در جستجوی "بهتر"

CHAPTER FIVE

In Search of “Better”

The Beer Advocate website lists 250 beers that have earned more than 3,400 ratings each. Each beer is someone’s favorite. It’s possible that there are thousands of beers in the United States that are someone’s favorite.

How can that be? Because taste matters. Everyone else is wrong.

When a marketer arrives and says, “This is better,” he’s wrong.

He actually means, “This is better for someone and it might be better for you.” Empathy is at the heart of marketing

People don’t believe what you believe.

They don’t know what you know.

They don’t want what you want.

It’s true, but we’d rather not accept this.

Sonder is defined as that moment when you realize that everyone around you has an internal life as rich and as conflicted as yours.

Everyone has noise in their heads.

Everyone thinks that they are right, and that they have suffered affronts and disrespect at the hands of others.

Everyone is afraid. And everyone realizes that they are also lucky.

Everyone has an impulse to make things better, to connect and to contribute.

Everyone wants something that they can’t possibly have. And if they could have it, they’d discover that they didn’t really want it all along.

Everyone is lonely, insecure, and a bit of a fraud. And everyone cares about something.

As a marketer, then, we have little chance of doing marketing to others, in insisting that they get with our program, that they realize how hard we’ve worked, how loud the noise is in our heads, how important our cause is . . .

It’s so much more productive to dance with them instead.

A million-dollar bargain

Consider the plight of the nonprofit fundraiser. She’s trying to raise a million dollars to pay for a new building on campus. Every time she’s meeting with a foundation or a philanthropist and an objection is raised, she says to herself, “You’re right, that’s a crazy amount of money. I’d never give a million dollars to charity—I have enough trouble paying my rent.” And so the donation doesn’t get made.

Empathy changes this dynamic. Because the donation isn’t for her, it’s for the donor.

It’s for the donor who says to himself, “This million-dollar donation is a bargain. I’m going to get at least two million dollars’ worth of joy, status, and satisfaction out of this decision.” And that’s okay. It’s the way choice works.

Everything that we purchase—every investment, every trinket, every experience—is a bargain. That’s why we bought it. Because it was worth more than what we paid for it. Otherwise, we wouldn’t buy it.

Which means, going back to the hapless fundraiser, that if you’re unwilling to have empathy for the narrative of the person you seek to serve, you’re stealing.

You’re stealing because you’re withholding a valuable option. You’re keeping someone from understanding how much they’ll benefit from what you’ve created . . . such a significant benefit that it’s a bargain.

If they understand what’s on offer and choose not to buy it, then it’s not for them. Not today, not at this price, not with that structure.

That’s okay too.

Thinking about “better”

It’s tempting to decide that there’s a transitive relationship, that A > B > C. This works, for example, with length. A ruler is longer than a thumb and a thumb is longer than a peppercorn, and therefore a ruler is longer than a peppercorn.

But linear comparisons don’t make sense when we’re building stories and opportunities for humans.

An Hermès bag is more expensive than a Louis Vuitton bag, which is more expensive than one from Coach. But that doesn’t mean that the Hermès bag is “better.” It merely means that it’s more expensive, which is just one of the many things that someone might care about.

Expense might be easy to measure, but it’s never clear that more of it is always better.

What about more subjective categories like “stylish” or “fashionable” or “status”? Suddenly, it’s not linear. Not easy to measure. Not clear at all what better means.

Better isn’t up to you

There are more than 250 models of motorcycles available for sale in Cleveland. Can you name them? No one can, not even a motorcycle collector.

And the same thing is true for ketchup, for insurance brokers, for churches.

So, how do we process this, remember this, choose a product?

We remember the best one.

Best for what?

And that’s the key question. Best for us.

If we care about sustainability and price, then our brain has a slot for our favorite brand, and it’s the one that’s the best at sustainability and price. No surprise.

But our neighbor, the one who cares far more about status within the group and luxury, has a very different brand in mind.

Which is not surprising, because we’re humans, not machines.

Your job as a marketer is to find a spot on the map with edges that (some) people want to find. Not a selfish, unique selling proposition, done to maximize your market share, but a generous beacon, a signal flare sent up so that people who are looking for you can easily find you.

We’re this, not that.

The marketing of dog food

Dog food must be getting better. More nutritious and of course, delicious.

