For six years, if you wanted an electric car, you’d need to pay extra. It cost more than the regular kind.
Of course, if you decided to buy one, you weren’t paying extra. You were buying sustainability, community awareness, cachet, status, safety, quiet and the feeling of being an early adopter.
People never pay extra.
They buy something they want at a price that feels fair to them.
In the next few years, electric cars are actually going to be cheaper than their more-polluting brethren. And that means that anyone who wants to charge a premium is going to have to offer quality, service, design and a feeling that it’s worth whatever is being charged.
It’s very difficult to make a living selling something that doesn’t, by some apparent measure, cost extra.
The hard work is in keeping the promise that your extra isn’t extra at all.
Industries are often held together by unspoken hierarchies, signposts on the road to achievement.
In the fancy parts of the book business, it’s not profit. Editors are often unaware of which books are truly profitable. They keep track of cultural impact, literary respect, the idea of a book being ‘well published’ and the hard-to-measure currency of ‘important’.
The Kindle and the long tail changed that, with new entrants keeping track of something else.
The “A” list movies, on the other hand, have an entire circle of status that’s organized around Academy Awards, famous directors and a pecking order that would be invisible to many of us.
Netflix and Youtube changed that as well, with new entrants keeping track of shorter cycles and different metrics.
In Silicon Valley, which has been an engine of our future for thirty years, technical prowess and elegance were the key drivers.
Now, the focus has shifted to simplicity, memes and momentary cultural currency in search of big numbers. The new signposts are about cultural ubiquity, IPOs, quick flips and harvesting data.
Apps instead of programs, user interfaces that need no instructions and don’t really reward a lot of effort, and output that’s driven by both. Like a roach motel, the goal is to make it seductive and hard to escape.
The hierarchies of status drive decisions far more than we realize. We often architect the systems that create our culture without paying attention to why.
Skepticism is a virtue. It requires a willingness to question conventional wisdom, and the guts to accept something after you discover that it’s actually true.
Denialism, on the other hand, is a willful rejection of reality. It’s safe and easy, and unproductive. Because there’s no room to change your mind.
To be a generous skeptic, we need to state in advance specifically what it would take for us to engage with the proposed insight, and then do so after our standards are met.
This is hard work. It’s not easy to change one’s mind. Difficult but worth it. Big shifts in perception are rare and it’s not something we look forward to.
Skeptics are a key to the scientific method, organizational design and even investing. We sign up to doubt and question and push, and then we become productive contributors by embracing the new tools and results.
Often, people in denial pretend to be skeptics. It feels more powerful than acknowledging that we’re simply avoiding change.
Of course you’re interesting. There’s something about what you’ve done, what you say, how you show up in the world that’s worthy of interest.
But that doesn’t mean that people are interested.
We each have a noise in our heads, an agenda and something urgent that’s grabbing our attention. And so, the amount of interest you receive (or don’t receive) has little to do with how interesting you are and a lot to do with how the people you seek to serve have organized their priorities long before you got there.
We can build slack into our lives. We can create cycles so that we don’t need to dance with a crisis around time on a regular basis.
If there’s another train after this one, you don’t have to fret.
If the deadline for the project is tomorrow, not today, you don’t have to sweat it.
If the guests aren’t arriving for an hour…
Sometimes, we choose to use the urgent crisis as fuel. We set up our lives around creating these deadlines, reminding ourselves that if we cross that line, we’re dead.
And then we allow the world to do it to us. To create urgencies simply to take our attention and focus.
Productivity is a measure of the value of what we ship in the time we’ve got to invest. It’s not measured in drama.
It’s possible to do great work without putting everything in jeopardy.
Marketers raise expectations in order to get someone to sign up and try a product and service.
And (hopefully) there’s satisfaction, delight and remarkability once the organization actually delivers on what you promised.
In between, the trough.
You spend $400 per customer on rent and architecture and web design.
Perhaps it’s $200 per new customer on podcast ads or salespeople.
All of these expenses happen long before you deliver.
And then, you confront the new customer with a surly receptionist, a website that is hard to understand, a wait for a table, a mismatch in the professional you assign, slow customer service, packaging that is difficult to open, fine print that suddenly becomes obnoxious and expectations that aren’t met.
In this trough, we have a few options:
The first, the most common, is to try to ignore it. Let em seethe. Bet on time and momentum and sunk costs to get them over the hump.
The second, a variation of this, is to spend as little as you can to address the problem of the trough. Acknowledge the problem, sure, but throw boilerplate and your lowest cost (least trained, least respected) people at the problem.
The third, the intelligent, difficult choice, is to invest in onboarding.
At $50 an hour, a well-trained, passionate and committed person might be able to onboard four customers an hour. That’s $12.50 to protect the $300 to $800 (or more) it cost you to earn that customer’s trial in the first place.
This person isn’t a replacement for what you sell or deliver. This person is the bridge over the trough.
They’re the patient voice at the end of the phone (who picks up on one ring) to help with a recalcitrant bit of software. Or the person who sends a handwritten note telling the guest what to expect when they get to your hotel. Or the human who simply calls to say ‘hi’ as soon as the trough begins. Not reading a script, but working as hard to make a connection and a difference as your ads and your location do.
The key rhetorical question, usually unasked and unanswered: Is it an expense or an investment?
Notes: Promotion is the time and expense of encouraging non-customers to raise their expectations.
The trough kicks in when reality intrudes, when we’re trying to understand what’s actually involved, when sunk costs become clear and when buyer’s remorse begins. It’s the form, the warmup act and that feeling of being alone at a cocktail party filled with people who know each other.
Many of your potential lifelong, supportive and profitable customers never materialize on the other side of the trough, because they left before you had a chance to delight them.
Actual marketing success happens after the trough, when people become loyal, when the product or service is remarkable and when the word spreads.
Why would we want to wait until someone is perfect before we give them a chance to make things better?
Each of us is part of a system, cogs in a process that rewards us for certain actions based on various inputs.
When the system is broken, some of the most highly leveraged, aware and insightful people notice. And of course, since they’re part of the system, they’ve been affected by it.
These are ideal qualifications to speak up and make the system better.
One way the status quo stays in charge is by encouraging people to stand by in silence, fearful of being called out for hypocrisy.
If people got a hacking cough and a chronic disease an hour after smoking their first cigarette, it’s unlikely many people would smoke.
If earthquakes happened a day after fracking for gas was tried, they would probably have stopped.
And if entrepreneurs discovered freedom, satisfaction and customer delight a week after starting their projects, more people would probably give it a go.
Most of us are able to respond to a feedback loop in the short run. The real opportunity and challenge is to get much better at recognizing the long loops.
In an episode of a podcast I really respect, three of the experts quoted used words that I was familiar with: Debunk, gaslighting and cult. These are powerful words, words with specific and evocative meanings.
In all three cases, the people speaking used them ‘wrong.’
Being on a podcast might be nerve-wracking, and in an effort to overcome anxiety, sound smart and level up, each person ended up doing the opposite.
But that’s how language works. We’re trying to say what we mean, and sometimes, it’s not what other people think we meant. The emotions behind the words are real, even if the words are a mismatch.
When it happens often enough, the words develop a new meaning.
Words are a moving target, an expression of feelings, and they inevitably shift.
There’s no absolute measure of wrong. Simply what we thought vs what they meant.
May 29, 2022
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