Wendy’s is using a legal loophole to avoid posting the calorie content of its food on the menus in their New York stores. Perhaps they’re hoping that people won’t realize that eating every meal there is going to make them fat.
Porsche ran a huge ad in today’s New York Times for the Cayenne. It contains every imaginable stat, including the size of the brake rotors. Oh, they left one stat out: mileage. Perhaps they’re hoping that people wealthy enough to buy a $60,000 SUV won’t notice how much gas they’re using…
The thing is: if you’re going to work this hard to hide information that’s likely to be quite important to some users, it’s going to be very hard to grow. One way or the other, the market finds out.
March 3, 2007
I was doing email permission marketing long before Al Gore even had a chance to invent the Internet. In the late 1990s, email was an incredibly powerful tool. In fact, it wasn’t unusual to get a 50% response rate to a well-created piece of mail delivered with permission to the right person at the right time.
Which is why I stopped. Without a large team, I just couldn’t do justice to the responses an email would generate. If 100 or 1,000 people take the time to write to me, I figure I ought to be able to take the time to write back.
So, with some trepidation, I’m trying an experiment. This blog is equipped with a feature that allows you to be updated by email. Once a week until my book comes out in May, I’ll be posting on this site. I’ll be writing about:
- What’s the book’s about
- How to win a free autographed copy
- A new sort of speaking tour
- How I’m marketing the book
- How the book can work for your organization
Feel free to sign up for the email alerts or for the RSS feed. Or not.
I just hope you’ll try to avoid the temptation to hit ‘reply’ to every post! Or at least forgive me if I don’t get back to you right away. The last thing I want to do is waste your time or abuse your trust.
And thanks for reading.
(Amazon and BN both have the book listing up).
March 2, 2007
Big markets look sexy. Big markets are a problem.
Sitting at the vet today, I saw a brochure for an injectable chip that makes it easier to identify a lost dog. No doubt, the investor meetings all started with, "Well, there’s a hundred million dogs in the United States, and if we just make a dollar annual profit on each one…"
It sounds reasonable. It’s not.
The problem with huge markets is the same problem you’d have playing squash or raquetball on a court that’s too big. The ball doesn’t have a wall to bounce off of. Huge horizontal markets have no echo chamber, no niches, no easy entry points. To make a system like this work, everyone has to agree on the technology and then there has to be a huge push to get millions of people to make the same decision at about the same time. It might work, but it’s awfully expensive.
Small markets aren’t as sexy, but they’re actually a better place to start.
Following a long tradition of slapping the latest buzzword on everything and anything: hybrid golf clubs.
Hybrid often means ‘compromise’, ‘blend’ and ‘please everyone’. Dangerous territory if you’re not careful.
[My golfing friends point out that the hybrid club came before the hybrid car. Noted. My point remains the same… buzzwords half a short half life.]
"Embrace your base."
"Blog about blogging."
If you want to get off to a great start in the primaries, be Dennis Kucinic or Sam Brownback. Someone the noisy people like to talk about.
If you want traffic to your blog, blog about blogging, because bloggers are noisy.
Noisy: as in being willing to raise your voice in defense (or in opposition) to an idea, a product or a person.
The noisy people shun the non-believers. (This video will never be fully scraped off your consciousness after you watch it, I promise). They (okay, we, cause I’m a noisy person too) are drawn to stuff at the edges and we like to talk about it. When I heard two kids at the middle school acting out the non-believers part of the Candy Mountain video, I knew it had arrived.
And I also knew that it was unlikely to go much further. The disappointment of the noisy people is this: Jon Stewart and Peet’s Coffee and the Mac almost never make it across the chasm, almost never become the choice of the masses. The parts of the story that make us delighted to talk about it, the parts of the story that make it easy to spread, rarely work for the masses.
So, if you want to reach the masses, you’ll need to realize that changing your story (but not your essence) is part of the deal. It’ll disappoint your noisy people, no doubt about it. But if you’re authentic in the core of what you offer, they’ll forgive you. The challenge is in creating a product or service or platform that can sustain both stories.
March 1, 2007
Not sure how often communication like this actually occurs: Note From Boss To Employees.