Americans spent more than twenty-four billion dollars on dog food last year. The average price has skyrocketed, and so has the gourmet nature of ingredients, like sweet potatoes, elk, and free-range bison.

And yet, I’ve never seen a dog buy dog food.

Have you?

Dog food might be getting more delicious as it gets more expensive, but we actually have no idea. We have no clue whether dogs enjoy it more, because we’re not dogs.

But we can be sure that dog owners like it more.

Because dog food is for dog owners. It’s for the way it makes them feel, the satisfaction of taking care of an animal that responds with loyalty and affection, the status of buying a luxury good, and the generosity of sharing it.

Some dog owners want to spend more on the dog food they buy. Some want gluten-free dog food, loaded with high-value placebos.

But let’s not get confused about who all this innovation is for. It’s not for the dogs.

It’s for us.

A marketer for a dog food company might decide that the secret of more dog food sales is to make a food that tastes better. But that requires understanding how a dog thinks, which is awfully difficult.

It turns out that the right formula is to make a dog food that dog owners want to buy.

The purpose of this example isn’t to help you market dog food better. It’s to understand that there’s almost always a disconnect between performance and appeal. That the engineer’s choice of the best price/performance combination is rarely the market’s choice.

There are two voices in our heads. There’s the dog’s voice, the one that doesn’t have many words, but knows what it wants. And there’s the owner’s voice, which is nuanced, contradictory, and complex. It’s juggling countless inputs and is easily distracted.

Like the dog owner who is choosing based on a hundred factors (but not taste), the people you seek to serve care about a range of inputs and emotions, not simply a contest for who’s the cheapest.

Choose your extremes and you choose your market. And vice versa.

Early adopters are not adapters: They crave the new

Early adopters are at the start of the marketer’s journey. But it’s important not to think of them as adapters. Adapters figure out how to get along when the world changes. They’re not happy about it, but they figure it out.

The early adopters are different. They are neophiliacs—addicted to the new. They get a thrill from discovery, they enjoy the tension of “This might not work,” and they get pleasure from bragging about their discoveries. The neophiliacs are very forgiving of missteps from those who seek to innovate with them, and incredibly unforgiving after the initial thrill of discovery wears off.

That relentless desire for better is precisely why they’re always looking for something new. You can’t be perfect in the eyes of an early adopter; the best you can do is be interesting.

In your work as a marketer, you’ll be torn between two poles. Sometimes, you’ll be busy creating interesting new work for people who are easily bored. And sometimes, you’ll be trying to build products and services that last, that can extend beyond the tiny group of neophiliacs and reach and delight the rest of the market.

There’s almost nothing a marketer can do that shouldn’t be prefaced with that distinction. The magic question is: Who’s it for?

The people you seek to serve—what do they believe? What do they want?

An aside about the reptile people who are secretly running things Professor Roland Imhoff of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, wanted to understand what makes some people choose their beliefs.

In particular, he’s been studying a particular kind of outlier: the conspiracy theorist. Since we know that conspiracy theories aren’t factual, why are they so appealing to some people? And which people?

In one study he cited, it was found that many people who believe that Lady Diana is still alive, having faked her own death, also believe that she was murdered. And in a similar study, people who believe that Osama bin Laden was dead before the Navy Seals arrived at his compound are also likely to report that he’s still alive.

The facts aren’t at issue here; they can’t be. What’s happening is that these theorists are taking comfort in their standing as outliers and they’re searching for a feeling, not a logical truth. Imhoff writes, “Adherence to conspiracy theory might not always be the result of some perceived lack of control, but rather a deep-seated need for uniqueness.” In Imhoff’s study, he presented American conspiracy theorists with made-up “facts” about a conspiracy regarding smoke detectors in Germany. When he told this group that 81 percent of the German population believed the theory of the conspiracy, they weren’t nearly as interested or enthusiastic as when they heard that only 19 percent of the population supported the theory.

By rooting for the overlooked underdog, the conspiracy theorist engages with his desired emotion, that of feeling unique, a brave truth-teller, the outsider.

This group doesn’t see themselves as kooks. Each member doesn’t have a unique theory, all alone in a field. Instead, they seek to be part of a small group, a minority group, an outspoken group that can take solace in each other while the outside world ignores them. They can find this feeling every time they hang out with the other reptile-spotters.

That’s not that big a leap from the countless micro-tribes that so many early adopters belong to.

