Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (36 page)

Too often, marketers are drawn to the hot market. The problem with the hot market is that if you don’t get it right quickly, you get crushed. Really big ideas tend to get perfected in the Siberian outposts, the little niches that get ignored (until they get really big). It takes a lot of confidence to walk into a hyper-competitive market with something new. Quieter markets may just give you the cover you need to work out what it’s going to take to make those marketers grow.

I just got a case of socks from
littlemissmatched.com
. You may remember them from
Purple Cow
. Hundreds of styles of socks; none match. Three to a sleeve, $10 or so.

Why bother with mismatched socks? Because most people don’t want them. The few that do, love to talk about them. It makes us happy. Ten dollars for 40 days’ worth of joy, repeated over a few years, is a bargain. The obvious market was 12-year-old girls, the sort of people who love having people notice their socks. The company is now branching out into more adult (I use the term advisedly) styles. I hope they don’t
get too popular! (Not that you care, but I’ve been wearing their socks every day for three years or so.)

The key lessons:

• The product
  is
  the marketing.
  
• Choose a hive of people who seek out products like yours and then talk about them.
  
• Be true to what you stand for.
  
• It’s okay not to be serious, especially if you’re selling a want, not a need.
  
• Be patient. The market will find you.
  

Here are principles I think you can’t avoid:

1. Fire the committee. No great website in history has been conceived of by more than three people. Not one. This principle is a deal breaker.
   
2. Change the interaction. What makes great websites great is that they are simultaneously effortless and new at the same time. That means that the site teaches you a new thing or new interaction or new connection, but you know how to use it right away. (Hey, if doing this were easy, everyone would do it.)
   
3. Less. Fewer words, fewer pages, less fine print.
   
4. What works, works. Theory is irrelevant.
   
5. Patience. Some sites test great and work great from the start. (Great if you can find one.) Others need people to use them and adjust to them. At some point, your gut tells you to launch. Then stick with it, despite the critics, as you gain traction.
   
6. Measure. If you’re not improving, if the yield is negative … kill it.
   
7. Insight is good, clever is bad. Many websites say, “look at me.” Your goal ought to be to say, “here’s what you were looking for.”
   
8. If you hire a professional, hire a great one. The best one. Let her do her job. Ten mediocre website consultants working in perfect harmony can’t do the work of one rock star.
   
9. One voice, one vision.
   
10. Don’t settle.
    

I got a ton of email this week about the Radiohead rollout. The short version: Radiohead (a million-album-selling rock band) launched their new album as a pay-what-you-want MP3 combined with an expensive boxed set. This is the sort of thing that I’ve been talking about for seven years and that many unknown bands have been doing for at least that long.

A lot of pundits have jumped in and talked about how this is the next big thing. That the music industry is finally waking up and realizing that they can’t change the world … that the world is changing them.

But that’s not the really useful insight here. The question is: Why did it take so long, and why did we see it from Prince (CD in the newspaper), Madonna ($120 million to leave her label and go to a concert promoter), and Radiohead?

Most industries innovate from both ends:

• The outsiders go first because they have nothing to lose.
  
• The winners go next because they can afford to and they want to stay winners.
  
• It’s the mediocre middle that sits and waits and watches.
  

The mediocre record companies, mediocre A&R guys, and mediocre acts are struggling to stay in place. They’re nervous that it all might fall apart. So they wait. They wait for “proof” that this new idea is going to work, or at least won’t prove fatal. (It’s the impulse to wait that made them mediocre in the first place, of course.)

So, in every industry, the middle waits. And watches. And then, once they realize they can survive the switch (or once they’re persuaded that their current model is truly fading away), they jump in.

The irony, of course, is that by jumping in last, they’re condemning themselves to more mediocrity.

Ben has a post about a beer made by an order of monks in Belgium. These monks, who have taken vows of silence, sell the beer only by appointment, don’t label the bottles, and severely limit the supply they create. As you can imagine for a beer that some call the best in the world, it has quite a cult following.

There are two ingredients to this remarkability. The first, as Ben points out, is the idea of ritual. By changing the way the product is created and distributed, they add a religious and spiritual element to the process (and this element would be present even if they weren’t monks). Second, they’re not trying to sell the most. That’s critical.

When you try to maximize anything, you work to be efficient, to fit in, to appeal to the average person, since that’s where the numbers are. Every time Budweiser makes a decision, it seems to make sense, since they’re trying to sell the most beer. “Most” embraces systems and policies that make sense. But “most” rarely succeeds.

When I was in college, the dean tried to put together an advisory group of students. Nobody he invited joined—it wasn’t worth the time. Then he named it “the Group of 100,” and in just a few days, it was filled. The easiest way to have insiders is to have outsiders.

Credit card companies have made billions by selling a card that others can’t get.

Politicians stand up and talk about their (exclusive) religion, or pit one special-interest group against another.

And of course, the best nightclubs have the biggest velvet ropes and the pickiest doormen.

Limiting the supply of your service, or limiting the quantity of your product, or being aggressive in whom you sell to (and whom you don’t) are all time-tested ways to build a killer brand. Humans like being insiders, and will work hard to create their own imaginary demarcations to demonstrate that they’ve made it inside.

Populism is almost always a hard sell, it seems.

When Tiffany’s lowered prices and quality and tried to reach out to the masses, they almost went bankrupt.

The ’Net seems to be turning some of this upside down. Twitter and Yahoo! Mail and eBay are completely populist. HotorNot, Flickr, and other websites have embraced this idea as well. (Worth noting that Gmail started as a totally insider service, with a limited number of invites, shared person to person.)

