At some point, anything we buy feels like a bargain. Something needs to be worth more than it costs or we wouldn’t buy it.
So, what makes what you offer a bargain?
Is it that you’ve lowered the price, or have you increased the value?
The Method:
Everyone who disagrees with you is right to do so–based on who they are and what they see
Attention is priceless and trust is worth even more
Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem
Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers
Permission is the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal, and relevant messages
The best time to do promotion is before you need it
Price is a story
You can’t be seen until you learn to see
“People like us do things like this” is the definition of culture
There are only a few widespread human needs
Stories are the original human technology
Resilient strategies work better when we repeat our tactics more often
Positioning is a generous act
Be missed when you’re not here
Make something worth talking about
Do work that matters for people who care
–repeat–
“Feels So Good” and “Chuck E’s in Love” were megahits. They transformed the careers of their creators.
But any fan of Mangione or Jones will tell you that it’s far from their best work. Not even close. And yet, that’s what the crowds came to hear.
In a long tail world filled with browsing, it’s easy to confuse “popular” with “great.”
It’s more productive to aim for great.
Not just similar. Cavendish bananas (the usual kind here in the US) are all clones, each from a tree grafted from a tree grafted, all the way back, from the first tree of the species in the UK.
There are problems with this.
Sure, the banana is the most reliable fruit. The banana marketing folks don’t have to worry about uniformity.
But the monoculture is fragile. When the virus that kills this species spreads, they’ll all disappear.
And there’s little room for innovation, for positioning or to be anything more than a commodity provider. It’s hard to tell a story about a better banana when bananas are all so obviously the same.
My best advice is to avoid being a banana farmer.
They seem like they’ll spread to everyone and stick around forever.
This almost never happens.
In order to spread to everyone, they need to move beyond the people who are looking for a new idea. And that happens when existing users have a powerful reason to tell their friends.
Not only that, but the idea has to solve a real problem for people who weren’t sure that there even was a solution to that problem.
And in order to stick around forever, there needs to be a generous lock-in, a reason to not only keep using it, but to not switch to the next thing.
The network effect plus stickiness almost never happens after the idea is launched. It’s about marketing (in the powerful, design sense) not promotion.
Under each post on my blog there’s a button that says RANDOM.
I’ll confess that reading posts I wrote ten or twenty years ago is often a surprise. I wrote each one, but I have no recollection of doing so.
We can no longer expect that others will experience an introduction to us and our work in the order we would like. Instead, we present a mosaic to the world, persistent tiles that add up to a whole.
The first difficult task is to consistently and persistently create one tile after another. Showing up to earn trust, attention and a voice.
And the second is to make sure it all rhymes.
Uncle Ben told Peter Parker, “with great power comes great responsibility.”
Some people, hoping to avoid responsibility, insist that they don’t have great power.
That’s a choice, but it might undermine what we’re capable of.
[Also worth a thought: with great responsibility often comes great power.]
If it takes three to five years for a project to gain traction, it probably doesn’t pay to start a project that the world knows it needs right now.
The challenge is picking something the world will need then. And the hard part is patiently and persistently sticking with it despite the fact that it’s not on everyone’s agenda (yet).
The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The next best time is tomorrow.
Extraordinary organizations have this as their employee handbook. Resilient ones. Human ones that can thrive in the face of automation and AI. Organizations that are built on customer service, hospitality and flexibility.
Of course, this means you’ll need to treat your team with respect and offer them training and dignity. It means you won’t be able to simply write down every single step in the manual, or work as fast as you can to replace people with uncaring software.
The partner of UYBJ is “why?”
If someone asks a team member why they’re doing something, it’s not useful to train them to repeat the policy. The puppetry of “I’m just doing my job” is the opposite of UYBJ. And that means, “because I said so,” while convenient, might not be the best management style.
When a customer asks, “why is it like this?” the professional can answer honestly and with conviction. That’s what it means to use your best judgment.
If you have a job where UYBJ doesn’t apply, it’s worth recognizing that every day you spend there is one where you’ve wasted a chance to learn something new and to take responsibility for what’s next.
Upskilling is the path forward.
Some pits are infinitely deep. Problems that, once addressed, always get worse. N +1. For some folks, the acquisition of money or power are like this. A little leads to a desire for more.
Other problems have known solutions. The tank only holds 8 gallons and then you can move on to filling the next one. A third ice cream cone isn’t as good as the first one. Effort leads to satisfaction.
It pays to decide which sort of hole we’re trying to fill.
