Just for Fun Friday

It’s Friday and you’ve been working hard all week. It’s time to take a break and enjoy something fun: Animator vs. Animation.

Thanks Tom Asacker at A Clear Eye for pointing this out!

Good enough

These two little words have kept many people in second-rate jobs, selling mediocre products to pretty good customers. Nobody wins and nobody loses (at least that is what we tell ourselves). The fact is, when it comes to things that matter, “good enough” is the enemy of excellence.

“Wait a minute!” you exclaim. “I thought ‘awful’ was the enemy of excellence?” Nope. Awful knows it’s decidedly bad and doesn’t care. “Good enough” pretends to more that it is. “Good enough” is lazy and hollow. “Good enough” wastes resources just to maintain the status quo.

When it comes to things that matter, never settle for “good enough” and only strive for excellence.

I’m selfish and lazy

There is no one else in this world who is more important than me (or at least that is the way I see it). I don’t like to hear much about you. Mostly, I only care about how you make me feel about myself. I sometimes talk about you with other people, but only when I think it will make me look cool or smart in front of my friends or allow me to be the “office hero”.

I don’t like to have to think too hard about what you tell me. I don’t want to have to go out of my way to have a relationship with you. In fact, for the most part, I’ll leave all that work stuff up to you.

Who am I?

I am your customer. If we haven’t met, it’s nice to meet you.

By design

A little break from the norm. Watch this video of interesting design in action:

Happy Tuesday everyone!

The basics

Why invest in a website, business cards and voicemail when you do not return phone calls?

Why ask for customer feedback when all they get when they call your customer service line is a message about how “important” their call is to you?

Why give employees perks when you cannot make payroll?

Why put a mint on the hotel guest’s pillow when the sheets are stained?

Why worry about the customer experience when your call center employees are not allowed to deviate from the call script?

Why carefully craft a hand-written, personal thank you note to customers when your automated, monthly account statements are undecipherable?

First, take care of the basics.

7 reasons why your mom would make a good marketer

After yesterday’s post, I though it would be fair to include some of mom’s sayings that do translate into good marketing advice:

1. I don’t care what everyone else is doing. I only care about what you are doing. Focus on your customers and not what everyone else is up to.
2. I just want what is best for you. Do the things that are in the best interest of your customers. A little heart goes a long way.
3. If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump off too? Following what others have done may seem easy, but it most certainly will lead to your own demise.
4. Don’t judge a book by its cover. Talent may come in many assuming forms.
5. How do you know you won’t like it unless you try it? Encourage innovation and “stretching” of your employees beyond what is comfortable.
6. Did you finish your homework? Do your homework on your customers, your employees and their changing worlds.
7. Don’t forget to put on clean underwear in case you are in an accident. Don’t make a business “accident” worse by not proactively preparing for a better outcome.

Happy Thursday!

7 reasons why your mom wouldn’t make a good marketer

We love our dear, old wise moms. However, your mom’s advice may not always translate into good marketing advice. Take these for example:

1. If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it at all. You should not only encourage your customers with complaints to say something, but you should seek them out.
2. How many times do I have to tell you…? If you find yourself needing to repeatedly yell your advertising message (think car dealerships) and most everyone still ignores you, it may be time to come up with something that is worth other people’s time to talk about.
3. Because I said so, that’s why. Every request from your customer may not be reasonable (or safe), but your customers do deserve an explanation as to why you can not deliver on what they have asked. (“In order to be fair to the other hotel guests, we can not allow you to take your 16 cats into your room, Ms. Sweeny.”)
4. I’m doing this for your own good. It’s not what you think is good for your customers, but rather what they think is good for themselves.
5. Look at me when I am talking to you. You have to earn the attention of your customers through a remarkable customer experience.
6. Do as I say, not as I do. It’s not the customer appearance (what you say you’ll do) that counts, but rather the customer experience (what you actually do).
7. No matter how old you get, you will always be my baby. You should never look back in the “photo album” of your business only to discover how much your customers alone have changed. It should be both your company and your customers changing together.

To be fair to moms everywhere, watch for tomorrow’s post. Happy Wednesday everyone!

Popularity and cumulative advantage

This is part five in a part five series about choices. Click here for part one, two, three and four

I concluded this journey about making choices where we began –with the three dilemmas of choice:

1. we have too many choices
2. we really don’t know what we want
3. our need to share with others

Because of these three dilemmas of choice above we often look for a cohesive solution that solves all three. The solution, I believe, is popularity. (When I say popular, it may not be what is popular to the masses, but rather smaller communities like our circle of friends, our church group or our family). After all, doing what is popular is safe. Popular means limiting managing choice. Popular means a chance to interact with other people.

Sure we may not follow what is popular in everything we do, but without “popular” we would have a hard time overcoming the three dilemmas of choice and we get stuck from time to time.

But how does something become popular? Quite simply (yet not so simply), popularity breads popularity. In other words, it’s a little thing called cumulative advantage or what Duncan Watts, professor of sociology at Columbia University, calls “the rich get richer” effect. Dr. Watts says, “[I]f one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still.”

