What have we done?
The massive marketing engines of the car industry have decided to run roughshod over the idea of viral marketing and they’re working hard to manufacture ideaviruses as fast as they can:
AutoWeek – Car News
Why does it bother us so much when marketers try to subvert the ideavirus process and buy their way into our lives?
Precisely because it feels so intentional. Because it represents an unwelcome intrusion, a display of power… it’s a lot like spam, in fact.
When you run into someone with “Scion” tatooed on her forehead, it’s odd. When you realize that person got paid to do it, you feel used. Maybe it’s just me, but I think there’s a huge difference between the famous Honda Cog Movie (or the BMW movies) and the manipulative Scion campaign. In the first cases, the car companies built something worth talking about. In the second, the manufacturer just bought the conversation.
With more than 55,000,000 downloads to date, the BMW campaign is a success by any measure. It’s hard to imagine that Scion can afford to buy enough “buzz” to make a difference. If Permission Marketing is about dating, then buying these conversations is about nothing more than prostitution.
(PS what about bzzagent.com? Yes, they get paid to help start conversations. But a key part of their business model is that they DON’T pay the sneezers themselves. The bzzagents work for free. It needs to be that way for it to work, imho).
Is it a fine line? You betcha. So is dating, for that matter! The magic and the art comes in creating remarkable products that don’t cross the line… they’re worth talking about, but they’re not paid conversations.
June 10, 2004
Last month, I posted a bunch of notices looking to hire summer interns (yes, we’re set, thanks). The ads asked people to send in a three page PDF, describing their background, their goals and giving applicants a chance to really stand out and make their case.
This, of course, should be the dream opportunity for most job seekers. Instead of being treated as a piece of paper, a list of stats in a dry resume, here was a chance to actually tell a little about yourself.
HALF the people sent in a resume. Just a resume.
“Here’s my resume” was the total content of at least 20% of the cover notes I got.
Part of this is the result of being beaten down. Most of the system is about following the rules, fitting in and not standing out. But a lot of it, it seems to me, is that people are laboring under a very mistaken impression about what works–in life, in seeking a job and in marketing in general.
Most people, apparently, believe that if they just get their needle sharp enough, it’ll magnetically leap out of the haystack and land wherever it belongs. If they don’t get a great job or make a great sale or land a terrific date, it might just be because they don’t deserve it.
Having met some successful people, I can assure you that they didn’t get that way by deserving it.
What chance is there that your totally average resume, describing a totally average academic and work career is going to get you most jobs? “Hey Bill! Check out this average guy with an average academic background and really exceptionally average work experience! Maybe he’s cheap!!”
Do you hire people that way? Do you choose products that way? If you’re driving a Chevy Cavalier and working for the Social Security Administration, perhaps, but those days are long gone.
People are buying only one thing from you: the way the engagement (hiring you, working with you, dating you, using your product or service, learning from you) makes them feel.
So how do you make people feel?
Could you make them feel better? More? Could you create the emotions that they’re seeking?
As long as we focus on the commodity, on the sharper needle, we’re lost. Why? Because most customers don’t carry a magnet. Because the sharpest needle is rarely the one that gets out of the haystack. Intead, buyers are looking for the Free Prize, for that exceptional attribute that’s worth talking about. I just polled the four interns sitting here with me. Between them, they speak 12 languages. No, that’s not why I hired them. No, we don’t need Tagalog in our daily work…. but it’s a free prize. It’s one of the many things that made them interesting, that made me feel good about hiring them.
What’s your Free Prize?
June 8, 2004
Sourcefruit Juiceboxes via Amit Gupta.
How can you not want to drink this?
June 7, 2004
Caryn Law writes in an email, “”You cannot use and leverage your sneezers to your advantage as a marketing tool, and then when they turn on you because you did something unexpected, blame them for the problem and call them selfish.”
It points to a larger issue about the change in the power equation. You’re not in charge of the conversations any more. Of course that’s true, but a lot of people don’t WANT it to be true, so they act like it’s not.
June 6, 2004
So, there’s now almost 3,000,000 bloggers tracked by some of the online services. That’s 1% or so of the active online population, and since it seems as though the number is doubling every month or so, it’s starting to get significant.
Remember how you used to curse journalists? Curse them for being lazy, or hyperbolic? How about this headline from today’s Independent (UK newspaper):
“First Night: Clinton takes to the stage for the ultimate sell”
Ultimate? What makes it ultimate? A $30 book is hardly the ultimate sell, right?
But choosing words, choosing headlines, choosing photographs… it all adds up. When the New York Times admits that it colored its reporting the wrong way re Iraq, we’re talking about a big side effect: thousands of people dead.
