Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (34 page)

So, the question: Should you put your best song on the free CD?

If it’s your best song, and it’s free, then no one will pay to get it from
iTunes. And if it’s the best song on the album, maybe no one will buy the album since they already have the song.

It’s easy to argue that you should hold back the best song, make people pay for that.

Until you realize that the >>> button on my CD player works great.

So, eight beats into your “not really my best because, hey, it’s free” song, I skip you, and you are gone forever.

Hint: this riff applies to a lot more than just the music business.

I was giving a speech at a hotel in Philly this week and found myself completely engulfed in a sea of black suits. Literally hundreds of eager-beaver college kids, all milling about, preparing themselves for a competition.
Sife.org
runs a nationwide tournament where students compete with business and community projects.

The thing is: there’s no rule that says you have to wear a black suit when you present.

Everyone is so focused on not messing up, on not blowing it, on
not standing out
that they all blend together instead. I talked to a few of the competitors. Amazing kids. Focused, smart, dedicated. I wish, though, that they could realize (before it’s too late) that standing out is better than being invisible.

Here’s a great Walt Disney phrase, new to me, which is similar to edgecraft:

Plussing.

Taking your work a little farther. Going closer to an edge, whichever edge.

Is there anything you can’t
plus
? Anything you can’t make simpler, more luxurious, cheaper, more extreme? Anything you can’t make more remarkable?

The trade-off, of course, is in the time and money it takes.

But not really. I was tricking you. The trade-off is in the perceived
risk it takes. Pushing your team a little harder in one direction means you’re going away from the center, abandoning “everyone” to really appeal to “someone.” And that’s the secret of edgecrafting. Plussing yourself all the way to the edge, whatever that edge is.

My health club has a huge sign designed to go by the heavily traveled railroad tracks next to my office.

EXCLUSIVE CHARTER MEMBERSHIPS AVAILABLE.

Well, of course they’re not that exclusive, given that they’re on a billboard.

And does it matter that they’re “charter”?

Of course they’re memberships. All health clubs have memberships.

Which leaves “available,” and the fact that they’ve got a sign pretty much makes that clear.

It’s like the apocryphal story about the fish store. “Well, of course the fish is fresh. You’re not going to sell me old fish, are you?” and “Of course it’s ‘here.’ Where else would you be selling the fish?” and finally, “We know it’s fish. We can smell it!”

The worst thing you can do is be boring and vague.

The second worst thing you can do is be boring and verbose and obvious.

The first goal of copy is to get you to read more copy.

The second goal is to tell a story that spreads.

And then, finally, to have that story get people to take action.

You should go mattress shopping.

I did, today.

I admit, I don’t think I’ve ever been mattress shopping before. What an astonishing experience. If you don’t believe the “storytelling” riffs in
All Marketers Are Liars
, this will convert you. It’s an entire room filled
with virtually identical objects, varying in price by as much as 2,000%. And while you can lie down on any of them, lying down on a mattress is totally different from sleeping on one over a decade.

All you can buy is the story.

However, this isn’t a post about the story. It’s a post about the phone on the Sleepy’s salesman’s desk. Our sales guy, who was outstanding by the way, explained that all 400 stores in the chain are owned by one guy, and that the instructions are clear: if there’s anything in the store, anything important, that’s broken and not fixed within 72 hours (including policies, prices, inventory, whatever), his job is to pick up the phone and dial 300.

And Harry Acker, the owner, the billionaire, answers. “This is Harry.” And you tell him and he fixes it.

I love that.

Even better … every once in a while, the phone rings. It’s Harry. “What’s up?” he asks. And if you tell him good news, he hangs up on you.

I think I’m glad I don’t have Harry’s job. But I was (amazingly, surprisingly, shockingly) glad I shopped there today.

John writes in and wants to know why I don’t think much of focus groups.

A properly run focus group is great. The purpose? To help you focus.

Not to find out if an idea is any good. Not to get the data you need to sell your boss on an idea.

No!

Focus groups are very bad at that. Groupthink is a problem, for one. Second, you’ve got a weird cross-section of largely self-selected people, the kind of people willing to sit in a room with bad lighting to make a few bucks.

What focus groups can do for you is give you a visceral, personal, unscientific reaction to little brainstorms. They can help you push something further and further to see what grabs people. But the goal isn’t to do a vote or a census. Any time your focus group results include percentages, you’ve wasted an afternoon.

(Not a typo.)

Want to guess what these musical acts have in common?

The Rolling Stones

The Eagles

Elton John

U2

Paul McCartney

They each made more than $50 million last year, according to
Forbes
. They accounted for 40% of the top 10 acts. The long trail is what happened.

Same with products like Quicken, websites like eBay, and chefs like Wolfgang Puck.

We’re so busy celebrating the hit of the moment that we forget that the real profit often comes from the long trail.

It’s easy to persuade yourself to shortchange the design of a product or your investment in its engineering, or to manipulate the launch to maximize the short-term box office appeal of opening weekend. But the long trail proves you wrong.

The Web compounds long-trail thinking. A website might spike with short-term traffic hits, but a great website builds on its traffic, rises in its search rankings, and continues to bring in traffic, year after year.

The long trail explains why so many unprofitable movies turn a profit when the DVD comes out.
The Shawshank Redemption
got seven Academy Award nominations when it was released but disappointed at the box office. Now, after more than 1.3 million reviews at NetFlix, it is one of the most enduring DVD hits ever.

The long trail is a reminder to invest like your product might just be around in ten years.

