Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (18 page)

I think real growth can come when you get out of your comfort hump and create a blend. Understanding how to live in multiple worlds and to balance them isn’t obvious, but the opportunities are worth it. Ben Zander’s brilliant book,
The Art of Possibility,
costs $10.20 at Amazon in hardcover. The DVD costs $1,495.00.

If he wanted to sell the DVD in large quantities, he’d need to price it differently and sell it in a different channel. But if he wants to work with trainers and the distributors who sell to them, he’s exactly in the center of that third hump.

Careful about the Y axis (volume). Units aren’t always the goal (that’s why I said this chart was conceptual). FREE gets you the most units, REALLY EXPENSIVE the least. But depending on your objectives, units might not be the point.

It’s not important to know the right answer, which hump to choose, because there isn’t one. It’s essential to know the question, because there are four distinct choices, and not choosing is still choosing.

The opposite of up is down.

The opposite of in is out.

Those two are easy. They are one-dimensional.

The opposite of Steve Jobs is Bill Gates.

Sort of. That’s because Bill and Steve have a lot in common (outsize
personalities, many Google matches, successful tech companies). But it’s useful to consider them as opposites because we learn a lot about their approaches, personalities, and yes, brands, by looking at the inverse.

The opposite of Starbucks is Dunkin’ Donuts.

Not an independent coffee shop, and not coffee at home.

On the other hand, the opposite of Dunkin’ Donuts is not Starbucks. The opposite is “not having coffee out.”

That’s because when someone considers getting their morning coffee, the choice is usually home or Dunkin’. That person doesn’t have Starbucks as part of their choice set. Defining your brand in this way makes it easier to ignore the irrelevant competition and easier to figure out what you are (and aren’t).

Bill Clinton and John Edwards aren’t the opposite of Rush Limbaugh. Al Franken is.

The BlackBerry isn’t the opposite of the iPhone. A plain-Jane Motorola phone is. Apple understands this. BlackBerry doesn’t seem to.

The opposite of the Food Network is hours spent poring over cookbooks at a local independent bookstore. Or perhaps it’s
Good Housekeeping
magazine. Or
Gourmet
.

One of the hardest things to do is invent a brand with no opposite. You don’t have an anchor to play against.

Does your team agree on who your opposite is?

Darwin pointed out that if you take one pair of breeding elephants and make some conservative estimates about their fertility, you would have more than 15 million elephants in less than 500 years (if none of them died an early death).

It’s pretty clear it doesn’t work that way. Perfect viral growth, even slow viral growth, rarely happens. If it did, we’d have an elephant problem.

The same thing happens with your idea. If one person told four and the cycle repeated itself for a few generations, everyone would know about it. But they don’t. It tails off. One person often tells zero. Or people hear about it but forget.

Real viral growth comes from one of a few likely paths:

• Someone sneezes your idea with amplification. They show up on
  Oprah
  , or you have $100 million to spend on ads. Great work if you can get it.
  
• The idea spreads with fidelity. One person really does tell four, and there’s not a lot of leakage. Starbucks worked this way, largely because the chain grew at just the right rate and kept its character as it did.
  
• The idea is particularly “viral” (using a popular understanding of the word). One typical person doesn’t tell four; she tells 400. This is the blogger effect—lots of small amplifiers, working in unison.
  
• The idea lives a very long time and spreads slowly. In our rapid-fire world, this one is pretty rare.
  

It’s possible to combine some of these tactics. When a political candidate starts out, for example, it’s almost certainly with a grassroots approach, but then, perhaps, once enthusiasm picks up, he or she shows up on TV. You can organize around this and plan for it, but you certainly can’t guarantee it.

Here’s the big news: it doesn’t matter much how many elephants you start with. In other words, big launches don’t necessarily scale. What matters is how fertile your elephants are (number of babies per generation) and how long they live. If Darwin’s elephants manage to squeeze in just one more generation, they end up with 30 million.

What happens after I click on your Google ad?

I was thinking about great Squidoo pages (lenses) yesterday, and realized that many of them, along with many blogs, have the same goal: give someone a handle, a sense of meaning—context—so they can go ahead and take action.

You have a blog to turn a browser into a raging fan for your candidate or your product.

You have a lens designed to teach people what they need to know to confidently sign up for your tour.

You have a landing page to convert Google AdWords clickers into buyers.

With that in mind, here are a few tactical tips that might help if that’s what you’re trying to do online:

1. Use numbers and bullets.
   People don’t read online, they scan.
   
2. Give people a place to go.
   The Web is incredibly efficient when it’s a road, much less so when it’s a dead end. The best meaning-building delivers the reader to a new place, in context.
   
3. Use pictures.
   Back to the scanning thing. Pictures, properly chosen, communicate quality as well as large amounts of information. I’m not talking about product shots (which are important) as much as about pictures that tell a story.
   
4. Have an opinion.
   Guides that bend over backward to be fair rarely impart information. Context is built more quickly if people know where you stand and can plug that into their previous point of view. If you’re giving meaning, you’re also making an argument—one in favor of your point of view.
   
5. Don’t be afraid to compare.
   Saying this is better than that helps me understand if I already have an understanding of that.
   
6. It’s a brick wall, not a balloon.
   This is a hard one for many people. We try to build something quickly and get it totally complete all in one go. If we can’t, we get frustrated and give up. But great blogs and lenses are built brick by brick, a little at a time. You learn what works and do it more.
   
7. It’s okay to be long, if you’re chunky.
   The great lesson of direct mail was that long letters always do better than short ones. That’s because once you’ve sold me, I’ll stop reading. But if I’m not sold and I get to the end, you lose. The Web is infinitely expandable. So go ahead and tell your story.
   

