The brilliant John McWade completely understands my new book, and he hasn’t read it yet. In the editor’s column of the new issue of Before And After (print only, but check out freebies at (link: Before & After, the magazine for graphic design) he writes,
“Think of it this way. If I ask to see a picture of your dormmate, what are you going to show me? Not a snapshot of Condoleezza Rice. Not a Picasso. Not some visual concept of yours. What you’ll show me is a real photo, what she actually looks like.
If she’s dressed for a date, she’ll be more presentable than if she just yawned her way out of a sleeping bag, but it’s still her.”
I’d add, “no, of course, it’s not her. It’s a picture of her. And no picture can ever, ever tell the truth.”
April 8, 2005
Until after you look at this site and see what Lori has done to the dog collar.
(warning: double entrendre alert).
High Maintenance Bitch – Creator of the Dog Boa.
PS as far as I can tell, this is a HUGE financial success. Not a hobby, but a multi-million dollar a year business that creates canine joy wherever it goes.
It’s been quite a week for disrespect. And it’s only Thursday.
Half of my incidents have been business-to-business situations. The other half occurred in places where I was just a consumer.
Looking back, I’m really sort of amazed by two things: First, how visceral the feeling is when I feel as though I’ve been disrespected, and second, how easy it would be to avoid.
Let me be clear about a definition here: disrespect is in the eye of the beholder. It occurs when someone feels slighted, or demeaned, or undervalued or lied to. There is no absolute measurement, and, because it’s relative, people will surely disagree about whether or not it has occurred at all.
Doesn’t matter. If you feel disrespected, then you were.
#1. Just spent two hours at the doctor’s office. An entire hour was spent in a little room, waiting. No updates, no apologies, nothing. Even after the doctor finally arrived, for him it was as though the long long wait didn’t even happen. Then, when I nicely asked to talk to the office manager on my way out, she took a phone call instead.
#2. I spent nine months negotiating a deal with a company where I’ve had a long and fruitful relationship. This project was going very, very slowly, and not because I was slowing it down. I’d been patient and flexible and was working it through the system. Two days ago, I got an email. It said, in its entirety, "Unfortunately, this is getting way too complex and not worth the effort for either of us. I know that we keep trying to make this work (for months now!) but it’s not working for either side. So, I think we should let this go and part friends."
There have been four others, just like this. I realized what they all had in common:
All the other person had to do was use a one or two sentences and the whole thing would have been fine. Almost all the instances of disrespect didn’t have to do with the substance of the transaction, it was the style of it. If the person had accepted some responsibility and acknowledged how I might feel, the outcome wasn’t really a big deal.
"I’m really sorry you had to wait. Mr. Wilson’s eardrum exploded and we’re doing everything we can to help him."
"I know you worked long and hard to make this deal work, but we just can’t figure it out. I’m so sorry we wasted your time."
It’s really simple: most of the time, most of your customers will cut you slack if you just acknowledge that the outcome isn’t the one they (think they) deserve.
People have a hard time with this. If someone feels as though they’re treating you technically correctly, they don’t want to apologize. They don’t want to acknowledge the feelings of the other side. This is awfully short-sighted. These are words that are worth thousands and thousands of dollars in lost sales and word of mouth.
"You must feel terrible about what happened. I know I do. If there were any way I could figure out how to make this better for you, I’d do it." When isn’t that a true statement when you’re dealing with an unhappy customer?
April 7, 2005
What’s the point of telling a lie to a captive audience… and one that’s going to discover the lie in just a moment or two?
Dean Jackson sent me this illustrative chart… the result of a flight on United Airlines. Hey, at least he GOT a bag labeled Supreme Nut Mix. Most travelers just get a glass of Sprite.
Every year, millions of Jews celebrate Passover by cleaning out their food cabinets and buying special “kosher for passover” foods. These are items that are made in a rabbi-inspected facility. They can’t contain corn or wheat or various leavening agents (that’s why kosher for passover Coke tastes better–no corn syrup).
This leads to one of my favorite seasonal lies. The supermarkets that sell Passover foods (very high margin, by the way) often line their shelves with doilies or white paper. Now, let’s think about this for a minute–what contamination exactly is the doily protecting the food from? Here’s a sterile, canned item, sitting atop a perforated doily, which is on top of a shelf that is presumably washed every once in a while.
Obviously, it’s not the doily. It’s the story behind the doily. It’s the story of a clean start, of something fresh. The same story that the food itself tells, a story that resonates with the worldview of the person who’s shopping for this.
Most existing organizations don’t spend nearly enough time worrying about this subtle sort of story.
Actually, coming to Minneapolis this Wednesday (the 13th.)
All the details are here. Please contact them for info, since I’m not able to actually dunk or dribble and have no tattoos. TIMBERWOLVES: U.S. Bank Speaker Series.
File this under, "They just don’t get it".
My contact info is pretty easy to find on my site, and as a result I’m getting more and more stuff from PR people. Notice that I’m being really generous and calling it "stuff" instead of "worthless, annoying, time-consuming spam."
The PR folks are used to having to shovel loads and loads of outbound stuff in order to get one or two things picked up. That’s the way it works in traditional media.
But tell me, please, which blogger out of the 10,000,000 is going to run a story with this headline (I’m not making this up):
REFLECTING REACH AND BREADTH OF ITS MEDIA NETWORKS,
THE VENDARE GROUP CHANGES NAME TO VENDARE MEDIA
WOW! Now there’s something that’s interesting and relevant to the people who have a choice about what to read. If your press release is a square peg and all the blogs out there are round holes, that doesn’t mean you should flog it anyway.
Many in the flak community are trying to turn blogs into just another media outlet. They’re not. Instead, they are a terrific home for the remarkable. Make stuff worth talking about first. Then talk about it.
Today’s New York Times tested wild salmon, sold for up to $29 a pound, from eight different fish stores in Manhattan. It reports that less than 25% of all the salmon tested was actually wild. The rest was farm-raised, which goes for half the price when the seller is honest.
That means that the vast majority of people who buy wild salmon in New York get the psychic benefit of believing they are eating something even better than than “ordinary” salmon. But it also means that they’re being deceived out of their money.
PS do you know why farm-raised salmon is such a lovely red? It’s artificially colored. But the color makes us think it’s fresher, and thinking it’s fresher makes us thing it tastes better. So it does.
PPS yes, I know that’s an Atlantic not a Pacific salmon to the left. Just testing your fish skills.
April 6, 2005
One of the very best marketing books of the year comes from the land of LEGO. It’s about storytelling. Find out more here: SIGMA.
It’s very different from but complementary to the new Liars book, out in May. Seth Godin – Liar’s Blog
April 5, 2005
Both of my seminars in April are officially full, no room, etc.
Thanks for everyone who’s coming… I hope to do another one in a month or two.
April 4, 2005