I was talking with a colleague today about the magic of Trader Joe’s. Here’s how they make billions:

1. They target consumers who care a great deal about what they buy at the supermarket. As a result, their customers are more loyal and, more important, are willing to drive farther to get there. This means that Trader Joe’s can have smaller, lower-rent locations (and fewer of them), which drives up sales per square foot and profits.
   
2. These customers are big mouths. They sneeze. When they serve something from Trader’s they brag about, they tell the story of the store. This drives down advertising costs.
   
3. Most of what they sell is private label. Now that they have scale, they are able to negotiate great prices from their suppliers, and more important, encourage/force their suppliers to make unique items, or organic foods, or foods of higher quality for the money. All of this is a virtuous cycle. The key mantra is that
   Trader’s finds foods for its customers, NOT customers for its foods
   .
   

I think these three steps are viable for a wide range of businesses and sectors. One example to stretch your thinking: the TED conference. It’s in a remote location, one that’s probably a bit cheaper than some other locations. People who care are happy to schlep there. And they love to talk about it. And because the audience is so focused, the speakers come for free, further enhancing the cycle. If it works for supermarkets and high-end business conferences, where else does it work?

People don’t believe what you tell them.

They rarely believe what you show them.

They often believe what their friends tell them.

They always believe what they tell themselves.

It’s expected that you’ll tip the masseuse (masseur) at the spa. But not the acupuncturist down the street.

It’s expected that the CEO of a public company will hire a hotshot consultant to help her do her job. The CFO gets to do that, too. But not the receptionist.

It’s expected that coffee in a fancy restaurant will cost more than it does at a café.

It’s expected that Wi-Fi in a business hotel ought to be free. But it didn’t used to be that way.

It’s expected that the TV in the gym will be on, always. It’s expected, though, that you’ll wear headphones to listen to Marley.

It’s expected that you take a family vacation to Florida. It’s not expected, though, to take the kids to Topeka.

It’s expected that a child-care facility will run ads with lots of rainbows. A Freudian psychiatrist, on the other hand, is expected not to advertise at all.

Faced with expectations, you’ve got three really big options:

1. Embrace
   expectations and build a product or service that fits what people are looking for. No change of behavior necessary. Be in the right place at the right time with the right thing priced appropriately, and hope the competition doesn’t show up.
   
2. Change
   the expectations. No one expected to be able to buy digital music for 99 cents a song and have it show up on their iPod. Now, that’s the default expectation in some communities. Changing an expectation builds a huge barrier to those that might follow. Change is time consuming and expensive and rarely happens on schedule.
   
3. Defy
   the expectations. Do the unexpected. This is tempting but often leads to nothing but noise.
   

Before you start marketing something, it helps to be able to describe which combination of the three you’re setting out to accomplish.

I was talking with someone the other night, and he said, “I was one of the first to use Wikipedia.” When pressed, he confirmed, “Right at the beginning.”

He’s 13.

It’s pretty obvious that he wasn’t one of the first to use Wikipedia. He was one of the first people he knew who had used Wikipedia. Big difference.

Nope.

Same thing.

People make their own realities. If Bill thought he was first, then in his mind, he was. When he started using it, it began to exist. When he stops going back, it will disappear.

Every person who encounters your organization for the first time comes with beginner’s mind. She knows nothing about yesterday or how hard you worked or your financing or what it took to build it. She’s here now, she’s first, let’s go.

Every month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks “mass layoffs.” That’s the term for more than 50 people losing their jobs at once. In August of this year, the total number of people hit by a mass layoff was 127,944. The number has been more than 100,000 every month except for one in the last decade.

And that doesn’t count small companies, smaller layoffs, nonprofits, and other ventures that don’t show up on the radar. The actual number has to be at least ten times as big—at least a million a month is my guess.

Compare that to the tiny number of people who get fired for attempting to do something great.

Sure, Carly got fired. But thousands at HP got laid off. She lost her job for challenging the status quo. They got canned for embracing it.

Sure, that crazy copywriter on the 11th floor got fired for attempting a viral blog-based campaign that backfired, but it’s nothing compared to
the entire department that lost their jobs because there just wasn’t enough business.

At least once a day, I get mail from people worrying that if they are too remarkable, too edgy, too willing to cause change and growth, they’re risking getting fired. I almost never get mail from people who figure that if they keep doing the same boring thing day in and day out at their fading company, they’re going to lose their jobs in a layoff.

50 ad agencies lose accounts for being boring, static, and unprofitable, for every one agency that gets fired for being remarkable.

50 churchgoers switch to a new congregation because of a boring or uncaring leader, for every one who leaves because she was offended by a new way of thinking.

50 employees lose their jobs because the business just faded away, for every one who is singled out and fired for violating a silly policy and taking care of a customer first.

50 readers stop visiting your blog (or your site or your magazine or your TV show) because you’re stuck in a rut and scared, for every one who leaves because you have the guts to change the format or challenge the conventional wisdom.

50:1.

Just under the wire, L. Frank Baum’s heirs have no copyright protection on
The Wizard of Oz
. As a result, there are Broadway musicals, concordances, prequels, sequels, and more. All of which creates a rich, emotional universe (and makes the copyrighted movie even more valuable).

Most of us remember the mythology stories they taught us in school (Zeus and Thor and the rest of the comic-like heroes). Myths allow us to project ourselves into their stories, to imagine interactions that never took place, to take what’s important to us and live it out through the myths.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of entertainment mythological brands. James Bond and Barbie, for example.