Jonathan's blog

The label you just can't shake

Jonathan — Fri, 20 May 2011 12:00:00 +0000

Take a moment to think about your job, home life, family, and friends, and what each expects from you.

The tough question to answer is: Why do they expect those things from you?

I ask this because many people want change to come a little bit easier for them, yet they feel like they've been tagged with a label they just can't shake. Since everyone seems to acknowledge that label, any progress seems to hit roadblocks.

That label is a reflection of the past. Unless it's pointing in the direction you're looking to go it will always read "This is who I am" and not "This is who I am becoming."

At one point my previous employer was looking into phone and Internet services. We weren't dissatisfied with our provider, their services just didn't seem to fit a company our size. However, our provider before them, Verizon? No way they were signing a contract with them again. Their label always read "Worst customer service, ever." I have no experience with Verizon myself, and for all I know this was an isolated incident or their customer service is far better now. What I do know is our perception of them was rooted in the past.

Changing the label is hard when there are years of evidence to back it up, and we decide to write the words in big, bold letters. Do something for years and yes, you'll get stuck with that label. Even if you make a change you won't see 100% of your progress over night. It will take time for some people to notice, and a lot longer to get everyone else to see what's happening.

The actual change is easy, convincing people you've made progress is the hard part. We don't always want to accept things have changed. There's a certain comfort in things staying the same, especially when it comes to those closest to us, and often times the people closest to you won't acknowledge it.

This is even harder in business when you often have to earn the deal before you can prove yourself. You can produce the best product in your industry and sell it at a price everyone can afford, yet not everyone will go with you. Then if you get the deal and screw things up your customer will remember that.

We don't remember the pretty good times, we remember the best and the worst. Those are the moments that stand out to us.

Marketers often make the mistake of trying to show how they're just a little bit better than the competition. By doing that you're just attaching a label to yourself with the words, "Just a little different from that other guy." If you want to get someone's attention, if you want someone to look at your differently, aim for being totally different. Not a little better or faster, totally different in some key way. That's how you get to wear a new label.

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The problem with marketing trends

Jonathan — Mon, 16 May 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Over the past few years the surge in social media marketing has seem the rise of a number of best selling books and "launched" the careers of numerous "experts." It has crept its way into thousands of businesses that pushed back, were confused by it, or simply ignored it before it became the thing to do.

As social media goes mainstream, creating an impact through it becomes even harder with more companies descending on it as the new way of marketing.

By now it's too late to take advantage of being one of the early adopters. The window of opportunity to experience its magic is gone, much like advertising on TV no longer guarantees a company millions of new customers as it once did.

Also gone is the formula for success. Those who found themselves at the top of social media, who can tell you how to succeed yourself, played the game in a very different era. The fundamentals might be the same, but it's a much larger world with landscapes most never imagined, let alone visited. It's closer to exploring a Tolkien novel for the first time than heading down a well-worn path.

Every successful marketing trend eventually becomes saturated and largely ignored. Look at TV advertising, for example. It's been shown that DVRs have pretty much no effect on people's buying trends (study here), meaning TV advertisements probably have no effect on the audience. We've learned to tune it out.

Think of the last time a magazine ad hit you hard and made you want to buy something. I think the last time I can remember it was right around never. But the closest? Some guy selling his CD's in Guitar World, which I read back in high school. Never bought the CD's... kinda glad about that, too.

Social media is no different now. Set up a blog, comment elsewhere, make friends, guest post, and you still might fail miserably. There are too many blogs out there now. It's crowded and hot, and even the bartender is ignoring you while you wave twenty dollar bills in his direction.

The most successful marketers in any marketing channel are those who figure out how to get their target audience's attention and show them how to get what they already want. Yeah, it's better to be damn good than good enough.

Will there ever be another window of opportunity like social media? Most likely. We're always coming up with different ways to communicate information and stories with each other. We've had newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and now the Internet. Something new will come along again. And when it comes along, the early adopters who figure it out will reap the biggest benefits before everyone else climbs aboard.

