Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (12 page)

If you argue with customers instead of delighting them;

If you copy work and pass it off as your own;

If you shade the truth a little;

If you lobby to preserve the unsustainable status quo;

If you network to get, not to give;

If you do as little as you can get away with;

… then we already know who you are.

• When you love the work you do and the people you do it with, you matter.
  
• When you are so gracious and generous and aware that you think of other people before yourself, you matter.
  
• When you leave the world a better place than you found it, you matter.
  
• When you continue to raise the bar on what you do and how you do it, you matter.
  
• When you teach and forgive and teach more before you rush to judge and demean, you matter.
  
• When you touch the people in your life through your actions (and your words), you matter.
  
• When kids grow up wanting to be you, you matter.
  
• When you see the world as it is, but insist on making it more like it could be, you matter.
  
• When you inspire a Nobel Prize winner or a slum dweller, you matter.
  
• When the room brightens when you walk in, you matter.
  
• And when the legacy you leave behind lasts for hours, days, or a lifetime, you matter.
  

1.
Go where your customers are.

Jacquelyn runs a tiny juice company called ChakWave. I met her in Los Angeles, standing next to an organic lunch truck. Like the little birds that clean the teeth of the hippo, there’s synergy here. The kind of person that visits the truck for lunch is the sort of person that would happily pay for something as wonderfully weird as her juice. And the truck owners benefit from the rolling festival farmer’s-market feel that comes from having a synergistic partner set up on a bridge table right next door.

2.
Be micro-focused and the search engines will find you.

My friend Patti Jo is an extraordinary teacher and tutor. Her new business, The Scarsdale Tutor, doesn’t need many clients in order to be successful. This fact permits her to focus obsessively, and that gets rewarded with front-page results on Google. Not because she’s tried to manipulate the SEO (she hasn’t), but because this is exactly the page you’d hope to find if you typed “scarsdale tutor” into a search engine. Could she do this nationwide? Of course not. But she doesn’t want to or need to. Living on the long tail can be profitable.

3.
Outlast the competition.

I was amazed at all the empty storefronts I saw in LA on my last visit. On one particular block, three or four of the ten lunch places were shut down. And the others? Doing great. That’s because the remaining office workers who used to eat lunch at the shuttered places had to eat somewhere, and so the survivors watched their businesses
grow
. A war of attrition is never pretty, but if you’re smart about overhead and scale, you’ll win it.

4.
Leverage.

Rick Toone runs a tiny guitar-making operation. His lack of scale makes it easy for him to share. When others start using his designs, he doesn’t suffer (he can’t make any more guitars than he’s already making); he benefits. Because he’s the originator of the design, his originals become more coveted, not less valuable. He leverages his insight and shares it as a free marketing device.

5.
Respond.

This is the single biggest advantage you have over the big guys. Not only are you in charge, but you also answer the phone and read your email and man the desk and set the prices.

So don’t pretend you have a policy. Just be human.

We try so hard to build the first circle.

This is the circle of followers, friends, subscribers, customers, media outlets, and others willing to hear our pitch. This is the group we tell about our new product, our new record, our upcoming big sale. We want more of their attention and more people on the list.

Which takes our attention away from the circle that matters, which is the second circle.

The second circle is the set of people who hear about us from the first circle.

If the first circle is excited about what we do and it’s remarkable enough to talk about, they’ll tell two or six or ten friends each. And if we’re really good, the second circle, the people we don’t even know—they’ll tell the third circle. And it’s the third circle that makes you a hit, gets you elected, and tips your idea.

The big drop-off is the natural state of affairs. The big drop-off is the huge decline that occurs between our enthusiasm (HEY! BUY THIS!) and the tepid actions of the first circle (yawn). Great marketers don’t spend their time making the first circle bigger. They spend all their time crafting services, products, and stories that don’t drop off.

If the new Web has a mantra, that’s it.

So much time and effort are now put into finding followers, accumulating comments, and generating controversy—all so that people will notice you. People say and do things that don’t benefit them, just because they’re hooked on attention.

Attention is fine, as long as you have a goal that is reached in exchange for all this effort.

Far better than being noticed:

• Trusted
  
• Engaged with
  
• Purchased from
  
• Discussed
  
• Echoed
  
• Teaching us
  
• Leading
  

I have no idea what it’s like to be pregnant.

And for most of us, we have no idea what it’s like to have $3 to spend on a day’s food, or $4 million to spend on a jet. We have no idea what it feels like to be lost in a big city, no idea how confusing it is to go online for the first time, no idea what it’s like to own four houses.

Marketers and pundits and writers and bloggers and bosses pretend they are empathetic, but we never can be. Sure, we can try, we can be open to cues and sensitive to clues, but no, we don’t really know.

Being certain about how someone else feels or what motivates them is foolish. Don’t declare that you know exactly why someone made a choice, or predict what someone is going to do next, and why. It’s a great parlor trick, but you’re probably going to be wrong. (I think the one universal exception is fear. We all know what it means to be afraid, and fear doesn’t change based on income or gender. The causes change, but the fear remains the same.)

Empathy is a hugely powerful marketing tool if we use it gently, being sure to leave lots of room for error. When we say, “oh, you did that to make a quick buck” or “you did that because you hate that guy” or “you did that because you’re a man,” we’ve closed the door to allowing people to write their own stories, and we make it difficult to learn what actually makes them tick.

Do you really expect that the first time we transact, it will involve me giving you money in exchange for a product or service?

Perhaps this is a good strategy for a pretzel vendor on the street, but is that the best
you
can hope for?

