Posted by Whitney on Feb 5, 2010 in
Uncategorized I have been a fan of Seth Godin’s for a long time. I read his blogs, buy his books, and frequently recommend them to friends. (In fact, we celebrated my birthday this year at Max Brenner’s restaurant, in part due to reading about Max in Seth’s books.) So when Seth told readers on his blog that they could get an early copy of his book by making a donation to the Acumen Fund, I eagerly signed up.
I really enjoyed Linchpin, and you can see my earlier reviews here. I would love to sit down with Seth and discuss his Lizard Brain concept further, taking into account the development of the brain as we go from kids to adults and how that process may impact creativity. But despite any nitpicking I might do on neurology, it brought home the point that you have the best chance to succeed when you are involved and engaged in your work.
When I came home today from a client meeting where being engaged and responsive had made a big impact, I was surprised to see a package by my door. Inside was another copy of Linchpin with a note from Seth that read :
“Generosity is a key piece of being an artist. It gives each of us a chance to connect, to make a difference and to do indispensable work. You were generous enough to make a donation to the Acumen Fund, an organization that focuses on trade, not aid, building communities that work because each member contributes more than they get. A few weeks ago, I sent you a preview copy of Linchpin, as promised. Now, in recognition of your generosity, I’m giving you another. I hope you’ll share this one with someone you care about.”
What a lovely surprise! I’m speaking to a group next week, and I’m going to make sure someone in the audience gets this gift, along with the hope they will pay it forward as well in the future.
I know Seth is a fantastic marketer, and this is an additional chance to help the word spread about his book. Since I found myself quoting the book frequently after reading it, I’m doing a pretty good job of that already. But this gives me an additional chance to share Seth’s words with others, and it was a terrific and thoughtful gift to find on my doorstep. It was like finding a handwritten note, that chocolate on the pillowcase, the extra secret surprise than reinforces the concept of getting through the process of giving.
I know I always find the more I give and help others, the more I seem to get in return. The return comes in many forms, but whether it’s volunteering or taking a moment to help a friend, or doing great work with a client, I always seem to end up
feeling that everything I put into a project, I get at least that much, if not more, out on the other side. Even in cases where things don’t work out so well, I always find there’s often a lesson I needed to learn in the process.
The bottom line here is that I’m already a huge Seth fan. He doesn’t need to “re-sell” me, really. I’m already happily playing on his team, so to speak. But this gesture reinforces the message that Seth not only stands behind his work, but he wants to make it easy to share with others who may not be fans (yet) the same way I am. And it’s another lesson to me that these small moments of surprise can be touching- moments of delight that work on many levels, including encouraging me to invest in any of Seth’s future projects. Not because of any “What’s in it for me?” reason, but because he always seems to find a way to surprise and delight me, and I’ve always been thrilled by anything I’ve done on his recommendation. I always learn something from Seth, or am reminded of things that are important that I may have put on the back shelf. So I’ll continue to invest in Seth, because he’s never afraid on investing in his audience and fans.
Tags: acumen fund, delight, fans, linchpin, marketing, seth godin, sharing, surprise
Posted by Whitney on Apr 3, 2009 in
Uncategorized I just got an automated phone call from my grocery store. Wegman’s has long been in our family- it was the best grocery in Rochester, NY where I grew up. There’s one in Downingtown, PA now, and while it’s about a 30-40 minute drive to get there, I go and stock up on favorite items about once a month.
Wegman’s like many grocery stores, has a shopper’s club. They give you discounts, coupons, etc. like all programs. But I just got a phone call from Wegman’s informing me that their records showed I had purchased two products that are being recalled because of the pistachio nut/salmonella scare. They gave me the product name, identification dates- everything I need to see if the item is still in the pantry, and the ability to return it for a full refund.
So for all that demographic information Wegman’s is collecting about my shopping habits, they are also using this data to help long after the sale has occurred- in this case, in the event of a recall.
(I’d actually like to see my trends at shopping there compared to other stores myself, since I don’t log this information anywhere- might be interesting- but that’s another story all together.)
Talk about great PR, great use of information, and great building of a relationship and trust with customers. Not only do we care about you in getting your business, we’ll contact you if there’s anything that might cause a problem after the sale is made as well.
I already love Wegman’s, but this has made me even more of a raving fan. Does any other business care so much about you before and after the sale? Is anyone else doing this kind of work?
Thank you, Danny Wegman and the whole team, for caring about family, for taking this step to keep us all healthy, and for making sure you will always be my store of choice.
Tags: marketing, pistachios, public health, shoppers club, trust, wegmans
Posted by Whitney on Apr 3, 2009 in
Uncategorized As someone with two kids with ADHD, attention is a big deal to us. I’ve made it my job to understand how attention works, how to get it, how to focus it, and how sustain it, because this information is vital to helping my kids learn how to learn most effectively.