Once it gets hot and crowded again, you might want to start waving thousand dollar bills instead of twenties. That'll get people's attention.

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Would you do that if your mother knew?

Jonathan — Wed, 11 May 2011 10:00:00 +0000

I have one simple rule when it comes to ethical marketing: if my family and friends were my only potential customers, would I market this way?

I thought of this while reading Success Made Simple: An Inside Look at Why Amish Businesses Thrive (Amazon Associate link) by Erik Wesner. The Amish take the golden rule to heart. They're not words spoken when the need arises. It's a belief embedded deep in their culture and religion, which easily extends into their businesses.

This is a dilemma every marketer and sales person faces at some point. If you don't understand why you've never felt the pressure of the job, especially in sales. When you're expected to get results and the pressure is on, the comfortable blanket called "Do the right thing" suddenly makes you feel hot and itchy. As long as it's wrapped around you it seems tougher to get sales right this very second. Yet if you take it off you realize you might freeze. It's not much fun.

There's a real temptation to cry wolf and hope no one notices until it's too late. If you're making one-time sales it's much easier to cry wolf, because you'll never have to see the customer again. It won't lose its effectiveness unless enough people start talking. You'll always wonder if it's going to come back and bite you, though.

Does this mean you have to be 100% truthful? In a sense, no. If people are clamoring for a feeling like peace of mind as opposed to results, you need to deliver peace of mind. A great example of this are Baby Einstein toys. Research - lots of research - points out that genetics are going to determine how smart a child will be. This won't stop many parents from trying to give their kids a better start.

It's even harder to do the right thing when you're busy or feeling extra pressure. In those cases you'll have to either drop commitments, delegate tasks, or deal with the ugly reality that you won't be doing your best work this time. Should you go with the last option, don't make shit up in hopes some white lies will make a difference. They will make a difference, except what might be different is you lose people's respect, trust, and maybe even your job.

Is that worth it to you?

On the flip side, don't shortchange what you have to offer. If you sell the most comfortable slippers for people with flat feet, say it!

Let's go back to Baby Einstein for a moment. Notice they're selling a product, but what the person buying really wants is to feel like they're giving their child the best? Selling to people's higher needs is good... and ethical. It's one thing to lie about what your product is. It's another to talk about how someone will feel using it. Not everyone is going to get that same feeling, I know. But expectations have a lot to do with how people respond, and if someone expects to feel peace of mind they've already punched the internal buttons to let them experience some of that goodness once your product is in their hands.

And if you ever find yourself lost, just ask yourself if you'd market that way to your friends and family.

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Best practices don't always work

Jonathan — Mon, 09 May 2011 10:00:00 +0000

One of the toughest, most frightening, hair-yanking challenges I face as a marketer is realizing that what should work and what has worked may not work this time. This may have been the biggest reason the last company I worked for eventually closed their doors.

The CEO built the company around his knowledge of cold calling, and we're talking about ground-breaking knowledge here. He launched a product at IBM without traditional advertising and promotion, something unheard of in the early 1980's at big blue. He and his team figured out how to make the best cold call. They took the strategy to a call center, launched the campaign with a massive budget behind them, and changed the way IBM thought about launching new products. He took this knowledge and used it to start a company in 1993.

This strategy worked perfectly up until 10 years ago. Which makes sense, as often the best markets are the ones no one calls on. Very few companies heavily called on IT departments. Those people get excited over a good sales call. When you're getting a rare sales call for a product or service you're looking for, just getting a live human being is remarkable enough for a sales person to get a foot in the door.

However, once IT departments started getting lots of sales calls? Good sales calls become mundane, great ones barely noticeable, and amazing ones are often turned away because there's nothing to be bought. Direct mail was thrown out without a looking at it once. E-mail campaigns eventually were no better. What worked for nearly 20 years got tougher, so it cost more money to get the same number of qualified leads.