Digital transactions are essentially free for you to provide. I can give
you permission to teach me something. I can watch a video. I can engage in a conversation. We can connect, transfer knowledge, engage in a way that builds trust—all of these things make it more likely that I’ll trust you enough to send you some money one day. I can contribute to a project you’re building, ask you a difficult question, discover what others have already learned.

But send you money on the first date? No way.

The question then, is how much time and effort does your nonprofit/consulting firm/widget factory spend on pre-purchase transactions, and how much do you spend on trying to simply close the sale?

Whom are you trying to please?

What are you promising?

How much money are you trying to make?

How much freedom are you willing to trade for opportunity?

What are you trying to change?

What do you want people to say about you?

Which people?

Do we care about you?

(And after each answer, ask “why?”)

It’s easy to get trapped in wondering what consumers want, and then being frustrated when you can’t get what you cook up in front of the people who want to buy it.

It’s easy to forget what
industry
wants.

Supermarkets don’t want unbranded fruits and vegetables because handling is expensive and it’s hard to differentiate and charge extra. On the other hand, supermarkets love nationally advertised packaged goods because they bring in shoppers, they have promotional support, they come with shelf allowances (money for shelf space), and new SKUs can create excitement.

Fashion stores don’t want sensible clothes that don’t change from year to year. Hard to make a living selling that. They like zingy designer names and ever-changing fashion and fads. That’s how fashion stores make a living.

Governments don’t like buying at retail prices. They prefer custom stuff from high-touch organizations that can bring them the mountain, instead of the other way around. They’d rather pay 10x for an office supply that’s customized just for them, instead of modifying what they want to match what the market sells. It gives them something to do. And all those salespeople! The trips, the bribes, the attention …

Doctors don’t like prescribing lifestyle changes or natural cures, because many patients demand a scrip and it’s easily defended and it comes with a sales rep.

If the industry can’t make money selling what you’re selling, why will they help you?

You can view these things as ridiculous peccadilloes. Or you can see them as parts of the system as permanent and as important as the gatekeepers who rely on them.

On the other hand, fall in love with the system and you might forget the end user. And we know how poorly that approach works.

If I sell you something, we exchange items of value. You give me money, I give you stuff, or a service. The deal is done. We’re even. Even-Steven, in fact.

That’s fine, but it doesn’t explain potlatch or the mystery of art or the power of a gift.

If I give you something, or way more than you paid for, an imbalance is created. That imbalance must be resolved.

Perhaps we resolve it, as the ancient Native Americans did, by acknowledging the power of the giver. In the Pacific Northwest, a powerful chief would engage in potlatch, giving away everything he owned as a sign of his wealth and power. Since he had more to give away, and the power to get more, the gifts carried real power, and others had to accept his power in order to engage.

Or we resolve it by acknowledging the creativity and insight of the giver. Artists do this every time they put a painting in a museum or a song on the radio. We don’t pay for the idea, but we acknowledge it. And then, if it’s particularly powerful, it changes us enough that we become givers, contributing to someone else, passing it along.

Sometimes we resolve the imbalance by becoming closer to the brand or the provider. We like getting gifts; we like being close to people who have given us a gift and might do it again.

And sometimes, in the case of international aid, we resent the rich giver, the one with so much more power, and thus create a cycle of dependence that does neither side any good. This sort of gift isn’t much of a gift at all.

When done properly, gifts work like nothing else. A gift gladly accepted changes everything. The imbalance creates motion, motion that pushes us to a new equilibrium, motion that creates connection.

The key is that the gift must be freely and gladly accepted. Sending someone a gift over the transom isn’t a gift, it’s marketing. Gifts have to be truly given, not given in anticipation of a repayment. True gifts are part of being in a community (willingly paying taxes for a school you will never again send your grown kids to) and part of being an artist (because the giving motivates you to do ever better work).

Plus, giving a gift feels good.

Walk up to the falafel stand and hand the guy $3. He hands you a falafel, no onions.

This
for
that
.

Something for something.

The time between surrendering the money and getting the sandwich is tiny. You gave him something, you got something. It’s simple.

Now, stretch it out a bit. You order dinner in a restaurant. They treat you nicely, the room is beautiful, you enjoy the evening,
then
you pay the bill. This, pause, pause, pause, that.

Go to law school. Pay a lot of money. Spend a lot of time. Be taught a bunch of things you don’t particularly want to know, things you probably
don’t need. Get a degree with a modicum of scarcity. Pay for a barreview course. Pass the bar. Then you get a job that pays a lot of money.

This
, then a multi-year pause, then, in return,
that
for the next forty years. We call it “return on investment.”

Online, though, I’m not sure the math is so obvious. You don’t write a blog to get gigs. You don’t help people out in a forum to build a freelance business. Sure, that might happen, but that’s not why you do it. If you are busy calculating quid pro quo, that means your heart isn’t in it, and the math won’t work out anyway.

Online, the something, the quid, the
this
, doesn’t cost cash. It takes heart and energy and caring, which are scarce but renewable resources. As a result, many people are able to spend them without seeking anything external in return. Even better, the act of generosity, of giving without expectation, makes it easier to do art, to create work that matters on its own.

I think it’s more like Santa math. Santa flies around the world, giving stuff away, and for what? He earns gratitude, trust, and friendship, that’s what. Sure, one day he might decide to license his image or try to sell you something. But right here, right now, gratitude, trust, and friendship are plenty. Especially if you enjoy doing what you’re doing. Quid, no quo.