In fact, everyone is always doing their best under the circumstances. As my friend Al says, there's no such thing as irrational behavior. That's because in this moment, given the perceptions someone is holding, the way they behave is in fact the only way they can behave.
Consumers don't make choices as much as they react and respond to the inputs and assumptions they have about the marketplace, their life and your brand.
If you don't like the way someone is acting, understand you can't change his behavior, you can only change his circumstances.
This makes it really difficult to vilify the recalcitrant consumer. It's not that they're stupid, it's that you didn't explain it very well. As Zig has said, "I can understand why you're not interested. Other people who believed [insert belief here] weren't interested either. But once they discovered [insert new fact here] they were eager to try it."
Sure, people are willing to lie, break promises, willfully misunderstand, avoid responsibility and blame others. But why? They're doing it because under the circumstances, it seems like the right thing to do. As marketers, we can often change the circumstances.
There's an infamous scene in the Godfather where a movie producer turns down a 'reasonable' request from the Don. The Godfather is stunned. How could someone turn him down?
After the family kills the producer's prize racehorse (and puts it in his bed), the producer changes his mind.
What changed? Before the intervention, the producer didn't understand, didn't believe, didn't fear the Godfather. So he made what he believed was the best possible decision. Afterward, his worldview was forcibly changed and he made a different decision based on different facts.
Probably not a good idea to run around beheading horses, but it's a useful lesson in changing perception.
July 20, 2009
Your users, employees, consumers and donors are obsessed with data now. Are you helping them solve their knowledge problem?
Years ago, I had an automatic transmission car with a tachometer. Why I needed to know my RPMs when I couldn't do a thing about it is beyond me.
Yet useless data and hidden data continue to plague users. I have a Garmin 305 watch to track my bike workouts. It's just fine, except I hate it. I hate it because there are only two pieces of data I care about while I'm working out: how fast I'm going and what my heart rate is. My theory is that I can't do anything about time, but I can control effort, right?
Garmin puts my heartrate in 3 point type in the top right corner. It's unreadable by anyone old enough to be crazy to use one of these devices. And my speed? They convert miles per hour into some sort of runner's fraction that I still haven't figured out. Broken.
[I was wrong! It's not broken, the instructions are. My faithful readers have alerted me that I can fix the display, which I'm going to spend the next hour figuring out how to do. Sorry to offend the 305].
Acumen, on the other hand, has built a charity dashboard that lets them evaluate projects on cost-effectiveness across sectors. It's a marvel, and it completely changes the way you think about philanthropy.
Or consider the ambient dashboards that have been built in surprising ways. One company put pinwheels on a VPs desk. When sales went up, the pinwheels spun faster.
Just curious: what do you think would happen to energy consumption if every car registered in the US was required to have a digital mileage readout installed?
Building good dashboards isn't difficult, but it's an excellent marketing strategy. A few brainstorms:
- If you can add a digital dashboard to your service, do it.
- If you can make the dashboard public, it gets more powerful.
- Highlight data that changes behavior.
- Allow the user to highlight the information that matters to them.
I'm not focused on digital companies here. If you can add a dashboard to a payroll company or a sleep measurement device, you can add one just about anywhere.
July 19, 2009
If you want to dig a big hole, you need to stay in one place.
If you walk around town with a little shovel, you'll just end up digging thousands of little holes, not one big one.
Call on one person ten times and you might make the sale. Call on ten people once each and you will likely get ten rejections.
The important thing to remember is that separate events are often separate. If you use the same ineffective approach on one thousand people, it's not going to start working better just because you use it more often.
Connected events, on the other hand, often benefit from frequency and trust.
Which leads to two viable strategies:
1. If you can stay still, stay still. Earn the trust, earn the sale by repeatedly demonstrating value and authority.
2. If you can't stay still, get a bigger shovel. Your marketing and your sales pitch has to be so refined and focused that it works the first time, because you don't get a second time.
July 18, 2009
Here's the thing about the life of Walter Cronkite:
At every turn, he acted as if he had a responsibility to his audience. He didn't do the right thing because he thought it would help him get ahead and then one day he'd get his share. Instead, he always did the right thing because that's who he was. No sellouts, no political consulting, no false transparency.
That's the way it is.
Transparency works if it's authentic.
July 17, 2009
1. Don't let popular spreadsheets be in charge of the way you look
92% of all the business presentations made in the United States are done with templates created by big companies in Excel or Powerpoint. This is a horrible tragedy.
First, programmers don't often have a lot of taste. The fonts are flaccid, the defaults are wan and uninspiring. There's no sophistication.
Second, and more important, when you show me something exactly like something I've seen a hundred times before, what do you expect me to do? Here's a hint: Zzzzzz.
2. Tell a story
There are only four reasons I can imagine you would want to show someone a graph (not a chart, or an infogram or a diagram, but a graph of numbers):
- Things are going great, look!
- Things are a disaster, help!
- Nothing much is happening.
- We need to work together to figure out what the data means.
I think if it's the third one, you can probably dispense with the graph altogether. And the fourth isn't really a presentation, it's a working session. Which means you're trying to light a fire, make a point, highlight a trend, cause action to be taken. Your graph should reflect that, or you're wasting my time.
