Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (17 page)

The folks that want (need!) an iPhone, and those that couldn’t care less. And of course it’s not just Apple and it’s not just phones. It’s every single industry in the world.

You’re not likely to convert one group into the other. What you can do is decide which group you’d like to market to. You can’t do both at the same time, or not particularly well, anyway.

I went to trade in my Jay Porter Prius for an updated Prius today. Well, I meant to do that, but I walked out instead.

I arrived at Westchester Toyota and passed two or three salespeople loitering outside. Inside, there were two or three more, sitting in a line of chairs, waiting for the signal from the headmistress at the counter.

My guess is that even for a thriving brand like Toyota, most of these guys weren’t paid so much. They were “good” salespeople, lifers who showed up, did what they were told, and closed a sale here and there.

It soon became clear that the salesperson who was assigned to me wasn’t “great.” The dealership had messed up: he had no record of my appointment, no file, no history of why I came. But he just punted. He made no effort to engage with me or look me in the eye or empathize with my frustration at the complete waste of time my call yesterday had been. He gave up after about ten seconds, bummed out that he had lost his place in line. So I left.

Driving home, I started to think about the discontinuity in the graph of salespeople. Discontinuities are interesting, because that’s where you can see how a system works. In this case, it’s obvious that a great
salesperson is going to sell far, far more than a good one. Nine women working together can’t have a baby in one month, and ten good salespeople still aren’t going to close the account that a great one could. That’s because it’s not a linear scale. The great ones reach out. They work the phones when they’re not first in line. They understand what a customer wants. They’re not just better than good. They’re playing a totally different game.

My best advice: fire half your sales force. Then give the remainder, the top people, a big raise, and use the money left over to steal the best salespeople you can find from other industries or even from your competition. You’ll end up with fewer salespeople. But all of them will be great.

And the good guys? Have them go work for the competition.

I’ve been listening to Neil Young’s
Live at Massey Hall
and thinking and even crying a bit. It’s an awfully powerful piece of work.

Two lessons for marketers: one small, the other bigger. First, it’s interesting to note how much more excited and open the crowd is to songs they’ve heard before. Even some of the songs that ended up becoming classics got a tepid reaction because they were unknown at the time.

Second, on songs that aren’t working so well, you will hear Neil try harder, play louder, raise his voice and strain to make an impact. It doesn’t work. At all. It’s what you say, most of the time, not how you say it.

Durian is a fruit from Southeast Asia that can be charitably described as smelling like stale baby vomit. It is also revered by millions and served with pride in many Thai and Malaysian households. Most of all, it’s a great way to learn about marketing.

Songpol Somsri, a scientist fascinated by the durian, has spent decades cross-breeding more than 90 varieties of durian and has come up with a stinkless variety. No odor.

This is what most marketers do. They listen to complaints from non-customers (“why don’t you buy from us?”), address them, and wait for the
market to grow. After all, if the people who don’t eat durian don’t eat it because of the smell, then removing the smell ought to dramatically increase the size of your market.

Except this almost never works.

Non-durian eaters don’t have a “durian problem.” They aren’t standing by, fruitless, impatiently waiting for Songpol Somsri to figure out how to make a stinkless durian. Nope. They’ve got cantaloupes and kiwis and all manner of other fruits to keep them busy.

The feedback you get from non-consumers is rarely useful, because the objection they give is the reason they
don’t
buy from you, not the thing that will cause them to affirmatively choose you.

Will stinkless durian revolutionize the marketplace? Possibly. I’ve been wrong before. But if I were a durian farmer,
I’d work hard to make durian stinkier
.

Marketing, I think, can be divided into two eras.

The first, the biggest, the baddest, and the most impressive was the era in which marketers were able to reach the unreachable. Ads could be used to interrupt people who weren’t intending to hear from you. PR could be used to get a story to show up on
Oprah
or in the paper, reaching people who weren’t seeking you out.

Sure, there were exceptions to this model (the Yellow Pages and the classifieds, for example), but generally speaking, the biggest wins for a marketer happened in this arena.

We’re watching it die.

The latest example is the hand-wringing about the loss of the book review sections from major newspapers. Book publicists love these sections, because they provide a way of putting your book in front of people who weren’t looking for it. Oprah is a superstar because she has the power (the right? the expectation?) of regularly putting new ideas in front of people who weren’t looking for that particular thing.

Super Bowl ads? Another example of spending big money to reach the unreachable. This is almost irresistible to marketers.

Notice the almost.

In the last few years, this model has been replaced. Call it permission if you want, or turning the world into the Yellow Pages. The Web is astonishingly bad at reaching the unreachable. Years ago, the home-page banner at Yahoo! was the hottest property on the Web. That’s because lazy marketers could buy it and reach everyone.

