Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (38 page)

The Blair Witch Project
and
Pi
both felt authentic.
The Matrix
was perfectly slick. The new
Star Wars
cartoon is just dumb.

That’s why a personalized letter works better than a generic résumé. We crave handmade authenticity and we adore perfectly professional slickness.

“How do you like the draft of the new brochure?” asks the boss.

There are several responses available to you, in order of wonderfulness:

1. It’s great.
   
2. There’s a typo here on page two.
   
3. What if we changed the size of the headline?
   
4. Are you open to considering different typefaces and colors?
   
5. Where are you going to distribute this?
   
6. Why use a brochure? Couldn’t we spend the same money more effectively?
   

Where are you on this scale?

You could hire a brilliant graphic designer to take your bullet-filled PowerPoint presentation and fix the fonts and clean it up. But would it change the game?

When in doubt, challenge the strategy, not the tactics.

Simple example of thinking bigger: What if you hired Jill Greenberg
to Photoshop well-known people in your industry to turn them into memorable images instead?

Every day you have the chance to completely reimagine what it is to communicate via PowerPoint. What Marc Andreessen has done is to completely reimagine what it is to be online. That’s where the win lies, when you reinvent.

The bigger point is that
none of us are doing enough to challenge the assignment.
Every day, I spend at least an hour of my time looking at my work and what I’ve chosen to do next and wonder, “is this big enough?”

Yesterday, I was sitting with a friend who runs a small training company. He asked, “I need better promotion. How do I get more people to take the professional type design course I offer at my office?” My answer was a question, as it usually is. “Why is the course at your office?” and then, “why is it a course and not accreditation, or why not turn it into a guild for job seekers, where you could train people and use part of the tuition to hire someone to organize a private job board? You could guarantee clients well-trained students (no bozos), and you could guarantee students better jobs—everyone wins.”

I have no idea if my idea for the training company is a good one, but I know it’s a
bigger
one. That’s when marketing pays for itself. Not when we find a typo or redesign a logo, but when we reconsider the question and turn the answer into something bigger than we ever expected.

Every time you visit a new website, enter a new airport, visit a new store, examine a new book, the question you ask first is, “what’s this like?”

At a strange airport, if it’s “like” your airport, you know just what to do. It’s easy. If it’s totally different, you have to stop, regroup, and start to understand what’s involved.

If a book has cheap color separations, the wrong sort of gloss on the cover, and the wrong hue to the paper, it just feels cheap and self-published and unlikely to be the real deal. It doesn’t matter a bit what’s inside, who wrote it, anything. You’ve already decided because this book reminds you of untrustworthy books you’ve encountered before.

Visit a website with a brown-on-brown color scheme, a stock photo of a nautilus, some flashing graphics, a bunch of widgets, and a typeface that’s not quite right, and you’ve already decided how you feel. Entirely based on the fact that
this
site is like
those
sites, and you didn’t like those sites.

Meet someone at a conference who is dressed perfectly, with shined shoes and a great suit (but not trying too hard), and you’re inclined to trust and respect him, because he reminds you of someone in a similar situation who was trustworthy.

Obvious, right?

So why do marketers so often miss this shortcut? Before you make what you’re going to make, find something you want people to be reminded of. Feel free to discard this model if you want to make a point (the iPod did not remind you of a Sony CD player), but discard it on purpose. If you’re writing a book, for example, your goal (probably) isn’t to reinvent what it means to be a book. You’re merely trying to reinvent the words and ideas. So when it comes to the jacket and the type, steal relentlessly. Your audience will thank you, because it’s one less thing to process.

When in doubt, ask your colleagues, “what does this remind you of?”

• How long after getting a big promotion does it take for an executive to get antsy?
  
• Why does a powerful senator take small bribes and risk his entire career?
  
• Why do Amazon customers, with a choice of every book, delivered overnight, for free, whine about Amazon’s customer service going downhill?
  
• Why do customers at a truly great four-star restaurant often feel a little bit of a letdown after the last course is served?
  
• Why do users of Facebook (a free service that they used to love) complain so vehemently about a change in layout?
  
• Why do the very same Apple lovers who waited in line for days now scoff at incremental (free) improvements in their iPhones?
  

“IS THAT IT?”

This state of ennui explains why we’ll never run out of remarkable, why consumers are restless, why successful people keep working and taking risks. It explains the self-centered, whiny attitude of some bloggers who can never get enough from the world, and it explains why a rich country like the U.S. could almost bankrupt itself in search of ever more.

I’m not saying that consumers don’t deserve respect and quality in exchange for their attention. I’m pointing out that we make ourselves unhappy just for the sport of it.

Marketers have played into this attitude and certainly amplified it. It helps them to gain share, of course, but it also raises the bar on what they’re going to have to do next.

As a marketer or a leader, it helps to see two things about your work:

The first is to realize that people will never, ever be satisfied with you; they’ll even whine when you give away something for free. Embrace the whining and realize that this attitude gives you an opportunity to answer the question with, “no! Wait, there’s more!”

The second is to understand that a hug and a smile from a true friend
is
it.
Along the way, marketers of stuff have tried to offer that stuff as a replacement for the thing that children/consumers/employees/customers/spouses really seek, which is connection and meaning and belonging and love.

If the marketplace isn’t talking about you, there’s a reason.

If people aren’t discussing your products, your services, your cause, your movement, or your career, there’s a reason.

The reason is that you’re boring. (I guess that’s what boring means, right?) And you’re probably boring on purpose. You have boring pricing because that’s safer. You have a boring location because to do otherwise would be nuts. You have boring products because that’s what the market wants. That boring staff? They’re perfectly well qualified.

You don’t get unboring for free. Remarkable costs time and money and effort, but most of all, remarkable costs a willingness to be wrong.

Remarkable is a choice.

The goal is to create a product that people love. If people love it, they’ll forgive a lot. They’ll talk about it. They’ll promote it. They’ll come back. They’ll be less price sensitive. They’ll bring their friends. They’ll work with you to make it better.

If you can’t do that, though, perhaps you can make your service or product less annoying.

I understand that “love” and “annoying” are rarely two ends of the spectrum, but in this case, I think they are.

I think smart marketers at Apple work to make products that people love. Smart marketers at American Airlines ought to work at making an airline that isn’t annoying.

Firefox used to be a product that people loved. Compared to the alternatives, it was magical. You could go on a quest to promote it and improve it.

At that point, a few years ago, the Firefox movement had a choice. Either continue to make Firefox ever more quirky and lovable (engaging a small audience, but with more passion), or work to make it less annoying (and allow it to reach more people). Today, people
like
(not love) Firefox, they continue to use it, and the idea spreads, but slowly. The goal has been chosen by the Firefox folks: to continue to make it less annoying. That’s disappointing to the passionate, but it’s a strategy.

Another example: I use iCal to keep track of my schedule. It defaults new appointments to 9
A.M
., and if the appointment isn’t at 9
A.M
., I have to manually change it. Makes sense. Problem: if the appointment is at 4
P.M
., and I change the 9 to a 4, iCal sets the alarm to go off at 4
A.M
.
Hey, wait a minute. I have never, ever had an appointment at 4
A.M
. Doesn’t iCal know this? Why is it so annoying! No one is ever going to love iCal as it stands, or even with some simple improvements, so why don’t the engineers spend time making it less annoying instead?

What could Apple do to make the product something you would love? Really love? Clearly, that would require an overhaul. What could they do to make it less annoying? 100 little things, easy to do.

Example: Momofuku was a New York restaurant beloved by many people. People loved it because (not in spite of) how annoying the place could be. They were annoyingly inflexible. They didn’t have particularly comfortable seating or great waiters. And the flagship restaurant made getting a reservation almost impossible. The quirkiness was part of the deal. Something to talk about when you brought a friend.

If all they did was think of ways to be less annoying, the restaurant wouldn’t get better for the people who loved it; it would get worse. Unfortunately, they got really popular, forgot what made them lovable, and crossed a line. The annoying parts got really annoying, and they forgot to dream up new ways to be beloved. I gave up. It flipped and I hate it now. It’s unloved
and
annoying. Boy, are customers like me fickle.

Think of the ordinary things you do or places you go. Could they be less annoying? What if the marketers there spent time and money to eliminate annoying? No, it’s not the sort of big-time stuff that leads to love, but they’re probably not going to get to love anyway. I’m not going to love my dry cleaner or the post office. But if they made those places less annoying, I’d spend more money and go more often. Face it, you use FedEx because it’s less annoying than the post office, not because you love them.

I think there’s a chasm here. You don’t go for love and end up with less annoying. You need to do one or the other. There are products and services I love that are annoying, but that’s okay, because that’s part of being in love. And there are products and services that are annoyance-free, but I don’t love them. That’s okay, too. I like them just fine.

Put a sign on your office door, or send a memo to the team. It should say either, “Everything we do needs to make our product less annoying” or “Everything we do should be idiosyncratic and engage people and invite them to fall in love with us. That’s not easy, which is why it’s worth it.” Can’t have both. Must do one.

Seems like a simple question, but given how much time and money we spend on it, it has a wide range of answers, many unexplored, some contradictory. I have a few thoughts about education, about how we use it to market ourselves and compete, and I realized that without a common place to start, it’s hard to figure out what to do.

So, a starter list. The purpose of school is to:

1. Become an informed citizen
   
2. Be able to read for pleasure
   
3. Be trained in the rudimentary skills necessary for employment
   
4. Do well on standardized tests
   
5. Homogenize society, at least a bit
   
6. Pasteurize out the dangerous ideas
   
7. Give kids something to do while parents work
   
8. Teach future citizens how to conform
   
9. Teach future consumers how to desire
   
10. Build a social fabric
    
11. Create leaders who help us compete on a world stage
    
12. Generate future scientists who will advance medicine and technology
    
13. Learn for the sake of learning
    
14. Help people become interesting and productive
    
15. Defang the proletariat
    
16. Establish a floor below which a typical person is unlikely to fall
    
17. Find and celebrate prodigies, geniuses, and the gifted
    
18. Make sure kids learn to exercise, eat right, and avoid common health problems
    
19. Teach future citizens to obey authority
    
20. Teach future employees to do the same
    
21. Increase appreciation for art and culture
    
22. Teach creativity and problem solving
    
23. Minimize public spelling mistakes
    
24. Increase emotional intelligence
    
25. Decrease crime by teaching civics and ethics
    
26. Increase understanding of a life well lived
    
27. Make sure the sports teams have enough players
    

If you have the email address of the school board or principals, perhaps you’ll forward this list to them (and I hope you
are
in communication with them regardless, since it’s a big chunk of your future and your taxes!). Should make an interesting starting point for a discussion.

That’s the way Derek Sivers (founder of CD Baby) described his mission statement in building the company. “What could I build that would be like a dream come true for independent musicians?”

What an extraordinarily universal way to construct a product, a service, or a business. Notice that dreams are rarely “within reason” or “under the circumstances.” No, dreams are dreams. If your business is a dream come true for customers, you win. Game over.

Too often, I hear about businesses that just might be a dream come true for their owners, but hardly for the people they seek to recruit or the customers they hope to snare. What do your prospects dream of? What would get them to wait in line?