Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (15 page)

If you can do the first, more power to you. Please let the rest of us know what you come up with.

That’s the number-one request (other than “pass the salad dressing”) of most of the people I meet.

The problem, of course, is in the “get.” The request has at its foundation the assumption that what you’ve built has somehow earned attention. “Our business model is working great—we just need more traffic. …”

People never say “How can I earn more traffic?” or “How can I rethink the core of what I’m offering so that it organically attracts people who want to see it?”

Getting traffic is a little like getting a date. You can probably manipulate the system for a little while (I had a roommate in college who was great at it), but self-reinvention is a markedly better long-term strategy.

We are facing what might be the greatest threat ever to the future of mankind.

And yet no one is marching in the streets, the outrage is largely intellectual, and action is slow. (If you want to argue about the science, please visit the Wikipedia page for “global warming”; this is a post about the marketing!)

Is the lack of outrage because of the population’s decision that this is bad science or perhaps a thoughtful reading of the existing data?

Actually, the vast majority of the population hasn’t even thought about the issue. The muted reaction to our impending disaster comes down to two things:

1.
The name.

Global
is good.

Warm
is good.

Even
greenhouses
are good places.

How can “global warming” be bad?

I’m not being facetious. If the problem were called “Atmosphere cancer” or “Pollution death,” the entire conversation would be framed in a different way.

2.
The pace and the images.

One degree every few years doesn’t make good TV. Because activists have been unable to tell their story with vivid images about immediate actions, it’s just human nature to avoid the issue. Why give up something we enjoy now to make an infinitesimal change in something that is going to happen far in the future?

Lady Bird Johnson understood this when she invested her efforts into a campaign against litter and pollution. The problem was easy to see. The messaging was emotional and immediate. You could see how your contribution (or efforts) mattered.

Because you don’t see your coal being burned (it accounts for more than 50% of U.S. electricity) and because the stuff coming out of your car is invisible, and because you don’t live near a glacier, it’s all invisible.

Doesn’t matter what you market. Human beings want:

totems and icons

meters (put a real-time mpg or CO2 meter in every car and watch what happens)

fashion

stories

and

pictures

Ninety-five percent of the new ideas that don’t spread—even though their founders and fans believe they should—fail because of the list above.

I first started talking about landing pages in 1991, but there’s probably someone out there who can pre-date me. Sometimes when you’ve been riffing on an idea for so long, it’s easy to believe that everyone gets it, but my mail says otherwise.

A landing page is the first page a visitor to your site sees.

Landing pages were important back in the day of email marketing, because if you included a link in your email, that was the page the permission marketee would land on if he clicked through.

Landing pages are even more important today because they are the pages that people see after clicking on Google AdWords ads.

A landing page (in fact, every page) can cause one of five actions:

• Get a visitor to click (to go to another page, on your site or someone else’s).
  
• Get a visitor to buy.
  
• Get a visitor to give permission for you to follow up (by email, phone, etc.). This includes registration, of course.
  
• Get a visitor to tell a friend.
  
• (and the more subtle) Get a visitor to learn something, an action which could even include posting a comment or giving you some sort of feedback.
  

I think that’s the entire list of options.

So, if you build a landing page, and you’re going to invest time and money to get people to visit it, it makes sense to optimize that page to accomplish just one of the things above. Perhaps two, but no more.

When you review a landing page, the thing to ask yourself is, “What does the person who built this page want me to do?” If you can optimize for that, you should. If there are two versions of a landing page and one performs better than the other, use that one! This sounds obvious, but how often are you doing the test? How long does a landing page last in your shop before it gets toppled by a better one? And do you have a different landing page for every single ad, every single offer? Why not?

Landing pages are not wandering generalities. They are specific, measurable offers. You can tell if they’re working or not. You can improve the metrics and make them work better. Landing pages are the new direct marketing, and everyone with a website is a direct marketer.

Chris Fralic reminded me of this piece I wrote for
Ode
.

Great stories succeed because they are able to capture the imagination of large or important audiences.

A great story is true. Not necessarily because it’s factual, but because it’s consistent and authentic. Consumers are too good at sniffing out inconsistencies for a marketer to get away with a story that’s just slapped on.

Great stories make a promise. They promise fun, safety, or a shortcut. The promise needs to be bold and audacious. Either it’s exceptional or it’s not worth listening to.

Great stories are trusted. Trust is the scarcest resource we’ve got left. No one trusts anyone. People don’t trust the beautiful women ordering vodka at the corner bar (they’re getting paid by the liquor company). People don’t trust the spokespeople on commercials (who exactly is Rula Lenska?). And they certainly don’t trust the companies that make pharmaceuticals (Vioxx, apparently, can kill you). As a result, no marketer succeeds in telling a story unless he has earned the credibility to tell that story.

Great stories are subtle. Surprisingly, the fewer details a marketer spells out, the more powerful the story becomes. Talented marketers
understand that allowing people to draw their own conclusions is far more effective than announcing the punch line.

Great stories happen fast. First impressions are far more powerful than we give them credit for.

Great stories don’t always need eight-page color brochures or a face-to-face meeting. Either you are ready to listen or you aren’t.

Great stories don’t appeal to logic, but they often appeal to our senses. Pheromones aren’t a myth. People decide if they like someone after just a sniff.