Having a remarkable offer became more important than ever. Our customers always had good products, yet we'd struggle through a campaign unless we could do something interesting or had an offer it was tough to say "no" to.

Every time I start a marketing campaign I get that feeling again. Because I realize that there are certain things I can do, and other things I need a company to do, for my efforts to really cause a ripple the way I want them to.

Great marketing doesn't turn good products into something people need. Great marketing gets amazing products in the hands of people who are looking for that specific kind of amazing in their lives.

That's reality.

My question is always, "Will this work?" It might work in some industries and not others. It might have worked last year but not work so well now.

When I do this I remember my safety net. I remember the fundamental ideas that work best. I think about how to apply the results of every relevant psychological or scientific study I've come across. People respond best to certain ideas, and as long as I lay my foundation right I know I'm going to better results.

It's why I don't believe in best practices. I believe in finding the best way to do things and always challenging it.

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Twitter falls short

Jonathan — Thu, 05 May 2011 10:00:00 +0000

Want to cause a stir because you can't get your idea across clearly? Let me point you to this thing called Twitter.

Earlier this week, NFL running back Rashard Mendenhall found out how quick the social media world moves when his tweets about Osama bin Laden and 9/11 became one of the most controversial news stories besides reports of bin Laden's death. Here are his tweets that caused the stir:

What fascinates me? Not that he made these tweets, or what his personal beliefs are. What fascinates me is that he had to explain himself on his blog a few days later.

Twitter is something I have never fallen in love with, and I'm sure Mendenhall understands my feelings right now. There's not a lot of depth in 140 character updates unless your idea is simple enough so it won't be misunderstood without proper context. It's a great place for simple, big ideas to spread. Any comment that needs context to make sense is begging to be torn apart if it's tweeted.

Except for having a hard time believing a plane could take down a skyscraper comment, I got the gist of what Mendenhall was saying. Some people clearly took it the wrong way, and there are plenty of wrong ways you can go down reading his tweets.

Jonathan Fields (awesome first name) posed a number of questions on his blog about Twitter after attending SOBCon. Some speakers there were asking people not to tweet, fearing their remarks would be taken the wrong way and spread like wildfire across Twitterland. I commented then, and now I'm heading deeper into why I agreed with the speakers.

Events like conferences are places full of context - tweets have no context. When you're at a conference and you go to tweet someone's big idea because you love it nobody reading your Twitter stream, except the people in the same room as you, understand where this comment is coming from. They just read the words and fill in the blanks themselves. I spoke at BarCamp Boston recently, and I had no problem with people tweeting my ideas. My only hope is the ideas tweeted made sense without any context.

When you remove context, you're giving up accuracy for a sound byte. This is the danger Twitter poses for me. I love big ideas. However, if I want to discuss them I also want more than 140 characters at a time. Some topics are far too controversial to chip in a few words and call it a day.

Ever notice that a lot of tweets contain links? The tweet itself is often a lead-in to much deeper thoughts, and the link is where those thoughts reside. A blogger isn't trying to summarize their post in 140 characters, they're using the 140 characters to get you interested in the contextually developed world they've created with far more than 140 keystrokes. If every idea I had in this post, every nuance, could be summed up in 140 characters with a 0% chance of people misunderstanding it, I'd tweet that sweet sentence and write a different blog post.

People who love the idea of putting people in the spotlight 24/7/365 to see what they're REALLY like need to look no further than life's toughest or most personal moments to understand why this is a bad idea. Why the curtain needs to be drawn sometimes. To be honest: I don't want you, whomever you are, to know what I do all day long, and it's not because I'm hiding anything.

Constant scrutiny is unnecessary, unwanted, and a burden no one should have to endure unless you want a role where it comes with the territory. It's like walking on eggshells, but worse. Not only are you walking on eggshells, you're trying to convince everyone around you to please not stomp all over the eggshells you just walked on.

Twitter certainly has its place in the world. It's best if we keep in mind where it falls short.

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The uncaptive audience

Jonathan — Mon, 02 May 2011 10:00:00 +0000

If you wanted to do something that you had never done, or were struggling with, who would you want to turn to for advice and guidance?