It’s interesting to take a second to look at Wikipedia. It started with the most populist, inclusionary point of view of all, but over time, people being people, a hierarchy and an inner circle were created. The exclusion is based on effort and skill, not race or income, but it’s still exclusionary. And at its best, it makes the site work. When it fails, it limits discussion, reinforces small thinking, and enrages the outsiders.

The first thing I’d ask myself before launching a product, a service, or a candidate is “who are we leaving out?” If the answer is “no one,” be prepared for uncharted waters. The future of marketing (at least the big successes) is going to be fueled by those with the guts to embrace the masses. The profits, at least in the short run, may well be found by those that embrace exclusion.

One last thing: while people are delighted to be included (and seem to enjoy excluding others), the benefits they feel are dwarfed by the anger and disappointment of those excluded. It’s something that people remember for their entire lives.

If you run a business that’s “all inclusive” (like a buffet, a resort, a membership organization, or even a consulting practice), you really have only two ways to increase your profits.

The first way
is to figure out how to get more money out of each customer. That means adding a surcharge on the special lobster appetizer or a small extra fee for better service. It means coming up with ways to not actually be “all inclusive,” to give the customers less unless they pay you more.

The goal of this method is to come up with goods and services that have a low marginal cost (your cost of getting or delivering one more)
and a high marginal value (what it’s worth to the customer). So, if you can charge the best members of your club a $500 fee for attending a networking event that costs you only $3 a person to host, you’re going to see a large increase in profit.

The second way
is to figure out how to give your customers more. To be even more “all inclusive” than the competition. To find countless items of low marginal cost and just include them. Why? Because it creates return visits from your existing base and, even better, is a significant investment in word of mouth, the most effective marketing tool available to you.

The Beaches resort in Jamaica prides itself on great people (true) and on being totally all inclusive (not so true). I was there for a few days for a family reunion, and it was pretty clear to me that an MBA on a mission was at work. The nickel-and-diming adds up. He had scoured the place to find ways to charge just a little (or a lot) more as often as possible.

Wi-Fi is a great example. The marginal cost of hosting one more person on a Wi-Fi network is as close to zero as something can be. Charge people more than $10 a day and suddenly you’re making hundreds or thousands of dollars of extra profit. Or promise free scuba, but charge people $70 for a checkout course before you let them dive—low marginal cost, high incremental profit.

I have no doubt that this scheme works in the short run. It might even work out to be a viable marketing strategy in some markets. However, the alternative is worth considering.
Not only do everything you say you’re going to do, but do more.

Offering low-marginal-cost items for free is a shortcut to generating word of mouth, which is a lot cheaper than buying ads.

Turns out that for the last twenty-seven years, every single movie that managed to win the Oscar for best picture was also nominated for best editing.

Great products, amazing services, and stories worth talking about
get edited along the way. Most of the time, the editing makes them pallid, mediocre, and boring. Sometimes, a great editor will push the remarkable stuff. That’s his job.

The easy thing for an editor to do is make things safe. You avoid trouble that way. Alas, it also means you avoid success.

Who’s doing your editing?

When was the last time you excitedly told someone about FedEx?

They’re perfect. The only time we notice them is when they screw up.

And that fancy restaurant with the four-star reviews? They’ve got the fine linen and the coordinated presentation of dishes. It costs hundreds of dollars to eat there, but it’s okay, because they’re perfect.

Which is a problem, because dinner consists of not much except noticing how imperfect they are. The second course came five minutes later than it should have (ten, even!). The salad was really good, but not as perfect as it was last time. And the valet parking … you had to wait in the cold for at least ninety seconds before your car came. What a letdown.

A letdown?

The place is a gift, a positive bit of karma in a world filled with compromise. And all you can do is notice that it’s not perfect.

As the quality of things goes up, and competition increases, it’s so easy to sell people on perfect. But perfect rarely leads to great word of mouth, merely because expectations are so hard to meet.

I think it’s more helpful to focus on texture, on interpersonal interaction, on
interesting.
Interesting is attainable, and interesting is remarkable. Interesting is fresh every day, and interesting leads to word of mouth.

I think our FedEx delivery person is interesting. I like her. I talk to her. And yes, it changes my decision about whom to ship with. I also think that Spicy Mina is an interesting restaurant. So far from perfect, it’s ridiculous. But I talk about it.

In the last few days, I’ve heard from top students at Cornell and other universities about my internship.

It must have been posted in some office or on a website, because each of the applications is just a résumé. No real cover letter, no attempt at self-marketing. Sort of, “here are the facts about me, please put me in the pile.”

This is controversial, but here goes:
I think if you’re remarkable, amazing, or just plain spectacular, you probably shouldn’t have a résumé at all.

Not just for my little internship, but in general. Great people shouldn’t have a résumé.

Here’s why: a résumé is an excuse to reject you. Once you send me your résumé, I can say, “oh, they’re missing this or they’re missing that,” and boom, you’re out.

Having a résumé begs for you to go into that big machine that looks for relevant key words, and begs for you to get a job as a cog in a giant machine. Just more fodder for the corporate behemoth. That might be fine for average folks looking for an average job, but is that what you deserve?

If you don’t have a résumé, what do you have?

How about three extraordinary letters of recommendation from people the employer knows or respects?

Or a sophisticated project they can see or touch?

Or a reputation that precedes you?

Or a blog that is so compelling and insightful that they have no choice but to follow up?

Some say, “well, that’s fine, but I don’t have those.”

Yeah, that’s my point. If you don’t have those, why do you think you are remarkable, amazing, or just plain spectacular? It sounds to me like if you don’t have those, you’ve been brainwashed into acting like you’re sort of ordinary.