Thanks to the Long Tail and to competition and to a billion websites and to busy schedules and selfish consumers, the unreachable are now truly unreachable.

If I want a book review, I’ll go read one. If I want to learn about turntables, I’ll go do that. Mass is still seductive, but mass is now so expensive, marketers are balking at buying it. (Notice how thin
Time
magazine is these days? Nothing compared to
Gourmet
.)

And yet. And yet marketers still start every meeting and every memo with ideas about how to reach the unreachable. It’s not in our nature to do what actually works: start making products, services, and stories that appeal to the reachable. Then do your best to build that group ever larger. Not by yelling at them, but by serving them.

There are four kinds of marketing situations, and the approach to each one is radically different. Yet most of the time, we lump them together as just plain “marketing.”

If you are trying to sell a house or fill a job, you only need to persuade
one person
.

If you want your book to sell a bunch of copies, your restaurant to be filled on Saturday night, or your coaching practice to have a full schedule, you need to sell to a
few
people.

On the other hand, viral bestsellers, killer websites, and essential conferences hit their stride when
most
people in a marketplace have been converted. You can’t get elected president (most years, anyway) without persuading most of the people who vote.

Lastly, when the market is defined right, there are situations in which you need to persuade
all
of the people involved. If you need 51 senators to agree with you on a bill, or if you need the purchasing committee
at a big company to buy your software, then you need a unanimous decision.

This four-way distinction is important for two reasons. First, because you often have a choice. You can choose which approach your venture will take on its way to accomplishing its goals. Gandhi didn’t need
most
of the people to change India; he instead relied on a smaller
few
, but with more passion than most politicians are able to generate.

You could, for example, plan a business that works when almost everyone adopts it (like eBay), or you could alter the business so it works just fine if a much smaller universe of people embrace it (like Threadless). Worth noting that neither business would work if just a few people showed up. 37signals has done a great job of designing Web products that need to be sold to only a
few
people, and then those people do the hard work of getting
everyone
in their organization to use them.

Here’s a quick list of how the four situations differ:

ONE
: You’re a needle, the market is a haystack. Make your needle as sharp as you can, and put it in as many haystacks as you can afford. Alternatively, you’ve already decided on your one (the date for the prom or the perfect job). In that case, throw the haystack out and engage in a custom, one-on-one, patient effort to tell your story to the person who needs to hear it.

A FEW
: Being exceptional matters most. Stand out, don’t fit in. Shun the non-believers.

MOST
: Amplify the excitement of the few and make it easy for them to spread the story to the caring majority.

ALL
: Compromise. You need to be many things to many people, embraced by the passionate but not offensive to the masses. Sooner or later, the issue for the reluctant part of the buyer community is that it becomes more expensive/risky to stand in the way of the group than it is to go along.

Blogs, for now, are almost always about the
few
. Google and Starbucks and the iPod are exciting stories because they’ve moved from the few to the
most
. The most important industry trade shows make huge profits because they’ve transitioned to the
all
.

Choose wisely, and realize that as you succeed, the game will change.

I’ve been working on a video project and thinking about pricing. That led me to this chart, which is more conceptual than accurate.

Let’s go through it, starting with the stick on the left.

FREE stuff spreads. You don’t make any money from the thing you’re giving away, but you do get attention, which is worth as much, or more, in many cases.

Charge even a penny, though, and the drop-off is huge.

Jump over to the middle hump, the one without the question mark.

REASONABLE PRICING puts you right in the middle of the market. With reasonable pricing, you can move just a bit to the left or the right to find the sweet spot, the spot where you can balance money for promotion or shelf space or advertising against keeping your price low. Most of us are familiar with the shape of this curve in our industry. For example, hardcover books go for about $21. At $28, you have more money for co-op and ads, but sales go down a bit. At $19, you can’t promote much, but sales go up a bit.

Move a bit to the left, to the first hump with a question mark.

REALLY LOW PRICING is a whole new world. That’s when something becomes cheap enough to be irresistible to someone who might not consider the category at all. This is what happens when MP3 songs go from
99 cents to 20 cents. This is what happens when you sell a hardcover book for $10. There’s no room for big promotion, at least at first, but as Walmart has shown us, you can get scale at the super low end and have plenty of profit left over to hire fancy PR firms and lobbyists and ad agencies.

The last hump, the one on the right, is usually unexplored.

REALLY HIGH PRICING is the domain of specialty markets and superstars. Elton John gets $300,000 to do a bar mitzvah. John Cleese offers training videos that cost $1,000 for one DVD. This is the land of high service and extreme exclusivity.

What’s interesting about the four choices is that most organizations are familiar with only one. Ask them to try another and they freak out. They don’t even want to consider it.