My guess: an expert. A person who's done the research, been there, done that, and made things happened would be best. Someone who could walk you through every step of the way, knowing what challenges you'll face, knowing the hardest things to get through, and having experiences to help you keep pushing until you did it. Talk about a great resource.

Yet people turn down advice from experts every single day. Advice from the very experts they should (in theory) be able to get key insights from.

There's a huge difference between a captive audience and an uncaptive audience. People who are interested in doing a specific thing, the captive audience, will listen and take action. The uncaptive audience will tune out any expert, even if the advice is free.

Why would someone tune out free advice that's researched, proven, and better than what they're currently doing?

People often place a higher value on something other than the expert's advice, and this creates a huge barrier. It's not the expert's problem, either. In fact, if you're trying to sell someone a solution and they're putting a big barrier up that you can't get around, you won't win... right now, that is. There are ways of making the problem more important, and I've seen time work its magic to cause people to make finding a solution more important. Right now, though, you're stuck and they're stuck.

If you can't get them to budge right now, it's going to take time and effort to get them to continue moving towards your solution. Until then, they're the uncaptive audience.

The uncaptive audience is a sucking force. They suck time, energy, money, attention, and any resource you're willing to give them. As long as there's a need they will try and find a solution, but only on their terms.

One of the best examples I can give, because I've both initially turned down this advice and later had it turned down coming from my own lips, is on weight loss. Specifically cutting down on carbs.

I used to be fat, to make this simple. I'm 6 feet tall I weighed 270 lbs, and that wasn't because I was an elite bodybuilder. Over the past decade I've lost nearly 100 lbs in phases. The last 20 lbs fell off me because I cut a lot of carbs out of my diet. It was advice a few people had given me, including multiple nutritionists, and I never tried it because I didn't want to give up cereal and muffins, sandwiches, and pasta on a regular basis.

Right now it's the simplest piece of advice I can give anyone looking to lose weight: just cut out the carbs as much as you can.

Yet even though I've lost far more weight than most people would have to lose to be in their healthy weight zone, this advice gets shot down all the time. The uncaptive audience wants to lose the weight, but would rather be able to eat certain things, or they hold opinions about what's healthy and what's not higher than scientific research. I know this, because that's exactly what I did!

People change their mind, though, and that's what you're waiting for. The key is to keep checking the pulse of the uncaptive audience to see when they're starting to pay more attention. I don't get frustrated when someone chooses not to listen to my advice on weight loss. If they really want me to help them, and I stay on top of the list as someone who's been there, done that, then if they change their mind I'll be one of the first people to know.

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Forget everyone: focus on your audience

Jonathan — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 10:00:00 +0000

On Tuesday the NY Times published an article by Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You to be Rich about focusing on making money, challenging some standard frugality tactics in the process (article here). The fun part? Ramit sent out an e-mail challenging his readers to see how their friends would respond to the article, and to analyze the trends in the comments being posted on the article.

If you're wondering what was being said: most of the comments on his article were somewhere between "I disagree" and "You're a scuzzball scam artist."

Scattered between the ranting masses are people who say, "Yeah, I agree with Ramit." Having read Ramit's blog for years, I can tell you those people are the ones he wanted to reach out to and connect with.

It's easier to convert people who agree with you than to try and get people to swap sides. Ramit gets this and has built a business around making money decisions as simple and effective as possible.

Have you ever delved into frugality? It's a fascinating field, yet there does come a point where you realize to become as frugal as possible without killing yourself you'd have to focus on it like a full-time job. There's no point where you can say you've reached a frugality utopia - you'll find a frugality plateau much sooner.

From personal experience, I know these people firmly believe in frugality and will use their time in search of the ultimate deal over and over. Give them the option of focusing on less to achieve more and your nose will smack up against a frugal facepalm.

