I first met John Scharffen Berger six years ago. A great guy.
Ever since then, I’ve been talking about how purple is chocolate is. I even made people in my seminars try some.
Now I see Hershey to buy Scharffen Berger – Yahoo! News. Thanks to Howard Mann for the ping.
It’s time for John to milk this cow. Good for him.
Now, the big question is this: does Hershey have the guts to not make it better (better means more efficient, cheaper, faster, less likely to melt, flashier packaged, etc.)
Average is often the goal. Average rarely leads to growth.
July 25, 2005
According to todays Times, Al Gore turned to Johnny Carson for advice on his image and, yes, his jokes (Heeeeere’s Al, Thanks to Carson – New York Times.) Imagine how the world would be a different place if he had gotten (and used) better advice. Talk about leverage.
I’m stunned by how often corporations, organizations and individuals turn to celebrities for advice. We embrace diet books and tv shows and movie stars and well-known consulting firms and on and on, hoping for the glimmer of wisdom that will make a difference.
When I appear on the Motley Fool radio show, they ask me for my stock picks. Hey! I don’t own any stocks. And even if I did, what could I possibly have to say that would matter?
The thing about advice is that you need two things to make it work:
1. it has to be good
2. it has to motivate you to actually do something
The reason that people turn to celebrities and big organizations is that the patina of fame and authority makes it easier to sell yourself and your colleagues on taking action–on actually doing something with the advice.
If McKinsey said to close the plant, then it’s a lot easier to sell your board. If you had gotten precisely the same advice from precisely the same 26-year-old Harvard MBA but she’d been in your strategy group instead of at McKinsey, they’d ignore her.
The thing is, famous advice isn’t always better (it’s often not better, as we’ll see in a moment) and it’s more expensive and it allows you to beg off actually understanding what’s going on.
It’s not better because in order for the famous person to get to the point where she could give you advice, she had to fit through a number of filters. Johnny Carson was famous largely because he was consistent and inoffensive. You might believe that those are good characteristics in a politician, but George W. demonstrated that taking advice from an unknown Texan pre-felon named Karl Rove was far more effective at reaching his goals than relying on some tips from a comedian. That’s because Rove’s advice was better. Because Rove understood the dynamic of the political marketplace without compromise.
I think most organizations don’t buy nearly enough advice. They go 97% of the way, do 97% of the work, make all the investments… but then they get too tired and too stuck to actually do the high leverage stuff that works. So yes, buy advice. Buy a lot of it. But most important, understand why the advice is good advice, really understand the dynamic behind it–then you won’t have any trouble selling the idea, because it’s not the advice giver that matters… it’s the advice.
If Gallagher or Will Ferrell show up, tell them you’re busy.
Always beware free advice. It is worth what it costs!
That said, I get a fair number of notes from well respected, intelligent people who are embarking on their first non-fiction book project. They tend to ask very similar questions, so I thought I’d go ahead and put down my five big ideas in one place to make it easier for everyone.
I guarantee you that you won’t agree with all of them, but, as they say, your mileage may vary.
1. Please understand that book publishing is an organized hobby, not a business.
The return on equity and return on time for authors and for publishers is horrendous. If you’re doing it for the money, you’re going to be disappointed.
On the other hand, a book gives you leverage to spread an idea and a brand far and wide. There’s a worldview that’s quite common that says that people who write books know what they are talking about and that a book confers some sort of authority.
2. The timeframe for the launch of books has gone from silly to unrealistic.
When the world moved more slowly, waiting more than a year for a book to come out was not great, but tolerable. Today, even though all other media has accelerated rapidly, books still take a year or more. You need to consider what the shelf life of your idea is.
3. There is no such thing as effective book promotion by a book publisher.
This isn’t true, of course. Harry Potter gets promoted. So did Freakonomics. But out of the 75,000 titles published last year in the US alone, I figure 100 were effectively promoted by the publishers. This leaves a pretty big gap.
This gap is either unfilled, in which case the book fails, or it is filled by the author. Here’s the thing: publishing a book is really nothing but a socially acceptable opportunity to promote yourself and your ideas far and wide and often.
If you don’t promote it, no one will. If you don’t have a better strategy than, “Let’s get on Oprah” you should stop now. If you don’t have an asset already–a permission base of thousands or tens of thousands of people, a popular blog, thousands of employees, a personal relationship with Willard Scott… then it’s too late to start building that asset once you start working on a book.
By the way, blurbs don’t sell books. Not really. You can get all the blurbs in the world for your book and it won’t help if you haven’t done everything else (quick aside: the guy who invented the word “blurb” also wrote the poem Purple Cow).
4. Books cost money and require the user to read them for the idea to spread.
Obvious, sure, but real problems. Real problems because the cost of a book introduces friction to your idea. It makes the idea spread much much more slowly than an online meme because in order for it to spread, someone has to buy it. Add to that the growing (and sad) fact that people hate to read. Too often, people have told me, with pride, that they read three chapters of my book. Just three.
5. Publishing is like venture capital, not like printing.
Printing your own book is very very easy and not particularly expensive. You can hire professional copyeditors and designers and end up with a book that looks just like one from Random House. That’s easy stuff.
What Random House and others do is invest. They invest cash in an advance. They invest time in creating the book itself and selling it in and they invest more cash in printing books. Like all VCs, they want a big return.
If you need the advance to live on, then publishers serve an essential function. If, on the other hand, you’re like most non-fiction authors and spreading the idea is worth more than the advance, you may not.
So, what’s my best advice?
Build an asset. Large numbers of influential people who read your blog or read your emails or watch your TV show or love your restaurant or or or…
Then, put your idea into a format where it will spread fast. That could be an ebook (a free one) or a pamphlet (a cheap one–the Joy of Jello sold millions and millions of copies at a dollar or less).
Then, if your idea catches on, you can sell the souvenir edition. The book. The thing people keep on their shelf or lend out or get from the library. Books are wonderful (I own too many!) but they’re not necessarily the best vessel for spreading your idea.
And the punchline, of course, is that if you do all these things, you won’t need a publisher. And that’s exactly when a publisher will want you! That’s the sort of author publishers do the best with.
Here’s the sequel.
July 21, 2005
In the spirit of Woot. Shawn Gross sent over: dotprodomains.com: creative domain name resellers.
It’s so obvious, it’s almost brilliant.
Mark Hurst sent me over to: tangentialism: Shake Shack, Beyond The Call Of Duty.
This is the inspiring story of how one restauranteur (in a notoriously difficult business) has figured out how to:
1. offer purple cow service
2. by people who like what they’re doing
As in my Starbucks story below, these hardworking, zen-infused line cooks are actually enjoying their jobs more than the folks whining across the street.
It’s about management. It’s about managers who don’t blame employees, but who empower them and push them instead. And yes, that’s marketing.
The good news is that while it’s almost impossible to blow people away with an ad campaign or a coupon or even a product, the bar is set so astonishingly low for managers that it’s pretty easy to blow people away by enabling your staff to be amazing, honest and happy at the same time.
Even if you run a law firm. Or a church. Or, heaven forfend, a political party.
July 20, 2005
Wired magazine is owned by Conde Nast, the magazine giant.
Wired has a priceless double opt in permission email list. It’s a great list of forward thinking people who actually WANT to hear from Wired.
If you wanted to make some short term cash, maybe to hit your budget numbers, you could sell/rent that list. You could probably articulate some sort of rationalization, point out the terms of service or the privacy policy, but no matter what, you’d be doing something short-term and stupid. Sending a car ad to this list serves only one purpose: to benefit the sender, not the recipient.
1. you’ve trained people not to open your mail
2. you’ve used up priceless attention
3. you wasted an asset instead of building one.
Thanks, Andy, for the heads up.
It’s true. I rarely walk into a Starbucks without my laptop. Not because I need a laptop to enjoy Starbucks, but because I need a Starbucks to use the web.
I found myself with a few minutes to kill while a friend was shopping this weekend, and next thing I knew, I was in a Starbucks with no laptop. Totally different deal. Very zen.
Anyway, on the way in I overheard a conversation (okay, I was eavesdropping, but it was on your behalf). Three 20 somethings who worked at the fast food place next door were whining about their jobs. Two were talking about how horrible it was to "open." The third admitted that he liked to open, because then he didn’t have to deal with the &#&$ customers. After about a minute of the detailed complaints, I had had enough and went inside.
Inside the Starbucks, the first thing I noticed, tucked deep in the corner, not for customer inspection, apparently, was a bulletin board. The bulletin board was jammed with pictures of the staff. The staff on a picnic. The staff at an amusement park. The staff kidding around.
That very same staff was working behind the counter. If it’s possible to make an herbal tea with enthusiasm, they were doing it. If it’s possible to make a $4 transaction feel joyful, they accomplished it.
Okay, the obvious thing here is that this is the Starbucks marketing effort, almost in its entirety. They don’t advertise, they don’t launch new products every day, but they are selling the way it makes you feel to purchase something there. And I have to tell you, it made me feel great.
The less obvious thing is that the folks behind the counter weren’t making this up. It wasn’t inauthentic. They had decided to enjoy their jobs, they were enjoying their jobs and it was helping not just Starbucks, but it helped them, too. All I had to do was glance out the window to see the difference.
I think there’s a huge lesson here. Not just for marketers who sell interactions (that means everyone except for maybe commodity steel producers) but for employees too.
Do you believe in cosmic fate and coincidences?
You may recall that a few months ago, I posted the picture of someone who looked an awful lot like me (Seth’s Blog: Everybody has a doppelganger) So much so that my wife thought it was my picture.
I had never heard of Robert–the picture came from a reader. And that was the end of that.
Until TED last week in Oxford. I entered the auditorium pretty late, and there was just one open seat. I "excused me"d my way to the center and sat down, in the dark. When the lights came up, I looked over to the person sitting next to me, and asked, "Have we met?"
It took us a few minutes, but, you guessed it, it was Robert.
So, was this an amazing coincidence? I mean, what are the chances? One picture posted of a twin in the history of my blog. One seat at Ted…
Of course, that’s the wrong question.
There are a million places I could have had the amazing coincidence of meeting Robert. There are a million people who could have been in the seat next to me that would have amazed me.
It’s only amazing when a coincidence occurs that you predicted BEFORE it happens. If it seems unlikely afterward, it’s just your brain telling you a story. What are the odds of winning the lottery twice? The same as winning it once… IF you start keeping track after you’ve won the first time. The lottery doesn’t know you already won the first time.
As for Robert, he is erudite, wicked smart and doing important work. It’s flattering to be mistaken for him.
PS Nick Davis sends us this fabulous quote:
You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming
here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot.
And you won’t believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate
ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the
state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight?
Amazing!
— Richard Feynman
— From his undergraduate CalTech lectures, 1961
July 19, 2005
I met the chief designer for Nokia at Ted. Marko is a great guy, but it was fascinating to watch the interactions he had with people. Every single person he met came up to him, pulled out a cellphone and began whining. Mostly, though, people didn’t hate their phones. They hated their carrier.
I know. I hate T Mobile.
My annoyance at my carrier didn’t decrease when I had to pay not once, but twice to buy a four day online pass to use the Net in my hotel. Sitting at the airport waiting to fly home, a few shekels left on my British phone card, I decided to take a whirl and called the hard-to-find customer service number for T Mobile, figuring I’d try to get a refund for the first $60 Net pass I purchased but that didn’t work (Hah! I thought. Hah! I can hear you thinking).
Bob Cocksedge answered my call. On the third ring. He was intelligent, thoughtful, even kind. He apologized for taking a while, using their antiquated database. He never found the purchase, but he emailed me the contact info for his manager so I can submit the transaction number once I got my credit card info at home.
You’ve already guessed the lesson. It only took Bob a few minutes. It didn’t cost T Mobile much of anything at all compared to leaving me on hold and then being rude to me. But for a tiny tiny fraction of the cost of one of those full page ads that they buy every day, T Mobile actually built their brand.
I’ve said it before–your call center is probably the single cheapest investment you can make in building your consumer or business to business brand among customers and motivated prospects.
Thanks, Bob, for reminding me.
July 15, 2005
