Seth Godin's Blog, page 253

Herbs

Thyme is cheap. Twenty five cents worth is plenty for a family of four.

Hang out at the market and watch people buy expensive fish, chicken or beef to cook for a family gathering. Amost no one is buying fresh herbs. What's that about?

I guess that the main course is so expensive and so much work and so apparently foreboding and complex that most people believe they can't be bothered with the effort of adding herbs. Herbs would change everything. A twenty-five cent investment would transform a simple but expensive dinner into something really great.

"What! I don't know how. It's not worth the effort. I'll screw it up. Isn't this expensive piece of fish enough? I'm too busy. Hey, it's just dinner..."

Metaphor alert: your marketing is missing herbs.

Famous to the family

The way my family plays 20 Questions is that one person silently chooses a famous person and then everyone in the car has 20 yes or no questions to figure out who it is.

A variation that was briefly popular was to redefine "famous" as "famous to the family." You could announce that you had chosen this variation and then pick, say, Ziggy the painter. Zigmund might not be known to the public or the history books, but in our family, he's famous.

I'm fascinated by a new category, though. "Famous to the tribe." Is Xeni Jardin famous? Merlin Mann? What about Anne McCrossan? Never mind that Warhol thing about 15 minutes...

Everyone is famous to 1,500 people.

Some people are even famous to 3,000.

And that's a fascinating new phenomenon. When there are 3,000 or 10,000 or 500,000 people who think you're famous, who are willing to play 20 Questions where you are the answer...it changes things. We're not really prepared for a culture where a million (or a billion) people are valid answers in 20 Questions.

The race to be slightly famous is on, and it's being fueled by the social and tribal connections permitted by the net. We give a lot of credit and faith to the famous, but now there are a lot more of them. Over time, once everyone is famous, that will fade, but right now, the trust and benefit of the doubt we accord the famous is quite valuable.

Consider: Gary Vee's new book is out today.

Is that enough to know? You bet it is. The tribe (whichever tribe you're in) is always chewing on the next thing, discussing the next idea, processing, absorbing and moving on. Is there any way that a new book from Gary isn't going to be on our tribe's list? He's famous to the family.

Empathy

"If I were in your shoes, I know what I would do."

Marketers can't do their jobs without understanding what a prospect wants, talks about or is interested in.

And managers (and leaders) are ineffective when they're unable to imagine life through someone else's eyes.

The problem is this: if you were in my shoes, I wouldn't be me, I would be you.

As soon as you bring your beliefs, expectations and worldview to the table, you've lost the ability to imagine what someone else would do in this situation. All you're doing is imagining what you would do.

The next time you're puzzled by the behavior of a colleague or prospect, consider the reason might have nothing to do with the situation and everything to do with who is making the decision and what they bring to it.

Cascade of broken promises

... a cautionary tale. It's always easier to make a promise than it is to keep one, and if you're not careful, it compounds.

I got my new Macbook Pro the other day. It comes with Migration Assistant, a flawed piece of software that promises to easily transfer years of old data from one machine to another.

The software failed. (Promise broken). Having paid $99 for the One to One service (which promises individual hour long sessions), I make an appointment and head over to the store. Nate, the promised guide, doesn't know how to fix it, because, despite the promise, he's not trained to do so. He hands me over to a genius, Michael, who hears my story and promises to personally handle it (it takes ten hours to do the transfer, he'll watch over it and make sure it goes well.) He actually looks me in the eye and says, "I promise to personally handle this."

The next day, the phone rings. It's Aideen, who has the case, doesn't know who Michael is and doesn't know what to do. She leaves a message. I call back, talk to someone at the store who insists that Aideen isn't available but that someone will call me back within thirty minutes. He says, "I promise that someone will call you within thirty minutes." An hour later, no one has called back.

It goes on and on. Every employee means well. Every employee is overwhelmed by incoming traffic, most from people who have already had their promises broken. Every employee has discovered that it's easier to make a promise and pass it along than it is to either tell the truth or keep the promise.

The cascade starts with the product. When your brand makes promises it can't keep, your overworked staff bears the brunt.

The limits of evidence-based marketing

That's what most of us do. We present facts and proof and expect a rational consumer/voter/follower/peer to make an intelligent decision on what's better.

That's how science works. Thesis, test, evidence, conclusion. All testable and rational.

Here's the conversation that needs to happen before we invest a lot of time in evidence-based marketing in the face of skepticism: "What evidence would you need to see in order to change your mind?"