People who don't agree with you don't want to agree with you. We want to believe in something, and having those beliefs ripped out from under our feet is about as comfortable as having our eyelids peeled. We're all wired that way. Fighting people with a different point of view is almost always a waste of time.

The hardest thing to wrap your head around is the idea that most of the time no one is right - or wrong. You can support your opinion with every bit of information you have and I'll tell you it's a fine argument. It's still an opinion, not a fact.

Make your life easier. Find the people who already agree with you and show how you can give them what they want.

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Is the future of books a subscription model?

Jonathan — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 10:00:00 +0000

One of my favorite bloggers, Fred Wilson, is a venture capitalist who often writes about technology companies and ideas. He's a huge music fan as well and has written about how he sees the music industry growing through streaming services online via ad supported radio and subscription services. His most recent post on music had me wondering: streaming music online is the next big thing, will the future of books also be a subscription model?

I started believing in this idea after thinking about the good and bad about growing music subscriptions. Here's my vision as to why book subscriptions make a lot of sense.

Subscriptions allow access to everything

My wife and I read books a lot, and we're surrounded by friends and family who read as well. There's an appeal to buying books until you start to question why you need all of them kicking around. I reference a few dozen of mine every year, but a lot of them were one-time reads that I'm now trying to trade on Paperback Swap, a book swapping service, since all they'll do at this point is take up shelf space.

I often read books years after they first come because there's no easy way to get them short of buying. The library wait list can be quite long for books over a year old. I don't want to give up shelf space to books I'm going to read once and never look at again. Subscriptions would give people a chance to read any book, at any time.

Will subscribers buy physical copies? If they see a reason to pass the book on or reference a physical copy, absolutely. Subscriptions to music and books won't eliminate the market where people buy copies for a decades, if ever.

E-readers are going to be everywhere

While no exact sales figures have been released, Forrester estimated that 4 million Kindles had been sold by mid-2010, and experts think Kindle leads with about a 60% market share. So let's say there will be 10 million e-readers out there by the end of 2011.

Doesn't sound like the biggest market considering those are high estimates, does it? That's because we're not including a much bigger market: tablets.

Apple sold 10 million iPads in 2010 alone, half of the 20 million tablets sold worldwide last year, and analysts expect 40 million iPads to be sold by the end of 2011. The number will jump if Apple can find a way to manufacture more, as Apple has had a few manufacturing shortages. Another 20-40 million tablets could be sold by competitors in 2011 as well.

If there aren't at least 100 million people who own a tablet or e-reader by the end of 2011, we'll cross that line soon enough. Not everyone will use their tablet as an e-reader, but they don't need to for the economies of scale to work.

How people consume books vs music

With the rise of mp3 downloads mainstream music has shifted back to its early days when singles were king and albums were far less popular. Don't want to pay $10-20 for an album? Just buy the songs you like for a dollar apiece. That's exactly what millions of people do with the growth of cheap and easy access to mp3 singles.

You can't buy the equivalent to mp3 singles when it comes to books. They're are an all or nothing proposition. Most e-books retail for $8-12, and physical books often cost more. Millions of book buyers are already spending hundreds per year on reading material.

The money math works out, big time

One of the main roadblocks Fred points out to growing subscription-based services for music is that record companies want $50+ per user. With other costs factored in, a yearly subscription would cost at least $100. The average buyer spends around $80 per year, and the big question is whether or not enough people see the value in paying more to have access to more music.

A lot of mainstream music buyers mainly purchase singles, not albums. Books have a much higher cost per copy, and someone who reads just one book per month could easily be spending over $100 per year on books.

I bet with that much money out there the book companies would have to consider it.

The offer to pay one fixed price and read all you want sounds good to me

The largest barrier left? Someone has to make this a reality. In fact, no one has to make this a reality.

However, there will be a day when Amazon is staring down tens of millions of potential customers between Kindles and Kindle apps on tablets. Physical book stores are struggling and Barnes and Noble looks to be their toughest competitor. If they want to stomp their competition out best they can, the best subscription offer might overtake the e-reader market faster than you can imagine. After all, those tablets can run the Nook app as well.