Turns out, this has a shiny, interesting byproduct- the shift in the advertising and the PR markets is becoming all about how to get and sustain attention. Whether you are talking about parenting, education, presentations, marketing- aspects of all of these endeavors involves, at its heart, attention.
Every human is equipped with a brain that has been customized by biology and experience over time. We now know that brains are always changing, forming new connections, pruning out old ones, even after you are an adult. People’s faces can be encoded on one neuron in your brain.* For everything you read, everything you see, everything you learn, your brain is changed by this process and customized for your needs.
Attention is the system that gets you to focus and possibly encode new information. Our brains are constantly looking for new information and running complex algorithms to determine whether that thing moving in your peripheral vision is harmless, or a danger. That’s part of our simplest flight or fight mechanism, and we can’t turn that off.
However, for people with ADHD, that system runs on high alert most times. Every new and novel stimulus, from the kid dropping a pencil next to you to the teacher writing on the board, to thinking about what’s for lunch are competing for brain space and attention concurrently. With ADHD, people have more trouble than most in directing their attention to a particular stimuls and tuning out all the others. I often describe it as trying to watch TV with someone who loves to channel surf. Just when you are getting into a show, someone comes along and changes the channel, and you don’t have the remote. Very annoying.
You get lots of little pieces of information this way, but integrating it into a coherent whole can be difficult. When you attention keeps switching to pay attention up to each novel piece of information, you can lose a grip on the story line, and having to refocus can take time. Medication for ADHD essentially gives people back the remote control, and their brains become a bit better at prioritizing what needs immediate attention and what can wait in line.
Attention essentially lets us decide what piece of information we can work on in our “working memory”- basically your mind’s lab bench. You can work on problems, write, solve math problems- but sooner or later, that project is going to need to be put away or stored, so you can move on to the next thing. Some things get trashed, others get put away for short term or long term storage- and the more interesting things are, the more other pieces of information or relevant connections you can make to the new information, the more “copies” are put away in different folders in your brain. Each time you think about your mom’s cookies for example, you not only can get to this memory from thinking about your mom, seeing a picture, but even seeing a silimar cookie or smelling cookies in the oven can bring this full memory back in all of its sensory glory. This memory has many connections, so you can retrive it from many different storage places, so to speak.
Attention is something we all want. Emotionally, it validates us as people. It allows us to make deeper and more meaningful connections. But if you overload the attention service, things become chaotic- the lab bench has too much stuff going on, and your brain can go so far as to boil over – many temper tantrums in adults and kids are caused by attention buffers beging overloaded and going into meltdown, or in entreme cases, people simply go to sleep to knock out the background noise, explaining why babies often simply go to sleep even in noisy shopping malls- their attention system gets overloaded, they get cranky, and respond by shutting off and sleeping.
If you really want to get ahead in the world of marketing, in the world of PR, presentation, education- whatever, really- it wouldn’t hurt to start by understanding how you can get and then focus the inborn attention mechanism we all have. Then you can start to figure out how to sustain it, encode information into memory, and make it useful and relevant for your audience.
John Medina has a great book out about the Brain that I really think everyone should read- it’s called Brain Rules, and I have links to it below. You could do worse than to learn how to use and manipulate the one tool every human has with them every day.
*See Brain Rules, by John Medina, for more in depth discussion about the brain and science- I’m really enjoying the Audible version. His website is incredibly helpful as well.
Tags: ADHD, analogies, attention, brain rules, education, focus, John medina, marketing, PR
Posted by Whitney on Feb 15, 2009 in
Uncategorized My kids have ADHD. I have ADHD. Having a background in developmental biology, I’ve been fascinated to learn how this whole attention thing works, and how you can manipulate attention in yourself and others. I think the reasons are obvious- if your attention is jumpy, if it’s like hanging around with someone who keeps changing the TV channels just as you start to get into a show, figuring how to wrestle that control away from someone else and learning how to control your own focus, as you want, is critical. Likewise, if you want to make sure people watch or pay attention where you want them to, knowing how to capture and sustain attention is going to be important. If I want my kids, for example, to focus on their homework, we have to provide hooks and incentives to make sure they get it done. Moral compunction only works for so long. In the end, sustaining their attention means finding way to give them a bigger context for what their learning- to make it more meaningful, interesting and relevant to them.
In the marketing world, or in the world in general, you have two big problems. The first is how to attract attention, and the second is what to do with it once you’ve got it.
The first step, gaining attention, requires you making enough noise, or getting notice or promoted by the right people. This is what Seth Godin means when he talks about making something remarkable- you have to do something worth while talking about and passing along. This means you have to have a product that is relevant and meaningful to the people you want to talk about it. If you have a crap product, a crap service, or something that does not stand out, you won’t be able to attract attention or sustain it for very long. Let’s assume for a second you have a remarkable product. Let’s assume you have a plan in place to gain the attention you seek.
