) that compared to the alternative, preparation is quite cheap.
There will be other flu pandemics, and each time, if history is a guide, we’ll be better at fighting them. But fighting a virus is very different than fighting the weather. The weather, the inexorable rise of the sea, is going to get harder and harder to ignore. The effects are unevenly distributed now, often exposing the most vulnerable, but as we saw with a global pandemic, we won’t be able to buy ourselves peace of mind for long.
The fork in the road is plain to see. Who will lead? Who will see possibility and opportunity and decide to show up now, when we can, to do something about tomorrow? And who will decide to push to go back to business as usual?
Just as air travel and cruise ships spread the virus, our industrial might has planted the seeds of our destruction. At the same time, the modern world has created a system with enough leverage to save itself.
While the system has leverage, the system is not resilient and the system doesn’t lead itself.
The best time to begin is now. Start where you are. Don’t wait for authority or a manual.
It’s tempting to believe that we’re not easy to fool.
Not by a magician, a politician or a banker. Other folks might be easily duped by a spammer or a hustler, but not us.
And yet, no one fools you more than you.
When you look in the mirror, do you see what others see, or is it possible you see someone far less (or far more) attractive than others do?
Do we assume that our work is so good and so useful that anyone who doesn’t see that is confused or misguided?
Perhaps we feel like an impostor, a fraud or an unseen genius…
These are all forms of self-deception.
A useful way forward might be to ask, “is it working?”
If the marketplace of ideas, of commerce or of relationships sees something of value, perhaps they’re right. And if they don’t, perhaps we might develop the empathy to understand what’s missing in our narrative about what we do or how we do it.
Marketing to others begins with marketing to ourselves.
If it turns out that our self-deception is a reliable source of fuel for us to achieve our goals, it might be worth living with. But at some point, our ability to fool ourselves becomes toxic. It blocks our ability to create generous and useful work, and it eats away at our confidence and peace of mind.
It’s not easy to see ourselves as others do. But perhaps they’re onto something.
To get to the Kebab House Cafe, you’ll need to drive past a dozen fast food restaurants, restaurants you can find off just about any interstate. It’s certainly less convenient to go a few blocks off the beaten path, but the food and service and vibe might be worth it.
The thing is, it matters even more to them. The folks that work there, the ones who are building something they’re proud of. It matters to the unique ones, to the ones that are trying harder than the others, to the folks who create interesting and memorable experiences.
And it’s not just one cafe. When a musician, a playwright or an entrepreneur takes a risk, they’re betting someone will care enough to hear them and engage with them. They do the work because they care, not because someone handed them a manual.
The best part is that when it matters to them, it might matter even more to us.
If we want to have the option of choosing something that isn’t in the ordinary course of convenient and cheap, we need to show up for the people who bring it to us.
Working with people who want to work with us is a privilege and a delight.
It’s legitimate, but it’s a mistake. A mistake because:
the subject line is wrong (you didn’t buy a gift card yesterday)
it was sent Saturday night at 8 pm
the formatting is off and it feels like a scam
We can learn a lot about what not to do from this.
First, if you make a mistake by email, fix it. Fix it by email AND fix it on your site. Let everyone who got the wrong note know, even if it’s embarrassing.
Second, if your company is built on email, establish a consistent look and feel, an approval process and most of all, definitely, a way to confirm that you actually sent it. For example, if you ever get an email from me, it will also be here on this blog. If it’s not, it’s a scam.
Now that Amazon has messed up both parts of this process (they got thousands and thousands of complaints last night, overwhelming their hard-working frontline support workers) they’ve opened the door for countless spammers and scammers who lack imagination but are good at following a trail.
While it may seem unrelated, part of the problem is the fear that people have in writing clearly. Here’s a sign I saw at Avis yesterday:
I’m pretty sure that the person who cared enough to make this sign doesn’t actually speak this way. Perhaps if it had said,
“We don’t have a car wash here, but the insides of our cars have been cleaned regularly. If you’d like to get a car wash, we’re delighted to pay you back up to $15 per rental. Thanks for understanding.”
The Amazon email was simultaneously overwritten and under-edited. It didn’t say what it meant, and the formatting simply made it worse.
And then the bureaucracy refused to quickly take responsibility and make it clear to millions of people.
As a result of error and fog and denial, trust disappears.
When facing a complex problem, it’s easy to become confused.
Lately, it’s become socially acceptable to express your confusion with certainty. Untrained in the field, make a pronouncement that makes it clear that you have not just an understanding of what’s going on, but also that you’ve figured out the causes and the next steps.
The thing is, confusion shared often leads to the learning we need to become productive as we move forward. “I don’t understand this part,” is a great thing to say before someone helps you understand it.
On the other hand, certainty is almost guaranteed to maintain your confusion, particularly when the thing you were sure was going to work, doesn’t.
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