What are your thoughts on the future of books?

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Painful progress: headaches building a business

Jonathan — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 10:00:00 +0000

I believe one reason most people never try to build their own business, or even join a start-up, is the never-ending potential for turmoil and shitty days.

Maybe there's a study out there with deeper insights on this idea. Maybe not. Is it worth asking a question about how valid my belief is and how factually grounded it is? Which correlations can be found? What causations, if any, exist between increasing different kinds of rewards vs shitty days and who starts their own company?

How important is it to know if any of these ideas are true?

These are the types of questions that fly through my mind every day.

I felt like Freakonomics resonated with me because of the questions they answered more than anything else. It's a good book; the questions, though, are just perfect.

Asking "Why?" might be my favorite thing in the world to do. Not literally. I'm sure I'd rank a few more personal things above it, maybe even the Red Sox (still love them after a 6-11 start). For me, understanding something deeper is just as appealing as finding it out in the first place, and then some. It's one thing to know how something works, but "Why?" is fascinating.

This probably explains my love of business, especially sales and marketing. It's a never-ending experiment, one with no perfect answers, just good, bad, and gooder ones.

At some point everyone is faced with the question of whether or not it's gooder to go out and try one's own thing.

Even the people who seem to walk down worn out paths with a clear direction in mind have to consider this at least once. It might be nothing more than a fleeting thought. Yet when things don't work out a lot of people have this thought, as if doing one's own thing is the easier answer.

Quick answer if that's you: it's not easier in the short-term, and if you screw up over and over it's not easier in the long-term, either.

It's like pulling off the most awesome jump while skiing, smashing your face in three seconds after you land, yet you're still heading downhill whether or not you want to be and there's another jump coming up.

On Monday my wife and I went to watch part of the Boston Marathon. I have to say marathons make no sense to me. I can barely stand to run for 20 minutes, let alone cover 26.2 miles by foot as fast as possible, without getting bored. It's not my thing. Yet 27,000 people showed up to run the route this year.

I'd call them lunatics, but I get it. It's their own version of doing their own thing. Except the stakes aren't as high.

Can you imagine what it must feel like the first time you cross the finish line after 26.2 miles?

Because that's how entrepreneurs feel about doing their own thing. They're not focused on winning, they're focused on successfully crossing the finish line. And having as few really shitty days as possible.

For now, that's an answer to one "Why?" I can accept as good enough in my book.

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Have you already made up your mind?

Jonathan — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 10:00:00 +0000

Do you know how much you can handle? What your limits are?

Odds are you're wrong, and not for a reason you'd think.

Think about a time you've been pushed to the edge, where you truly thought you couldn't go any further, and yet you found a way to do just a little more. What happened? One moment you're done, the next you've given more than you had to give.

You hit a mental limit. One you might have put in place yourself.

This is one challenge marketers face all the time. A prospects's self-imposed limitation. A barrier, if you will.

Often times it's because the prospect believes that even if they go with a different product, the problem will remain.

They're not buying a product, they're buying something which will solve their problem. If they don't believe the problem can be solved, or if your product will do the job, then they will not buy.

Is there a way around this mindset?

Let's go back to when you ran up against your own limitations, but found a way to keep going. Do you remember what got you to keep going?

What studies have found is that we need to change our perspective of what our limitations are. Not the limitations themselves, but how we look at them.

For example, if you were told to write the same sentence over and over until you couldn't any more, there would eventually come a moment when you said, "That's it! I can't write another line." If I asked you to sign the bottom of the piece of paper, you'd do it with ease.

Funny how the mind works.

Being able to reframe how you're going to solve prospect's problem can be far more powerful than simply solving it. Offering a better solution that looks pretty similar to what they've already bought isn't always enough. Sometimes having a totally different solution works best.

The concepts of this post came from reading Mindfulness by Ellen J. Langer, an interesting look at being focused - or unfocused - on the things around us. (Amazon Associate link)

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