Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (23 page)

“How was the hotel?”

“How’s the service at the post office?”

In just about all the decisions we make, we consider the price. A shipper doesn’t expect the same level of service quality from a first-class letter delivery that it does from an overnight international courier service. Of course not.

And yet …

A quick analysis of the top 100 titles on Amazon (movies, books, music, doesn’t matter what) shows
zero
correlation between the price and the reviews. (I didn’t do the math, but you’re welcome to—might be a good science-fair entry.) Try to imagine a similar disconnect if the subject was cars or clothing.

For any other good or service, the value of a free alternative that was any good would be infinite—free airplane tickets, free dinners at the café… When it comes to content, though, we rarely compare the experience with other content at a similar price. We compare it to perfect.

People walking out of the afternoon bargain matinee at the movies don’t cut the film any slack because it was half-price. Critics piling on to a music video on YouTube never mention the fact that HEY IT WAS FREE.
There is no thrift store for content
. Sure, we can get an old movie for ninety-nine cents, but if we hate it, it doesn’t matter how cheap it was. If we’re going to spend time, apparently, it better be perfect, the best there ever was, regardless of price.

This isn’t true for cars, potato chips, air travel, worker’s comp insurance …

Consider people walking out of a concert where tickets might be being scalped for as much as $1,000. That’s $40 or more for each song played—are people considering the price when they’re evaluating the experience? There’s a lot of nuance here … I’m certainly not arguing that expensive is always better.

In fact, I do think it’s probably true that a low price
increases
the negative feedback. That’s because a low price exposes the work to individuals that might not be raving fans.

Free is a valid marketing strategy. In fact, it’s almost impossible for an idea to have mass impact without some sort of free element (TV, radio, Web pages, online videos … they’re all free). At the same time, it’s not clear to me that cheaper content outperforms expensive in many
areas. As the marginal cost of delivering content drops to zero (all digital content meets this definition), I think there are valid marketing reasons to do the opposite of what economists expect.

Free gets you mass. Free, though, isn’t always the price that will help you achieve your goals.

Price is often a signaling mechanism, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the area of content. Free enables your idea to spread, but price signals individuals and often ends up putting your idea in the right place. Mass shouldn’t always be the goal. Impact may matter more.

The hungry person at the all-you-can-eat buffet is happy to take one more item. She doesn’t spend a lot of time comparing this to that or saying “no thank you” or avoiding certain items. If it’s interesting, “sure I’ll try a little bit. I can always come back.”

The guarded person walking down the street avoids eye contact with the homeless person, doesn’t answer a request from the person looking for petition signatures, and certainly doesn’t help a Boy Scout with that old lady.

And this is precisely the dichotomy that every cause, every candidate, and every marketer faces.

Either you’re selling to people who are hungry for what you offer, who are open to hearing what you have to say, who are
fans
…

Or you’re selling to people who are actively protecting themselves, guarding against interruption or a mistake or worse.

How can you possibly have a strategy about what you’re going to do next until you determine which mindset you’re marketing to?

Here’s the key truth: in any given moment, in any given situation, a person is either hungry or guarded. You need to decide which sort of person you’ll be telling your story to, because one approach won’t work on the other type of person.

PS: The mindset can (and does) change as people go through their day. At the bookstore, she might be hungry for a new idea, and just a few minutes later, at the bus stop, she wants to be alone.

Selling is often misunderstood, largely by people who would be a lot more comfortable merely inviting.

If I invite you to a wedding, or a party, or to buy a $500,000 TV ad for $500, there’s no resistance on your part. Either you jump at the chance and say yes, or you have a conflict and say no. It’s not my job to help you overcome your fear of commitment, to help you see the ultimate value or, most of all, to work with you as you persuade yourself and others to do something that might just work.

If the marketing and product development team does a great job, selling is a lot easier—so easy it might be called inviting. The guy at the counter in the Apple store selling the iPad 2 isn’t really selling them at all. Hey, there’s a long line of people with money in their pockets. I’m inviting you to buy this, so if you don’t want it, next!

The real estate broker who says that the house would sell if only he could get below-market pricing and a preapproved mortgage is avoiding his job.

The salesperson’s job: help people overcome their fear so they can commit to something they’ll end up being glad they invested in.

The goal of a marketer ought to be to make it so easy to be a salesperson that you’re merely an inviter. The new marketing is largely about this—creating a scenario where you don’t even need salespeople. (Until you do.)

Selling is a profession. It’s hard work. Ultimately, it’s rewarding, because the thing you’re selling delivers real value to the purchasers, and your job is to counsel them so they can get the benefit.

But please … don’t insist that the hard work be removed from your job to allow you to become an inviter. That’s great work if you can get it, but it’s not a career.

If you’re reading this blog, then the world didn’t end, at least in my time zone.

How does one market the end of the world? After all, you don’t have
a big ad budget. Your “product” is something that has been marketed again and again through the ages and it has
never
worked. There’s significant peer pressure not to buy it.

And yet, every time, people succumb. They sell their belongings, stop paying into their kid’s college fund, and create tension and despair.

Here’s the simple lesson:

Sell a story that some people want to believe
. In fact, sell a story they
already
believe.