Sooner or later, each of us becomes (for a while) the kind of person who believes in the reptile people that control the earth. We’re seeking our own little pocket of uniqueness.

Humility and curiosity

A marketer is curious about other people. She wonders about what others are struggling with, what makes them tick. She’s fascinated by their dreams and their beliefs.

And she has the humility to embrace the lack of time and attention that her audience wrestles with every day.

People aren’t eager to pay you with their attention. The fact that you bought an ad doesn’t earn you something that priceless.

Instead, we can hope that people might voluntarily trade their attention. Trade it for something they need or want. Trade it because they’re genuinely interested. Trade it because they trust you to keep your promise.

Not everyone will be interested. But if you do your job right, enough people will.

This is the lock and the key. You’re not running around grabbing every conceivable lock to try out your key. Instead, you’re finding people (the lock), and since you are curious about their dreams and desires, you will create a key just for them, one they’ll happily trade attention for.

A lifeguard doesn’t have to spend much time pitching to the drowning person. When you show up with a life buoy, if the drowning person understands what’s at stake, you don’t have to run ads to get them to hold on to it.

Case Study: Be More Chill—More than one way to make a hit

Two years after almost no one went to see this poorly reviewed musical debut in New Jersey, its soundtrack showed up on the Billboard Top 10 original cast album chart. More than a hundred million streams after it was first recorded, Be More Chill is the hit musical that you can’t see (yet).

Except for Hamilton, this is the most beloved musical of its time, spawning fan fiction, illustrated video animatics, and high school productions.

This phenomenon happened without a Broadway debut. Without the risk and time and committee meetings. And most definitely without strong reviews after opening night. Charles Isherwood wrote in the New York Times: “predictable in its contours . . . stale . . . boilerplate . . .” The thing is, it wasn’t a play for Isherwood or any of the other critics. It was aimed squarely at the new generation that has adopted it. And talked about it. And shared it. A fan named Claudia Cacace in Naples, Italy, drew some of the video animation, which was seen by Dove Calderwood in Idaho Falls, Idaho, who hired her to draw some more. And so it spreads.

At a recent café performance and meet and greet in New York (the meet and greet lasted for several hours), fans came from all over the world to meet the creators. And, just as important, each other.

It should come as no surprise that there will be a new run of the musical. Off-Broadway this time.

What’s a car for?

More specifically, what’s a teenager’s first car for?

It’s not simply a need for transport. After all, when the teenager was fifteen, he didn’t have that much of a transport problem. And plenty of teenagers make it through the college years without a car. This is a want, not a need.

Few purchases cause more change than this one, and in this case, we’re seeing different changes for different people.

For the teenager, a car enables a change from dependent child to independent adult.

That’s a shift in status, in perception, and in power. It’s far bigger than four wheels.

For the parent, it causes a change from dominion over someone to offering freedom and responsibility. And it leads to significant discussions about safety, about control, and about status.

What will the neighbors say? What will we tell ourselves about safety? About independence, opportunity, and coddling?

All of these changes are at the heart of the car decision. When the designer, the marketer, and the salesperson see these changes at work, they provide more value, because they can design with these issues in mind.

Too many choices

Old-fashioned industrial marketing is built around the person who pays for the ads. It’s done to the customer, not for him or her. Traditional marketing uses pressure, bait and switch, and any available coercive methods to make the sale—to land the client, to get the money, to sign on the line that is dotted.

When the customer has no choice but to listen to you and engage with you, when there are only three TV channels, only one store in town, only a few choices, the race to the bottom is the race worth winning.

But the newly empowered consumer has discovered that what looks like clutter to the marketer feels like choice. They’ve come to realize that there are an infinite number of choices, an endless parade of alternatives. For the marketer, it’s like trying to sell sand in a desert.

A million books published every year.

More than five hundred kinds of battery chargers on Amazon.

More coaches, courses, and clubs than they could ever consider, never mind hire or join.

Surrounded by this tsunami of choice, most of it offered by folks who are simply selfish, the consumer has made an obvious choice. Walk away.

Positioning as a service

In a world of choice, where we have too little time, too little space, and too many options, how do we choose?

It’s easier for those we seek to serve simply to shut down and not even try to solve their problems. If it feels like any choice is going to be wrong, it’s better to do nothing. If the world is filled with claims and hype, people believe none of it.