3. Follow some simple rules
When you violate the fundamental rules of graphing, you confuse me, or cause me to pay attention to parts of your presentation that aren't related to the story you're trying to tell. Here are a few:
- Time goes on the bottom, and goes from left to right
- Good results should go up on the Y axis. This means that if you're charting weight loss, don't chart "how much I weigh" because good results would go down. Instead, chart "percentage of goal" or "how much I lost."
- Don't connect unrelated events. For example, a graph of IQs of everyone in your kindergarten class should be a series of unrelated points, not a line graph. On the other hand, your weight loss is in fact a continuous function, so each piece of data should be attached.
- Pie charts are spectacularly overrated. If you want to show me that four out of five dentists prefer Trident and that we need to target the fifth one, show me a picture of 5 dentists, but make one of them stand out. I'll remember that.
4. Break some other rules
Use color. Use thick lines. Use circles. Use big type faces. Don't use 3-D charts unless you have a license. You can animate, but only if you have a note from your doctor.
If you break too many rules, it'll backfire. If the graph is hard to grok, or appears tweaked too much, we cease to believe it. [and the Onion chimes in, ht to Tom]
I used to hate the lawn.
Growing up, we lived on a curved street, and as a result, our house had a back lawn much bigger than normal. My job was to mow it, using an old, noisy, non-sharp, broken down mower. I remember it taking about 14 hours a week.
I hated everything about that lawn.
I wonder how your customer service people feel?
Does it show?
Every person who does marketing, sales, product design or any other job that influences customers directly should spend at least an hour a week answering the customer service lines, using the same tools your customer service people use. Out of sight is not so good, out of mind is inexcusable.
July 16, 2009
True confession: I didn't attend graduation from Stanford Business School. They mailed me my MBA instead. I hadn't been on campus in months, I was already busy running a brand in Boston, learning more than I could have in school. A generous teacher made sure I got the diploma (and of course, they got the tuition, so it was probably a fair trade).
Today, though, I attended final graduation for my informal free MBA program. You can read some of the student recaps right here. The photo was taken just before I fell in the Hudson River.
I'm thrilled at the new friends I've made (for life, probably) and thrilled at how much they learned, how smart they are and what a difference they'll make in the world. But most of all I'm thrilled that every single one of the nine realized that I had nothing much to do with their transformation, they did. Which means the opportunity is available to everyone, whether or not you get a cross country skiing lesson from me.
We didn't have a fancy commencement with speeches (actually, we had pizza). What we ended with was the idea, "Go, make something happen."
Four words. That's not a lot, but all you might need.
July 15, 2009
A few weeks ago, my tooth fell out (on a cross country flight no less). I managed to get home and then eagerly put some Anbesol ("for oral pain relief, dentist strong so the pain is gone!") on the hole. Yes, that was my screaming you heard all the way from here.
The next morning, my dentist explained that not only doesn't Anbesol work on exposed nerves, it makes them worse.
You can read the label all day long and you won't see that mentioned. But hey, they made a sale (one sale).
Or consider this item on Amazon. How big do you think these "mixing bowls" are? The reviews point out that the smallest one is not big enough to hold an egg. Does that change your perception of the item?
Why not tell the truth? Why not call them "mini bowls"? Why not change the label from "toothache relief"? (Technically, it's not a toothache if you have no tooth, okay, thank you Mr. Lawyer, that's exactly the sort of weaseling I'm talking about.)
There are lots of things you can do to make the sale. They often are precisely the opposite of what you should do to generate word of mouth. I know, you can't have word of mouth unless you have a sale, but a sale that leads to pain is hardly worth it.
My rule of thumb is this: every person you turn away because your product or service isn't right for them turns into three great customers down the road. Every bad sale costs you five.
If you're selling a business to business service and you can prove that it's better, that it delivers more value, that it's cheaper or more durable or more efficient, shouldn't that mean you will close every sale?
Even hard-headed business people end up buying the thing they want, not the thing they necessarily need.
The real danger of relying on facts to make your sale, though, is that when the facts are no longer on your side, you're toast. The low-cost supplier gets hooked on the easy sales that come from acting like a commodity, and if that changes, you've got little room to maneuver.
Great brands and projects are built on real value and a real advantage, but great marketers use this as a supporting column, not the entire foundation. Instead, they build a story on top of their head start. They focus on relationships and worldviews and interactions, and use the boost from their initial head start to build competitive insulation.
July 14, 2009
Ads online typically cost $5 to $20 for one thousand impressions. A fancy magazine might cost two or three times that. But it's still pennies a person.
Attending a conference, on the other hand, costs $1000 by the time you add up the expenses. That's a CPM of $1,000,000. One thousand of the right people at the right conference costs a million dollars, as opposed to $12 for the same thousand people online.
That seems nuts. Same people, radical difference in price. Apples and oranges. It's not a valid comparison because one is about ads and interruptions, the other is from the point of view of the conference organizer or the attendee awash in attention and connection…
Here's the thing: advertisers treat prospects online as targets, as victims, as people to subject to interruption. Conferences treat attendees as royalty, as paying customers who invested time and money to be there.
And that's the difference. As long as your site is about something else and the ads are a distraction, you'll see CPM rates drop. As soon as you (or the advertisers) figure out that creating online communities aligned with the advertising, where attendance is a choice by the consumer, then you're creating genuine value.
The irony is that advertisers continue to push media people to create the very environments that don't work. They want a bigger M and a lower C.
Far more useful for everyone to do the opposite. Pay a lot and get more than you pay for.
July 13, 2009