The
story
has to be integrated into your product. The iPad, for example, wasn’t something that people were clamoring for, but the story of it, the magic tablet, the universal book, the ticket to the fashion-geek tribe—there was a line out the door for that. The same way that every year, we see a new music sensation, a new fashion superstar. That’s not an accident. That story is just waiting for someone to wear it.

And the
some
part is vital. Not everyone wants to believe in the end of the world, but some people (fortunately, just a few) really do. To reach them, you don’t need much of a hard sell at all.

Too often, marketers take a product and try to invent a campaign. Much more effective is to find a tribe, find a story, and make a product that resonates, one that makes the story work.

That’s the whole thing. A story that resonates and a tribe that’s tight and small and eager.

I hope you can dream up something more productive than the end of the world, though.

In
All Marketers Tell Stories
I argue that most organizations shouldn’t try to change the worldview of the audience they’re marketing to.

“Worldview” is a term popularized by George Lakoff. It’s the set of expectations and biases that color the way each of us see the world (before the marketer ever arrives on the scene). The worldview of a 45-year-old, wine-loving investment banker is very different from that of a fraternity brother. One might see a $100 bottle of burgundy as both a bargain and a must-have, while the other might see the very same bottle of wine as an insane waste of money.

Worldview changes three things:
attention, bias,
and
vernacular
. Attention, because we choose to pay attention to those things that we’ve decided matter. Bias, because our worldview alters the way we filter and interpret what we hear. And vernacular, because words and images resonate differently with people based on their worldview.

It’s extremely expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to change someone’s worldview. The guys at Opus One shouldn’t spend a lot of time marketing expensive wine to fraternities because it’s not efficient. Sell nuts to squirrels; don’t try to persuade dolphins that nuts are delicious.

There’s an exception to this rule, and that’s the necessity of changing worldviews if you want to become a giant brand, a world changer, a marketer for the ages. Starbucks changed the way a significant part of the world thought about spending $4 for a cup of coffee.

Or consider Facebook. It started by selling nuts to squirrels. At first, Facebook was social crack for lonely (all college students are lonely) college students. Over time, the social pressure it created snuck up on and surrounded those with a different inclination, those that would never have signed up on their own. These folks had a worldview that privacy was valuable and that time was better spent elsewhere. But once a sufficient number of their friends and colleagues were online, they felt they had little choice. Converting those people (often against their short-term wishes) is where Facebook’s most recent 300 million users came from.

The interesting truth in both the Starbucks and Facebook examples is that a different worldview was at work. The latecomers to each company were sold a very different story—the story of “you need to be here because all your friends are.” That worked because it matched the latecomers’ worldview, the one that includes an imperative, “don’t be left out.” Different nut, same squirrel.

Not just the first one.

And not all three.

But you really need at least one.

1. Results. If you can offer a return on investment, an engineering solution, more sales, no tax audits, a cute haircut, the fastest rollercoaster, a pristine beach, reliable insurance payouts at the best price, peace of mind, productive consulting, or any other measurable result, this is a great place to start.
   
2. Thrills. More difficult to quantify but often as important, partners and customers respond to heroism. We are amazed and drawn to over-the-top effort, incredible risk taking on our behalf, the blood, sweat, and tears that (rarely) come from a great partner. A smart person working harder on your behalf than you’d be willing to work—that’s pretty compelling.
   
3. Ego. Is it nice to feel important? You bet. When you greet us at the door with a glass of white wine, put our name in the lobby of the hotel, actually treat us better than anyone else does (not just promise it, but do it), it feels great. This approach can get old really fast if you industrialize and systemize it, though.
   

This list explains why the local branch of the big insurance company has trouble growing. It’s hard for them to outdeliver the other guys when it comes to the cost-effectiveness of their policy (#1). They are unsuited from a personality and organizational point of view to do #2. And they just can’t scale the third.

Put just about any business with partners into this matrix and you see how it works. Book publishing, for sure. Hairdressers. Spas. Even real estate.

The Ritz-Carlton is all about #3, ego, right? And on a good day, there’s a perception that the guys at Apple are hell-bent on amazing us yet again, delivering on #2, taking huge career and corporate risks on our behalf. As soon as they stop doing that, the tribe will get bored.

(There’s a variation of ego, #3, that comes from being in good company. This is what gets people to sign up for Davos or to choose ICM as their agent. Your ego is stroked by knowing that only people as cool as you are part of this gig. Sort of the anti-Groucho opportunity. Nice position, if you can get it, because it scales.)

It’s tempting, particularly for a small business, to obsess about the first factor—results—and to spend all its time trying to prove that the
ROI is higher, the brownies are tastier, and the coaching is more effective. You’d be amazed at how far you can go with the other two, though, if you commit to doing them, not merely talking about them.

One of my favorite ideas in the new wave of programming is the notion of a minimal viable product. The thought is that you should spec and build the smallest kernel of your core idea, put it in the world, and see how people react to it, and then improve from there.

For drill bits and other tools, this method makes perfect sense. Put the product out there, get it used, improve it. The definition of “minimal” is obvious.

Often, for software we use in public, this definition leads to failure. Why? Two reasons: