Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (25 page)

The problem with Google AdSense is that it makes marketers accountable. Unlike with Super Bowl ads, you can tell if your Google ads work. And so it’s easy to stall.

The problem with inventing a new product that challenges the status quo is that whoever did it is responsible for whatever happens.

The problem with prioritizing your group’s tasks and publishing the list is that it makes it really clear what you’re on the hook for.

In very tiny, very motivated organizations, new employees are often stunned by how much gets done. That’s because of how hard it is to stall.

Most businesses don’t fail dramatically.

They do it slowly.

But you wouldn’t know that from sitting in at meetings or listening to speeches. Same is true, of course, for countries, nonprofits, and other organizations.

Human beings respond to emergencies. It’s easy to get everyone to take action if we’re in the middle of some sort of security crisis … but fixing the educational system isn’t going to happen.

Faced with the gradual, inexorable decline that faces most organizations, it’s just natural to try to fix the problem with a broad stroke. A big ad campaign or a new slogan or a totally redesigned website.

The answer, more likely than not, is to consistently and regularly stop the bleeding. To improve the boring stuff.

Organizations fail slowly. They often succeed fast, though. That’s where the remarkable comes in. So, if I had to summarize it: you take a big step up … by being bold. But you avoid a slow death by getting every little thing right.

A: Don’t.

I’m frequently asked (by friends and, sometimes, aggressive strangers) to help them find someone to fund their company. Often, but not always, these people are happy to hear the following answer.

1. If you fund your company, even a little, you’ve just sold it. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but one day. That’s because rational investors are funding your company in the expectation that you are going to sell it and make them a profit. (Sure, there are exceptions, but not many.) So, if you don’t expect that your company will be easy to sell for a big profit, or you don’t ever want to sell your company, it’s not a smart idea to raise money for it.
   
2. Most companies are not appropriate sites for VC money. That’s because they’re freelance
   ventures, not entrepreneurial ones. A freelance venture is one where you work to get paid. An entrepreneurial one is where you can make money while you sleep. Meaning that you work really, really hard and you scale and suddenly you own real estate or media properties or technology or a system or a brand that people pay for without your actually doing any incremental work yourself.
   
3. One friend ran a very successful specialty school. He decided he wanted to start a division that would sell books about his system. The numbers on the publishing side were terrific (on the spreadsheet). The investors wanted 40% of the existing business in order to put up sufficient money to recapitalize everything and bring big-company thinking, etc., etc. I pointed out that this would not only ruin my friend’s life but probably also cripple the economics of both businesses.
   

The alternative (which might work for you as well) is not to fund the business. It’s to fund the
project.
That’s how they fund movies. You don’t get a piece of the studio. You get a piece of
Rocky XIV
.

If you’ve got something that works and you’re ready to go to the next level, consider funding the expansion, with the payoff being a scaling piece of the project. Maybe 100% of the proceeds until the investment is repaid, then 25% after that, forever. Once
that
project pays off, you’ll be able to fund the next project, probably on even better terms. And on and on, with each project having, if you choose, different investors and different payout streams.

4. The real lesson is this: if you absolutely need a lot of money to do a particular business, and the terms you’ll need to accept to get that money are unacceptable, find a new business. Nothing wrong with that. The market might be trying to tell you something.

So, Tom Cruise devoted an entire year of his life to promoting a movie that will be #1 in the U.S. for exactly 14 days.

To be replaced by another movie, even more hyped than Cruise’s, that may just triumph for three weeks instead of two.

Lulu.com
just released a study of bestselling books. It turns out that in the last forty years, the length of stay of a typical bestseller at #1 is down by more than 85%. In other words, best sellers used to be bestsellers for
seven times
as long as they are now.

That’s an awe-inspiring figure.

Why?

Because the base of the pyramid is so much bigger (ten times as many books published every year, at least), you would expect that the winners would win bigger and longer to make it worth the journey. Not so.

And awe-inspiring because the effort necessary to get to #1 is far greater than it used to be. From co-op (bribes) given to retailers for shelf space and advertising, to the extensive touring and cross-promotion that’s necessary, it’s a lot more work and a lot more risk to get there.

Now, we’re seeing authors building permission assets and timing all their promotion so they can be #1 on Amazon for an hour—an hour! Allen Drury had a #1 bestseller for a year.

Of course, it’s not just movies and books. Just about any style-based business (and what business is no longer style based?) sees the same phenomenon. The lesson I draw is this:

If your marketing strategy requires you to hit #1 in order to succeed, you probably need a new marketing strategy.

What’s the opposite of that? An overnight failure?

The idea of an overnight success is relatively new. Joan of Arc, Robin Hood, and Sarah Bernhardt were not overnight successes. It took media (the old kind, like TV and movies, and especially the new kind, like Google video) to create the overnight success. My friends Pomme and Kelly are overnight successes. So are some of the characters on
American Idol
.

Along the way, some people have trained themselves to believe that the only kind of success worth having is overnight success. That if you don’t hit #1 the first week, you’ve failed. That if your interface isn’t perfect out of the box, or if you don’t get 5,000 people standing in line at the opening of your new store, you’ve failed.

The
Times
today reports on Kathleen McGowan, easily considered an overnight failure. She spent years researching and writing a novel. She went to the annual book convention on her own nickel last year, trying to pitch it. Day after day was spent slogging her way to any person willing to look at it. This year, of course, she’s back with a million-dollar-plus advance, feted by booksellers, the whole drill.

Traffic, by Day of the Week

Squidoo is another interesting case. Here’s a look at our daily traffic, courtesy of our Google Analytics package, since January (I removed four weeks, from mid-March to mid-April, because of a glitch with searches). Squidoo has more than 27,000 lenses built by 15,000 people in about five months. No, the chart doesn’t look like Myspace or Flickr. What it does look like is the early days of Google and Wikipedia and other overnight failures.

The challenge for observers, investors, and partners (like the publisher who took on Kathleen) is to avoid the temptation of buying into the media infatuation with the overnight success story (which rarely happens overnight). The challenge for marketers is to figure out what daily progress looks like and obsess about that.

The goal, I think, is to be an overnight failure, but one that persists. Keeping costs low, building a foundation that leads to the right kind of story, the right kind of organic growth. Kathleen wrote a book that she believes in, one that was worth investing years of her life in. And then she painstakingly made progress until she became the next big thing.

I just had some great windsurfing lessons. I can tell you that windsurfing is very easy … except for the wind.

The wind makes it tricky, of course. It’s not particularly difficult to find and rent great equipment, and the techniques are fairly straightforward. What messes up the whole plan is the fact that the wind is unpredictable. It’ll change exactly when you don’t want it to.

Just the other day I read a riff that reminded me that the same thing is true about customer service (it would be a lot easier if it weren’t for the customers). Then I realized that every single function of an organization has a wind problem.

Accounting would be easy if every incoming report were accurate and on time. Sales would be easy if it weren’t for the prospects not buying from you all the time. Marketing would be easy if every prospect and customer thought the way you do.

Here’s the good news: the fact that it’s difficult and unpredictable is the best thing that’s happened to you all day. Because if it were any other way, there’d be no profit in it. The reason people bother to go windsurfing is that the challenge makes it interesting. The driving force that gets people to pay a specialist is the fact that their disease is unpredictable or hard to diagnose.
The reason we’re here is to solve the hard problems.

The next time you’re tempted to vilify a particularly obnoxious customer or agency or search engine, realize that this failed interaction is the best thing that’s happened to you all day long. Without it, you’d be easily replaceable.

1. “That will never work.”
   
2. “… That said, the labor laws make it difficult for us to do a lot of the suggestions [you] put out. And we do live in a lawsuit-oriented society.”
   
3. “Can you show me some research that demonstrates that this will work?”
   
4. “Well, if you had some real-world experience, then you would understand.”
   
5. “I don’t think our customers will go for that, and without them we’d never be able to afford to try this.”
   
6. “It’s fantastic, but the sales force won’t like it.”
   
7. “The sales force is willing to give it a try, but [major retailer] won’t stock it.”
   
8. “There are government regulations and this won’t be permitted.”
   
9. “Well, this might work for other people, but I think we’ll stick with what we’ve got.”
   
10. “We’ll let someone else prove it works … it won’t take long to catch up.”
    
11. “Our team doesn’t have the technical chops to do this.”
    
12. “Maybe in the next budget cycle.”
    
13. “We need to finish this initiative first.”
    
14. “It’s been done before.”
    
15. “It’s never been done before.”
    
16. “We’ll get back to you on this.”
    
17. “We’re already doing it.”
    

All quotes actually overheard, or read on blogs/comments about actual good ideas.

The first is fear.

The fear that you’ll have to implement whatever you dream up.

The fear that you will fail.

The fear that you will do something stupid and be ridiculed by your peers for decades.

The fear that you’ll get fired.

The fear that there will be an unanticipated backlash associated with your idea.

The fear of change.

The fear of missing out on the thing you won’t be able to do if you do this.

The second is a lack of imagination.

I believe that every single person I’ve met in this profession is capable of astounding creativity. That you, and everyone else for that matter, are able to dream up something radical and viral and yes, remarkable. So why doesn’t it happen more often? Sure, fear is a big part, but it’s also a lack of imagination.

Basically, most people don’t believe something better can occur. They believe that the status quo is also the best they can do. So they don’t look. They don’t push. They don’t ask “what else?” and “what now?” They settle.

Fear is an emotion, and it’s impossible to counter an emotion with logic. So you need to mount emotional arguments for why your fear of the new is the thing you truly need to fear.

As for the second issue, just knowing it exists ought to be enough. Once you realize you’re settling, it may just be enough to get you wondering … wondering whether maybe, just maybe, something better is behind curtain number two.

People who want to do a good job are more likely to follow instructions that they know they can successfully complete, while they’ll often ignore the “softer” tasks if they can.

If you’re marketing a product or an idea to a group of people, and you juxtapose two ideas—one obvious and simple, while the other is challenging and subtle—you can bet that the mass of people will grab the first idea (if they don’t ignore you altogether).

Example: It’s easy to get people to wake up early on the day after Thanksgiving if you offer them a TV at a discount, the way Walmart does every year. It’s a lot trickier to challenge consumers to figure out which one of the eighteen refrigerators you offer is likely to offer the best price/performance ratio.