Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (37 page)

Great jobs, world-class jobs, jobs people kill for … those jobs don’t get filled by people emailing in résumés. Ever.

Whether you run a hotel or a retail store or a parts supply store, things change when you find out the Pope is coming for a visit.

The fresh flowers get delivered, the beds are made a little tighter, and your best staff are waiting out front. Everything is a little bit cleaner and shinier. Maybe a few staff bring in their kids to sing a song or two.

The thing is, everyone enjoys this extra work. It’s fun to stretch a bit. It doesn’t feel quite as much like work when you’re doing something special.

You probably guessed the punch line: The Pope isn’t coming to your place of business this trip. He won’t be reading your blog or calling your customer service line, either. Sorry for the confusion. Go ahead and rent out that room or give away that table you were saving.

But since it’s so much fun, why not do it for someone who isn’t the Pope? Like your next customer?

This is a truth of the Internet: when traffic comes to your site without focused intent, it bounces.

Seventy-five percent of all unfocused visitors leave within three seconds.

Any site, anywhere, anytime: 75% bounce rate within three seconds.

By unfocused, I mean people who visit via Digg or StumbleUpon or even a typical Google search. If your site is spammy or clearly selling something, the number is certainly higher. If you’re getting traffic because you have a clever domain name, it might be even higher. I don’t know of many examples where it is lower.

Big traffic numbers are good for your ego, that’s certain. You can brag about hits, or page views or visits, if you can get away with it. But the bounce rate is still that scary 75%.

So, what should you do about silly traffic?

The tempting thing to do is to obsess over it. If you could convert just 10% of the bouncers, you’d be increasing your conversion rate by
almost a third! (The math: 7.5% is about a third of the 25% who don’t bounce.) There are a million things you can do to focus on this, and almost none of them will show you much improvement.

One other thing you can do is to get hooked on the traffic, focus on building your top-line number. Keep working on sensational controversies or clever images, robust controversies, or other link bait that keeps the silly traffic coming back.

I think it’s more productive to worry about two other things instead.

1. Engage your existing users far more deeply. Increase their participation, their devotion, their interconnection, and their value.
   
2. Turn those existing users into ambassadors, charged with the idea of bringing you traffic that is focused, traffic with intent.
   

“I’m just looking” is no fun for most retailers. Yet they continue to pay high rent for high-traffic locations, and invest time and money in window displays. Very few retailers lament all the traffic that walks by the front door without ever walking in. A long time ago, they realized that the shoppers with focused intent are far more valuable.
Smart retailers work hard to get focused people to walk in the door and to keep the riffraff walking on down the sidewalk.

Your website can do the same thing. In fact, you might want to make it
more
likely that bouncers bounce, not less, but only if those changes increase the results you get from the visitors you truly care about.

Make big promises; overdeliver.

If you can define great marketing in fewer words than that, you win.

“Big promises”: treating people with respect, improving self-esteem, delivering results, contacting as often as you say you will but not more, including side effects in your planning, delivering joy, meeting spec, being on time, connecting people to one another, delivering
consistency, offering value, and on and on. Caring. The stories involved in your promises matter. Those are often what people are buying.

This is the first place where the equation breaks down. Marketers often make big promises that appear to be unrealistic or are delivered in ways that don’t match the worldview of the prospect. Marketers get carried away with themselves and get focused on their greatness and forget to tell a story that people enjoy believing.

And sometimes, they make promises that are too small to get our attention. Boring promises are hardly worth making.

“Overdeliver” means doing more than you said you would, which is the secret to word of mouth.

Here, of course, the pitfall is obvious. You made too big a promise and you did your best, but no, you didn’t overdeliver, not really. You didn’t amaze and delight and yes, stun me with the incredible results of your offering.

Just because it’s only four words doesn’t mean it’s easy!

George Clooney is a movie star. He looks like one. He makes tens of millions of dollars a year, hangs out at Cannes, and has starlets falling at his feet.

Danny DeVito is exactly five feet tall. He was perfectly cast as the Penguin.

Can you imagine the career advice Danny got? The well-meaning people who explained to him (as if he didn’t know) that he didn’t look like George Clooney? That perhaps, maybe, he should consider a job as a personal trainer or short-order cook?

The math, however, tells us something different.

(Number of people resembling George Clooney)/(Number of jobs for people resembling George Clooney) is a much bigger number than the ratio available to Danny. For the math challenged: because everyone in Hollywood is trying to be George, there are a lot more opportunities for the few Dannys willing to show up. Invest in Danny. The edges usually pay off.

Your sales force and your customers may scream that you need to lower your price.

It’s not true.

You need to increase your value. If people don’t want to pay, it’s because you’re not delivering enough value for the money you’re charging.

You’re not selling a commodity unless you want to.

At every turn, Pixar messed up the marketing of their new movie. It has a hard-to-spell name, no furry characters, not nearly enough dialogue (the first 45 minutes are almost silent), no nasty (but ultimately ridiculous) bad guy, hardly any violence, and very little slapstick. WALL•E didn’t get a huge Hollywood PR campaign or even a lot of promotion, it doesn’t feature any hot stars, and as far as I can tell, the merchandising options are quite limited.

Can you imagine the meetings?

Can you imagine the yelling?