If the honest answer is, "well, actually, there's nothing you could show me that would change my mind," you've just saved everyone a lot of time. Please don't bother having endless fact-based discussions.

[Apple tried to use evidence to persuade IT execs and big companies to adopt the Macs during the 80s. Ads and studies that proved the Mac was easier and cheaper to support. They failed. It was only the gentle persistence of storytelling and the elevation of evangelists that turned the tide.]

What would you have to show someone who believes men never walked on the moon? What evidence would you have to proffer in order to change the mind of someone who is certain the Earth is only 5,000 years old? If they're being truthful with you, there's nothing they haven't been exposed to that would do the trick. I was talking to someone who has a body of artistic work I respect a great deal. He explained to me his notion that the polio vaccine was a net negative, that it didn't really work and that more people have been hurt by it than helped.

I tried evidence. I showed him detailed reports from the Gates Foundation and from the WHO and from other sources. No, he said, that's all faked, promoted by the pharma business. There was no evidence that would change his mind.

Of course, evidence isn't the only marketing tactic that is effective. In fact, it's often not the best tactic. What would change his mind, what would change the mind of many people resistant to evidence is a series of eager testimonials from other tribe members who have changed their minds. When people who are respected in a social or professional circle clearly and loudly proclaim that they've changed their minds, a ripple effect starts. First, peer pressure tries to repress these flip-flopping outliers. But if they persist in their new mindset, over time others may come along. Soon, the majority flips. It's not easy or fast, but it happens.

That's why it's hard to find people who believe the earth is flat. That's why political parties change their stripes now and then. It wasn't that the majority reviewed the facts and made a shift. It's because people they respected sold them on a new faith, a new opinion.

Important/Measured

Is something important because you measure it, or is it measured because it's important?

Does our new ability to see things with web data make the previously overlooked now visible, or are we giving weight to things merely because we''ve measured them?

broken link, fixed

Sorry guys, here's the correct link from the previous post: http://www.thedominoproject.com/2011/03/poke-the-box-the-workbook.html

Initiators #2 [and a free workbook]

[There's now a free digital workbook to go with Poke the Box. Subscribers to the Domino blog got it already. You can find it here.]

For thousands of years, restaurants were dull. Feeding the public is hard work, and being a chef was perhaps a craft, but not often an art.

Consider, then, the case of Grant Achatz, founding chef at the groundbreaking restaurant Alinea and his new restaurant, Next. Every three months, the restaurant is going to abandon its entire menu and start over. First up is a recreation of nineteenth century French food. Then, a futuristic Thai menu. Set it and forget it is precisely not the point. Given all the places you could go for dinner in Chicago, surely this one is now on the list... iniative is the reason.

Or David Chang, raised in Virginia, of Korean descent, who started a career in New York by building an homage to a Japanese noodle bar that may or may not be named after the inventor of dried ramen noodles. Chang is an iconoclast (he adds bacon to his broth, just because he can) and is on a tear, piling up one innovation after another. Failures along the way? Definitely. That's part of what it means to move forward.

And finally, Sarma Melngailis, a chef and entrepreneur who continues to redefine what a chef is supposed to do all day. She found a niche and started poking, building, launching and learning. Is a juice made from yuzu and dandelion for everyone? Of course not. That's part of the point.

The worst moments are your best opportunity

That's how we judge you and how we remember you.

You are presumed to be showing us your real self when you are on deadline, have a headache, are facing a customer service meltdown, haven't had a good night's sleep, are facing an ethical dilemma, are momentarily in power, are caught doing something when you thought no one else was looking, are irritable, have the opportunity to extract revenge, are losing a competition or are truly overwhelmed.

What a great opportunity to tell the story you'd like us to hear about you.

The thing that makes it popular...

might be precisely the thing that keeps it from working.

Chatroulette was popular because you might randomly see some horrible naked guy. It was like a train wreck attracting rubberneckers. But the very attraction that drew a crowd also ensured it would never be seen as a serious tool.

That kid in school that everyone cheers on as he works to become a class clown might appear popular, but it's certainly getting in the way of his being taken seriously enough to get into college.

I'd argue that the same thinking applies to the way you first encounter someone. You can certainly be over the top enough to get a handshake or even a meeting, but the thing that got you that meeting might be exactly what costs you the deal.

There are a hundred ways you and your organization can become more popular, earn more clicks, generate more comments... but is popular what you're after?