Marketers can choose to stand for something. Instead of saying “You can choose anyone, and we’re anyone,” the marketer can begin with an audience worth serving, begin with their needs and wants and dreams, and then build something for that audience.

This involves going to extremes.

Finding an edge.

Standing for something, not everything.

The method: draw a simple XY grid.

Every available alternative can be graphed on the grid. (I’m not calling them competitors yet, and you’ll see why.) All the potato chips in a given supermarket. All the types of care for a bad back. All the spiritual institutions in a small town.

Pick two axes. One is arrayed horizontally (X) and one vertically (Y).

For each axis, choose something that people care about. It could be something like convenience, price, healthfulness, performance, popularity, skill level, or efficacy.

For example, there are six ways to get some diamonds across town. On one axis we have speed, and on the other we have security. It turns out that both an armored car and the postal service will happily insure a small envelope of diamonds, but one will take a long time and the other will take an afternoon.

If you don’t care about security, a bike messenger is even faster. And if you don’t care about speed or security, well, a stamp will work fine.

The magic of the XY positioning of extremes is that it clarifies that each option might be appropriate, depending on what you seek. Can you see how this chart would be totally different if the axes were changed to convenience, cost, environmental impact, or scalability?

The same approach can work for potato chips (expensive, local, air baked, flavored, extra thick, cheap, etc.) or for Walmart, Zales, and Tiffany (price, convenience, status, scarcity). Or a cruise ship and a private jet. Or perhaps a Ford, a Tesla, and a McLaren. We’re not so much interested in features as we are in the emotions that those features evoke.

Here are some axes for you to choose from. Because you know your space far better than I do, I’m sure you can come up with some others.

Speed

Price

Performance

Ingredients

Purity

Sustainability

Obviousness

Maintenance costs

Safety

Edginess

Distribution

Network effect

Imminence

Visibility

Trendiness

Privacy

Professionalism

Difficulty

Elitism

Danger

Experimental

Limited

Incomplete

After you pick an attribute with two extremes for the X-axis, find a different attribute and use it for the Y-axis. Plot the options your customer has on this chart.

Now you have a map of how the alternatives stack up. A map that a busy human being can use to find the solution to her problem.

Some potato chips are marketed as healthy and organic. Others as traditional and satisfying. Still others as cheap and widely consumed.

Marketers have been doing this forever. When David Ogilvy and Rosser Reeves (and probably Don Draper) were making ads in the 1950s, they figured out a hole in the market and then simply invented claims and features that would fill that hole. So, one soap is for people who want purity, while another is for people who care about not having dry skin. It didn’t matter if the soaps were the same, since they were “positioning” themselves. And then as marketing pioneers Jack Trout and Al Ries pushed it further, challenging marketers to position the competition into a corner while you worked to keep a spot to yourself.

This is all fine, but it doesn’t hold up over time, not in a hyper-competitive world. Instead, we can think of the quest for the edges as: Claims that are true, that we continually double down on in all our actions.

Claims that are generous, that exist as a service to the customer.

The local music teacher, for example, needs to begin not merely by saying “I’m local,” because, as we all know, there are other teachers just as local. Moreover, “I’m pretty good at teaching” and “I won’t yell at your kid” are hardly attributes worth talking about.

On the other hand, if he chooses “I’m serious, my students are serious, and this is about rigor” as one axis, and “My students win competitions” as the other one, suddenly you have a teacher worth driving to, a teacher worth paying extra for.

Is this the teacher I wish I’d had growing up? Absolutely not. It’s not for me. But for the parent who views the practice room as a form of character-building, and for the student who sees music as a competition, this is precisely what they wanted.

And now the teacher has his work cut out for him. Because he does, in fact, have to be more rigorous and professional than other teachers. He does have to make the difficult decision of expelling students who aren’t serious enough. And he has to persevere enough with his corps of students that they actually do win competitions.

A few blocks away, a different teacher can take a totally different spot on the map. She can work with the whole student, focusing on the experience, not the notes. She can refuse to enter competitions but instead build a practice based on connection and generosity.

Both teachers treat different people differently. They don’t compete; they’re simply on the same board.

Choose your axes, choose your future

When you look at the list of available attributes, it’s tempting to pick the ones that most people care about. After all, it’s hard work to claim an edge, and to pick one that few people care about seems foolish. Better, we think, to pick the popular one.