I got a note from a college student last week, explaining that his professor told him he couldn’t use the term “viral marketing” in a paper. It doesn’t exist; apparently, it’s just a newfangled form of word of mouth.

I found the interaction fascinating (“I’m not certain what benefit is gained by arguing with an instructor” is my favorite quote from his teacher), but I got to thinking about whether the instructor had a point.

“Viral marketing” shows up 2,000,000 times in Google; “ideavirus” shows up 200,000 times. Of course, you could argue that just because millions of people are using a term doesn’t make it legitimate (though you’d be wrong).

Anyway …

Viral marketing [does not equal] word of mouth.
Here’s why:

Word of mouth is a decaying function. A marketer does something, and a consumer tells five or ten friends. And that’s it. Word of mouth amplifies the marketing action and then fades, usually quickly. A lousy flight on United Airlines is word of mouth. A great meal at Momofuku is word of mouth.

Viral marketing is a compounding function. A marketer does something, and then a consumer tells five or ten people. Then they tell five or ten people. And it repeats. And grows and grows. Like a virus spreading through a population. The marketer doesn’t have to actually do anything else. (Marketers can help by making it easier for the word to spread, but in the classic examples, the marketer is out of the loop.) The
Mona Lisa
is an ideavirus.

This distinction is vital.

For one thing, it means that constant harassment of the population doesn’t increase the chances of something’s becoming viral. It means that most organizations should realize that they have a better chance with word of mouth (more likely to occur, more manageable, more flexible) and focus on that. And it means, most of all, that viral marketing is like winning the lottery, and if you’ve got a shot at an ideavirus, you might as well over-invest and do whatever it takes to create something virus-worthy.

And yes, I happen to think that arguing with the instructor is a very good idea.

Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal, and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.

It recognizes the new power of the best consumers to ignore marketing. It realizes that treating people with respect is the best way to earn their attention.

“Pay attention” is a key phrase here, because permission marketers understand that when someone chooses to pay attention, they are actually paying you with something precious. And there’s no way they can get their attention back if they change their mind. Attention becomes an important asset, something to be valued, not wasted.

Real permission is different from presumed or legalistic permission. Just because you somehow get my email address doesn’t mean you have permission. Just because I don’t complain doesn’t mean you have permission. Just because it’s in the fine print of your privacy policy doesn’t mean it’s permission, either.

Real permission works like this: If you stop showing up, people complain; they ask where you went.

I got a note from a Daily Candy reader the other day. He was upset because for three days in a row, his Daily Candy newsletter hadn’t come. That’s permission.

Permission is like dating. You don’t start by asking for the sale at the first impression. You earn the right, over time, bit by bit.

One of the key drivers of permission marketing, in addition to the scarcity of attention, is the extraordinarily low cost of dripping to people who want to hear from you. RSS and email and other techniques mean that you don’t have to worry about stamps or network ad buys every time you have something to say. Home delivery is the milkman’s revenge—it’s the essence of permission.

Permission doesn’t have to be formal, but it has to be obvious. My friend has permission to call me if he needs to borrow five dollars, but the person you meet at a trade show has no such ability to pitch you his entire résumé, even though he paid to get in.

Subscriptions are overt acts of permission. That’s why home-delivery
newspaper readers are so valuable, and why magazine subscribers are worth more than readers who buy the magazine at a newsstand.

In order to get permission, you make a promise. You say, “I will do x, y, and z; I hope you will give me permission by listening.” And then—this is the hard part—that’s all you do. You don’t assume you can do more. You don’t sell the list or rent the list or demand more attention. You can promise a newsletter and talk to me for years, you can promise a daily RSS feed and talk to me every three minutes, or you can promise a sales pitch every day (the way Woot does). But the promise is the promise until both sides agree to change it. You don’t assume that just because you’re running for president or coming to the end of the quarter or launching a new product that you have the right to break the deal. You don’t.

Permission doesn’t have to be a one-way broadcast medium. The Internet means you can treat different people differently, and it demands that you figure out how to let your permission base choose what they hear and in what format.

When I launched my book that coined this phrase nine years ago, I offered people a third of the book for free in exchange for an email address. And I never, ever did anything with those addresses again. That wasn’t part of the deal. No follow-ups, no new products. A deal’s a deal.

If it sounds like you need humility and patience to do permission marketing, you’re right. That’s why so few companies do it properly. The best shortcut, in this case, is no shortcut at all.

Where does love come from? Brand love?

The TSA is in the fear business. Every time they get you to take off your shoes, they’re using fear (of the unknown or perhaps of missing your plane) to get you to take action.

Chanel is in the hope business. How else to get you to spend $5,000 a gallon for perfume?

Hope can be something as trivial as convenience. I hope that this smaller size of yogurt will save me time or get a smile out of my teenager.

And love? Love gets you to support a candidate even when he screws up or changes his mind on a position or disagrees with you on another one. Love incites you to protest when they change the formula for Coke, or to cry out in delight when you see someone at the market wearing a Google T-shirt.

People take action (mostly) based on one of three emotions:

Fear

Hope

Love

Every successful marketer (including politicians) takes advantage of at least one of these basic needs.

Forbes
magazine, for example, is for people who hope to make more money.

Rudy Giuliani was the fear candidate. He tried to turn fear into love but failed.

Few products or services succeed out of love. People are too selfish for an emotion that selfless, most of the time.

It’s interesting to think about the way certain categories gravitate to various emotions. Doctors selling checkups, of course, are in the fear business (while oncologists certainly sell hope). Restaurants have had a hard time selling fear (healthy places don’t do so well). Singles bars certainly thrive on selling hope.