Now, everyone with a blog is a journalist. When you run a post accusing a politician of having no personality, for example, you’re indulging the public’s desire to elect a dinner partner, not a president. When you chime in on the day’s talking points, you’re a tool, not a new voice.
So, we come to the moment of truth. Now that anyone who wants to be a journalist CAN be a journalist, are the ethics going to get better… or worse?
I’m an optimist most of the time, but on this issue, I’m afraid I’m a realist.
Sigh.
June 4, 2004
I can benchmark everything now.
I can benchmark my morning workout. The rowing machine tells me if today’s workout was a personal best. Even better, I can go online and compare my workout to the efforts of thousands of other people.
On my way to work, I can track my mileage. (My record is 89 mpg). Once there, I can watch the status of my books on Amazon, comparing their sales to every other book published in the English language… and then go check out JungleScan.com, where I can track the book’s performance over the last 90 days.
The problem with benchmarking is that nothing but continuous improvement (except maybe spectacular results) satisfies very much. Who wants to know that they will never again be able to beat their personal best rowing time? What entrepreneur wants to embrace the fact that the wait time at her new restaurant franchise is 20% behind the leader—and there’s no obvious way to improve it?
Our interconnected, 500-channel world lets us be picky. We can want a husband who is as tall as that guy, as rich as this guy and as loyal as my brother-in-law. We can ask for an apartment that is in just the right location, with just the right view and just the right rent—and then reject it because the carpeting in the hallway isn’t as nice as the one in the building next door. Monster lets us see 5,000 resumes for every job opening… and imagine that we can find someone with this guy’s education and that woman’s professional experience—who works as cheap as this person and is as local as that one.
In the old days, data was a lot harder to come by. You didn’t know everything about everyone. All the options weren’t right there, laid out in Froogle and compared by epinions.com. We didn’t have reality TV shows where each and every component of a singer’s presentation or a bridal prospect’s shtick were painstakingly compared.
Yes, benchmarking is terrific. Benchmarking is the reason that cars got so much better over the last twenty years. Benchmarking has the inexorable ability to make the mediocre better than average, and it pushes us to always outperform.
But it stresses us out. A benchmarked service business or product (or even a benchmarked relationship) is always under pressure. It’s hard to be number one, and even harder when the universe we choose to compare our options against is, in fact, the entire universe.
Of course, the boomers have this problem even worse (and we’re all boomers, aren’t we? Even if you’re not, we don’t care—it’s all about us). Boomers are getting older. We can benchmark our eyesight, our rowing speed, our memory or even our ability to come up with great ideas at a moment’s notice. As a result, we benchmark ourselves into a funk. We get stressed because we have to acknowledge that nothing is as good as it was.
In addition to the stress, benchmarking against the universe actually encourages us to be mediocre, to be average, to just do what everyone else is doing. The folks who invented the Mini (or the Hummer, for that matter) didn’t benchmark their way to the edges. Comparing themselves to other cars would never have created these fashionable exceptions. What really works is not having everything being up to spec… what works is everything being good enough, and one or two elements of a product or service being AMAZING.
So, I’m officially letting go. I’m going to stop comparing everything to my all time best, to your all time best, to everyone’s all time best. Instead of benchmarking everything, perhaps we win when we accept that the best we can do is the best we can do—and then try to find the guts to do one thing that’s remarkable.
Was this my best blog entry ever, or what?
May 31, 2004
you want to group your employees, your shareholders or, worst yet, your employees into one homogeneous blob, click on this: JP Brown’s Serious LEGO – CubeSolver.
Watching TV all day apparently makes us the same. But we’re all really different. Different hobbies, different values, different needs. When you deliver something that matches someone’s long-held desire, you win.
May 28, 2004
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in creating excitement in their products and marketing. Jeffrey C Long – Culture Craftsman: Free Prize Inside
May 27, 2004
In 1995, I didn’t believe in the Web. Didn’t think it would beat the paid online services. Beginning in 1996, I started to come around.
Soon thereafter, I invented the term “landing page” to describe the page you went to after clicking on a banner or a link (give me long enough and I’ll take credit for inventing HTML too!). Anyway, at Yoyodyne my peers and I spent years pitching people on how to improve their landing pages. I still believe it is the single biggest flaw in web design.
Back then, we sketched out a device called the Yoyodyne Engine for Sales. The idea was an automated system that would test landing pages on the fly.
Today, I heard about Offermatica – Landing Page Optimization. I have no idea if it does what it appears to, but if it does, hooray. It only took seven years.
May 25, 2004
This is a little jarring at a lot of levels.
Ringtones, it turns out, are now a sizable portion of all music purchases for certain users. Weirder still, in addition to willingness to pay money for tones, people are even subscribing to a magazine about them.
The Ringtone Magazine
It’s pretty clear that we’re down to buying what we want, not what we need!
May 23, 2004