Pixar, recently purchased by Disney, could crank out multibillion-dollar confections. They know all the moves; they have the chops to create merchandising powerhouses. And with just one movie a year, Pixar certainly must have been under huge pressure to do just that.

And yet, instead, they made a great movie. A movie for the ages. A film, not 90 minutes of commerce.

The irony, of course, is that they’ll make plenty of money. Bravery often pays off, even if paying off is not your goal.
Especially
if that’s not your goal.

Marketing isn’t always about pandering to the masses and shooting for the quick payoff. Often, the best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing at all.

I want to write a novel. What word processor do you recommend?

Yesterday on the radio, Jimmy Wales was talking about the Wikipedia movement. A caller who identified himself as a strategist at Amnesty International asked: “We’re going to build a website to promote freedom and democracy and human rights. What software should we use?”

Really.

If you want to do something worth doing, you’ll need two things: passion and architecture. The tools will take care of themselves. (Knowledge of tools matters, of course, but it pales in comparison to the other two.)

Sure, picking the wrong tools will really cripple your launch. Picking the wrong software (or the wrong hammer) is a hassle. But nothing great gets built just because you have the right tools.

My approach is to make an assertion about tools early in the process, and then move on to a solid draft of the good stuff. “Given: that we can make a computer do what
xyz.com
makes it do.” Or “given: we can make a piece of titanium do what Frank Gehry makes it do.” Then, go design something, imagine it, spec it, flesh it out, and fall in love with it.
Now
you can ask Jimmy Wales what sort of software to use.

Let’s say your service costs more than the commodity-oriented competition (I hope it does!).

Where do you find repeat business or even new business? How do you make a sale (to another business or to a consumer) when you cost more?

The answer, of course, is in the intangibles. The things that have no price. Things that customers value more than it costs you to provide them.

If you don’t have that, all you can do is beg. And begging is not a scalable strategy.

If you find yourself saying, “the boss won’t let me lower the price,” or
“we’re more expensive, but that’s because our cost structure is higher,” then you’re selling the intangibles too short. The stuff people can’t buy at any price, from anyone else, but that they really value.

Here are some random ways you can embrace some intangibles:

• Call the person
  before
  you get the RFP, before they know they need you. Brainstorm with them about how you can work together to create the thing they need.
  Participation
  is priceless. After all, if all you’re doing is meeting my spec, why exactly should you be rewarded?
  
• You’d be amazed at how much people value
  enthusiasm
  . Genuine, transparent enthusiasm about the project they’re working on. Are you a framer? How do you respond to someone who brings something in to be framed? (Hint: if it involves a tape measure, you’re missing the point.)
  
• Don’t forget
  speed.
  If you are overwhelmingly faster than the alternatives, what’s that worth? For some people, more than you can imagine.
  
• Focus
  and personal service are obvious (but priceless) intangibles.
  
• Generosity
  is remembered for a long time. People remember what you did for them when you didn’t have to do a thing, when you weren’t looking for new business, when it was expensive or costly for you to do it. Did you know that the movie studio bought Robert Downey Jr. a Bentley when
  Iron Man
  hit it big? He didn’t ask; they didn’t want anything (at least right then).
  
• How do you respond when you make an error? This is actually a huge opportunity to deliver an intangible, especially in a business-to-business setting. The last thing a client wants is to have to explain a snafu to her boss.
  
• Peer pressure
  is another silent intangible. What will my friends and colleagues think if I choose you? What if I don’t choose you? Is it fashionable to pay a lot? How hard are you working at establishing a connection across your market so that choosing you is the right thing to do, regardless of the price?
  
• The last one is probably the biggest.
  Hope.
  Do you offer hope for something really big in the future? Maybe just around the corner,
  but perhaps in the long run. What does it look and feel like? Are you drawing a vivid picture?
  

Simple example: IDEO. Check them on each one of these criteria and you’ll see why they have a waiting list.

When providers are stressed or scared or pressured, they instinctively resort to price. It feels real and reliable. It’s a trap, I’m afraid. All of the non-commodity decisions are driven by the intangibles, and your job is to build remarkable ones and tell stories about them.

There was a terrific duo playing live music at the farmer’s market the other day. They were well rehearsed, enthusiastic, and really good. Being a patron of the arts, I bought a CD.

I hated it.

I’ve thought a lot about what turned me off, and I think it’s the curve above.

Faced with the excitement of making a CD and playing with all the knobs and dials, the musicians overproduced the record. They went from being two real guys playing authentic music, live and for free, and became a multitracked quartet in search of a professional sound. And they ended up in the dead zone. Not enough gloss to be slick, too much to be real.

This happens at restaurants all the time. Give me a handmade huarache, and it’s fine if it’s on a paper plate. Or give me something from Thomas Keller. But I have no patience for the stuff in the dead zone, the items that are too slick to be real, but not slick enough to be a marvel.
Who, exactly, wants an industrial tuna sandwich wrapped in plastic wrap?

You can send me a handwritten note (but don’t write it in crayon with words spelled wrong), and I’ll read it. And you can send me a beautifully typeset FedEx package. But if you send me mass-produced junk with a dot matrix printer, out it goes. The dead zone again.

That’s why really-well-done HTML email works, as does unique, hand-typed text email. It’s the banal stuff in the middle that people don’t read. And yet, 95% of what I see is precisely in the dead spot of the middle zone.