The following is a lengthy (but well worth the read [registration required]) experiment that Dr. Watts conducted about cumulative advantage:

In our study, published last year in Science, more than 14,000 participants registered at our Web site, Music Lab (www.musiclab.columbia.edu), and were asked to listen to, rate and, if they chose, download songs by bands they had never heard of. Some of the participants saw only the names of the songs and bands, while others also saw how many times the songs had been downloaded by previous participants. This second group – in what we called the “social influence” condition – was further split into eight parallel “worlds” such that participants could see the prior downloads of people only in their own world. We didn’t manipulate any of these rankings – all the artists in all the worlds started out identically, with zero downloads – but because the different worlds were kept separate, they subsequently evolved independently of one another.

This setup let us test the possibility of prediction in two very direct ways. First, if people know what they like regardless of what they think other people like, the most successful songs should draw about the same amount of the total market share in both the independent and social-influence conditions – that is, hits shouldn’t be any bigger just because the people downloading them know what other people downloaded. And second, the very same songs – the “best” ones – should become hits in all social-influence worlds.

What we found, however, was exactly the opposite. In all the social-influence worlds, the most popular songs were much more popular (and the least popular songs were less popular) than in the independent condition. At the same time, however, the particular songs that became hits were different in different worlds, just as cumulative-advantage theory would predict. Introducing social influence into human decision making, in other words, didn’t just make the hits bigger; it also made them more unpredictable.

So does a listener’s own independent reaction to a song count for anything? In fact, intrinsic “quality”, which we measured in terms of a song’s popularity in the independent condition, did help to explain success in the social-influence condition. When we added up downloads across all eight social-influence worlds, “good” songs had higher market share, on average, than “bad” ones. But the impact of a listener’s own reactions is easily overwhelmed by his or her reactions to others. The song “Lockdown,” by 52metro, for example, ranked 26th out of 48 in quality; yet it was the No. 1 song in one social-influence world, and 40th in another. Overall, a song in the Top 5 in terms of quality had only a 50 percent chance of finishing in the Top 5 of success.

In our artificial market, therefore, social influence played as large a role in determining the market share of successful songs as differences in quality. It’s a simple result to state, but it has a surprisingly deep consequence. Because the long-run success of a song depends so sensitively on the decisions of a few early-arriving individuals, whose choices are subsequently amplified and eventually locked in by the cumulative-advantage process, and because the particular individuals who play this important role are chosen randomly and may make different decisions from one moment to the next, the resulting unpredictability is inherent to the nature of the market. It cannot be eliminated either by accumulating more information – about people or songs – or by developing fancier prediction algorithms, any more than you can repeatedly roll sixes no matter how carefully you try to throw the die.

This, obviously, presents challenges for producers and publishers – but it also has a more general significance for our understanding of how cultural markets work. Even if you think most people are tasteless or ignorant, it’s natural to believe that successful songs, movies, books and artists are somehow “better,” at least in the democratic sense of a competitive market, than their unsuccessful counterparts, that Norah Jones and Madonna deserve to be as successful as they are if only because “that’s what the market wanted.” What our results suggest, however, is that because what people like depends on what they think other people like, what the market “wants” at any point in time can depend very sensitively on its own history: there is no sense in which it simply “reveals” what people wanted all along. In such a world, in fact, the question “Why did X succeed?” may not have any better answer than the one given by the publisher of Lynne Truss’s surprise best seller, “Eats, Shoots & Leaves,” who, when asked to explain its success, replied that “it sold well because lots of people bought it.”

What can we learn from cumulative advantage? Is it completely random or can we influence the outcome by directing the “early-arriving individuals”? What do you think?

Our need to share with others

This is part four in a part five series about choices. Click here for part one, two and three

Have you ever started to share with someone about a really good book that you just read or movie you just watched only to get to a point where you know the other person cannot follow what you are saying because it was one of those “I guess you had to be there” moments? Now imagine that every experience that you had from now on was one of these “you really had to be there” moments and you could not share with anyone what you have experienced. This would be a very lonely existence indeed!

Our need to share with others and to be “included” helps shape our decisions. We do not want to be left out of from the water cooler talk at work and we want to share our opinions about the latest movie. Because of this, we often choose to see the movies that other people are seeing or to read what other people are reading.

What we are really doing is choosing to join a community – a community with a common bond of consumption. Joining such a community helps to tame an unmanageable number of choices because many of the choices are already made for us. If I join the “liberal democrat” community or “The Red Hat Society” then some decisions are already made for me (or made easier for me). Also, as a member I get to share in common experiences with others and share in a common “short-hand” way of speaking that proves I am part of the group (“The pow is really phat, dude” for the snowboarding community).

Do you have such a community for your product? Is your product remarkable enough to demand such a community?

We really don’t know what we want

This is part three in a part five series about choices. Click here for part one and two.

The second dilemma of choice is we really don’t know what we want. Or at least we don’t think we do. However, one thing is for sure – no one wants to feel like they are being coerced or forced into a decision. But I do believe we want to be lead down a well-marked path of discovery. I believe that this path includes:

1. A well-managed number of choices. Too much choice and we tend to freeze, too little choice and we tend to feel that there must be something else out there and we go searching.
2. A quick way to differentiate between similar products. A “Good-Better-Best” ranking works very well.
3. A bestseller list of the most popular items.
4. An easy way to have consumers share with other people what they have found.
5. A guarantee or free trial to limit buyer’s remorse.
6. An easy to follow call to action of what you would like the consumer to do next.

The better that we can mark the path for consumers so that they can make choices more easily and limit their fear on making the wrong choice, than we will actually speed up the decision process and make the consumer feel more satisfied. What is your well-marked path?