If you do, you’ll certainly be choosing a crowded quadrant. And without the magic of advertising, it’s very difficult to grow in a quadrant that’s crowded. Your customer doesn’t know what to do, so he does nothing.

The alternative is to build your own quadrant. To find two axes that have been overlooked. To build a story, a true story, that keeps your promise, that puts you in a position where you are the clear and obvious choice.

Everyone else, the average or hard-working brands that picked the average or popular axes—they’re all lumped together. They are Oldsmobile and Plymouth and Chevrolet and the rest of the lumpenproletariat.

You, on the other hand, have gone out on a limb, one that belongs to you, and maybe, just maybe, there are underserved customers out there who can’t wait to find you, connect with you, and spread the word.

So many choices

Software, perfume, insurance, candidates, authors, devices, coaches, charities, and retailers—there’s a brand everywhere you look. If you could only pick one brand to put next to each of the following emotions, one brand that you’d choose to help you feel a certain way, which brand would you pick?

Safe

Beautiful

Powerful

Worthy

Responsible

Smart

Connected

Hip

If the marketers have done a good job, they have made these choices easy for you.

People are waiting for you

They just don’t know it yet.

They’re waiting for the edge you will stake out, the one that they can imagine but don’t expect.

They’re waiting for the connection you will offer. The ability to see and be seen.

And they’re waiting for the tension of the possible, the ability to make things better.

Your freedom

You have the freedom to change your story. You can live a different one, one that’s built around those you seek to serve.

You have the freedom to change how you spend your day. You can outsource the tasks and find the guts to do emotional labor instead. You can go out on a limb and do what others aren’t doing.

The most frustrated marketers I know are the ones who take it as a given that because they are in industry x, they have no freedom.

And so real estate brokers hustle for listings and do precisely what the other brokers do.

And so pharma marketers run slightly generic ads and skirt the line in influencing doctors, instead of realizing how many options they actually have.

And so we get on the Facebook merry-go-round, boosting our posts, counting our followers, and creating ever more content in the hope of being noticed. There are so many other ways to make an impact and earn trust.

Much of what we take for granted in our marketing toolbox was considered a risky innovation just a few generations ago. It’s worth discarding the cruft that we built and replacing it with more generous tools.

The freedom of better

After the refrigerator was popularized, there wasn’t a good reason to continue hiring the ice delivery man. It wasn’t better worth paying for.

After the supermarket took off, it got harder to justify the work of the milkman.

And now we can all take advantage of the huge shifts in what it takes to do what we used to do (it’s all at our fingertips now, right?) and use that leverage to redefine better.

Because better is what our market is waiting for.

Consider the real estate broker. He used to hoard data. If you didn’t hire a broker, you had no information about what you were looking for. Today, in a world where Zillow has 110 million homes listed, the home shopper is likely to have access to at least as much information as the broker does.

If the goal is to defend the status quo, to be a chokepoint, it’s going to require an exhausting sprint, one that tries to keep ahead of an ever-quickening technology and information flow.

But what would better look like? Not for you, but for the customer?

This shift is true for many of us. So much of the work is networked, automated, and reliable now. I needed a team of eight engineers and a budget of millions of dollars to send emails to a million people in 1994. Today, anyone can do it for nine dollars a month using Feedblitz.

A decade ago, it took a dedicated team of publishers, print brokers, and sales reps to get a book to be available nationwide. Now a Kindle book can be published by one smart person with a digital file.

We made the “doing” easier, which is precisely why we need to outsource that part of our job and focus all our energy onto the hard work of making change happen.

One last thing about sonder

We’re not faking our points of view, our dreams, and our fears. And neither are you.

In politics, there’s a long history of people believing that those on the “other side” don’t really mean what they say. That Barry Goldwater and Jane Fonda were just putting on a show. That atheists really, deep down, believe in God, and that evangelicals are mostly trying to make a point, not express their actual beliefs.

The same goes for Mac users versus those who favor the Linux command line, or for math geeks versus those who insist that they can’t do math.

We assume that someone can’t possibly believe that they can’t do math. Or they can’t possibly support that insane policy. Or eat food like that on purpose.

We’re not faking it. Your customers aren’t faking it. Those who prefer your competition aren’t either.

If we can accept that people have embraced who they have become, it gets a lot easier to dance with them. Not transform them, not get them to admit that they were wrong. Simply to dance with them, to have a chance to connect with them, to add our story to what they see and add our beliefs to what they hear.