Great stories are rarely aimed at everyone. Average people are good at ignoring you. Average people have too many different points of view about life, and average people are, by and large, satisfied. If you need to water down your story to appeal to everyone, it will appeal to no one. The most effective stories match the worldview of a tiny audience—and then that tiny audience spreads the story.

Great stories don’t contradict themselves. If your restaurant is in the right location but has the wrong menu, you lose. If your art gallery carries the right artists but your staff is made up of rejects from a used-car lot, you lose. Consumers are clever and they’ll see through your deceit at once.

Most of all, great stories agree with our worldview. The best stories don’t teach people anything new. Instead, the best stories agree with what the audience already believes and makes the members of the audience feel smart and secure when reminded how right they were in the first place.

Greg writes in and wants to know if that’s really true. What if the customer is an amnesiac, a jerk, a difficult blowhard bad-mouther? What if the customer is the sort that wears his L.L. Bean khakis for a year and then sends them back?

In our ultracompetitive markets, how can you possibly have a chance in the face of enormous consumer power?

The answer might surprise you. It’s the unwritten Rule 3 on Stew Leonard’s famous granite rock:

If the customer is wrong, they’re not your customer anymore.

In other words, if it’s not worth making the customer right, fire her.

Successful organizations (and I include churches and political parties on the list) fire the 1% of their constituents that cause 95% of the pain.

Fire them?

Fire them. Politely decline to do business with them. Refer them to your arch-competitors. Take them off the mailing list. Don’t make promises you can’t keep, don’t be rude, just move on.

If you’ve got something worth paying for, you gain power when you refuse to offer it to every single person who is willing to pay you.

In 1988, my book packaging company had about six weeks’ worth of payroll in the bank. Yet we fired our biggest customer, someone who accounted for more than half our revenue. I still believe it was the right thing to do. We ended up happier and more successful, making up the business in a few months’ time.

If you treat a customer like he’s wrong, he’s going to leave and probably tell a bunch of other people. Before you take that route, be direct, straightforward, polite, and firm, and decline to sell to them.

So yes, the customer is always right. And if they’re not, then one way or the other, they’re not your customer anymore.

It’s not always the stories that we tell to prospects and consumers that matter. It’s often the stories we tell ourselves.

In talking with companies that are unhappy with the way they are growing, I find two common themes (and one a little less often):

1. A belief that they
   deserve
   more attention. That their product or their service is so good and so beneficial and so fairly priced that the story they tell and the way they tell it shouldn’t matter. I don’t think this is arrogance. I think it is a natural by-product of hard work and high pressure.
   
2. A lack of authenticity. This is almost the flip side of the first, but, surprisingly, it often shows up at the same time. This is the feeling
   that you don’t have to tell the truth, that it’s “just marketing.” But talk to someone at a company on a mission—Southwest or JetBlue or Acumen Fund—and you’ll hear the same story, told with desire and belief and honesty. These are people on a mission to really do something. Contrast that with someone who wants to know the ROI on a monthly basis from a blog—they’re busy doing the math, not living the story.
   
3. The third theme, which shows up a bit less often, is the marketer who doesn’t believe that she deserves success. This is the self-critical marketer who is being brutally honest—and is frustrated at the state of her market and of her product. The obvious but often difficult solution is to either change the product, change the story, or get a new gig. The wrong but most common response is to just be frustrated.
   

You’ve certainly met people who have all three things taken care of. They approach a marketplace or a consumer with an appropriate amount of humility. They tell a story that is true, that they believe, that they live. And they do it with confidence, knowing that the story they are telling is bound to benefit most of the people who hear it.

The fascinating thing is that all three of these items happen
before
the consumer is even involved. They are internal and they’re under your control, direction, or influence.

Habits are essential to marketing and to profits.

Starbucks in the morning is a habit. So is having your law firm do a trademark search every time you invent a new name. Buying bottled water is a habit, but it didn’t used to be.

Making a habit is a lot easier than breaking one (ask a smoker), and habits often come in surprising ways (ask Jerry, who now has a manicure habit).

If you want to grow, you’re going to have to either get more people to adopt your habit (which might require breaking a different habit) or somehow increase habitual behavior among your happy customers.

Here is the first of three common pitfalls that wreck your marketing efforts:

Lots of marketers (and most of their bosses) like to say, “I’ll know it when I see it.”

That’s why they want to see three or five or twenty executions of an ad. Or ten or fifteen mock-ups of a car or a facade. That’s why marketers put their staff and their freelancers and their agencies through an infinite loop of versioning.

“I’ll know it when I see it.”

Actually, you won’t.

You didn’t know it when you saw the first iPod or the first iteration of Google. You didn’t know it when you were first exposed to email or JetBlue or the Macarena or Britney Spears. No, in fact, you hardly ever “know it.” If you did, you’d be a lot smarter than the rest of us, and we’d all be eagerly watching for your next product.

What
is
true is that we often know success when it smashes us in the face. We didn’t “know it” when Google went public at $85 a share (did you buy shares with your house as collateral?), but we sure knew it when it hit $300.

Perhaps Clive Davis knows a hit song when he hears one, and certainly Giorgio Armani has the magic eye. But, just speaking for myself, I don’t have Clive’s ears or Giorgio’s eyes.

Marketing campaigns are frequently crippled by managers who are sure that they know “it” when they see it—and this isn’t it. Some of my favorite stories are the ones about all the naysayers who tried to kill the stuff that ends up being great. They just didn’t know what it was.

I can count on one hand the number of marketers I know who get to do “Marketing” (with a capital M) every day.