Step Two requires sustaining attention. That means that people who have cared in Step One are willing to talk about your product/service/idea, and pass it around to others. It means that the people your evangelists talk to will find the service/product/idea as remarkable as the evangelists did. This means you need authentic, real opinions- the kind you can’t just pay for. If you can’t get anyone to like your product without a significant bribe/incentive, you should consider whether or not that means you have a flaw in your product. You won’t be able to sustain any sort of attention if the product isn’t relevant and doesn’t encourage people to spread the word. And if the only way you can spread the word is by bribing people to do so, you’ll never know if you have a real audience- maybe you’ll only have a purchased one.
If your product/service/idea gains momentum, it may become self-sustaining. Look at the case of the Fail Whale on twitter. The Fail Whale was a piece of art at iStockPhoto.com, adopted b y the Twitter people to show when twitter was over the limit and having “issues”. It became a somewhat beloved icon, and has even won awards for great design, now leading to a Fail Whale fan club and even making some money through swag for the original artist. The artist never went into this with the thought that her painting would be an icon for the internet- it just ended up happening that way in an organic fashion over time. The artwork caught someone’s attention, became propagated through Twitter, and now has spawned kinetic sculptures, gear, fans and more. The fail whale may not need any additional attention or marketing to make it more famous- but it sure has served to get the artist more attention than she ever dreamed of otherwise- giving her a platform for future work. You could not have done this by trying to make it famous through a blogger outreach program, through placed advertizing or anything else. It was organic growth, oure and simple, in the truest sense of Word of Mouth.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand. Attention, and its first cousin, motivation, are things we all have to understand when we think about how to spread the word about our ideas or products. In a perfect marketplace of ideas, we hope the best ones rise to the top, and the worst ones are buried. But even mediocre ideas can catch on (how else can you explain Chia Pets??) if you have can catch someone’s attention and sustain it long enough to convert that attention to a sale.
It’s always going to be more than wrapping up your ideas in pretty packages and bows and ribbons- but even good ideas need a bit of attention-grabbing before they’ll catch on. Otherwise, they are nothing more than one of many ideas floating around, hoping and praying for a bit of attention, from someone- anyone. This is where relevance comes in.
Lots of ideas are interesting- but it’s the ones with relevance that we glom onto and hang onto. I know for me, personally, there are lots of ideas I have simmering on the back burner- things that have caught my attention, but aren’t of immediate relevance or importance. But then something happens, my needs change, and that back burner idea or project is right there, just waiting to be acted on- like finding something terrific in your pantry- it’s been there all the time, just waiting for you to take notice and act. This trigger from base-level awareness to action isn’t always easy to find.
For example- Why did I go off and buy a new digital recorder when I already have one? Well, I needed one that would take a standard microphone XLR cable for a class I was teaching. I knew the Zoom H4 had such a jack, but having an H2, I didn’t really see a need for the H4 until this specific set of circumstances occurred to make it relevant in my life. What I had worked fine; but the H4 solved a problem, and it was my ambient awareness that this would solve my problem- that it was relevant to me, that made the sale. No one could have done anything to make me make this decision any sooner.
So you can’t force anyone to convert from a browser to a customer until it’s relevant to them. You can be in their attention sphere, you can make a case for why you can be relevant and solve their problems, but until they really need to solve that problem now, no amount of attention-getting will guarantee that conversion.
So for all of you who are considering whether endorsements sell products, you have to recognize that endorsements and advertising only help gain attention- they sow the seeds- whether or not they will germinate is really not up to you- that’s up to your customers alone. if you understand then what attention is and what it does, perhaps it will help you be more realistic about ROI. For conversion, you need to concentrate much more on motivation and relevance- attention is only one piece of the bigger pie.
Tags: attention, ideas, marketing, motivatio, relevance
Posted by Whitney on Jun 12, 2008 in
Uncategorized Chris Penn has a great blog post about online marketing web strategy we should all read and take to heart.
In essence, Chris tells us that the product comes first, the advertising comes last.
Whether you intend to market yourself, your company, a product, a service- it doesn’t matter. The very first thing you need to concentrate on is the quality of the “widget” you want to market. If the “widget” isn’t the best it can be, if it isn’t worth remarking on, than no dog-and-pony show of marketing will make it any better than it is.
The Cheeseburger Doritos Fiasco
About a year or so ago, I wandered into the local supermarket, and there was a bag of snacks called Doritos Flavor X-14. You were supposed to buy them, try them, guess the flavor, and go online to tell Doritos more about the flavor- it was a very video-game like environment, and was pretty cool. I even liked the whole mystery flavor experiment. I bought this chips and tried the whole thing out, impressed by the marketing scheme as much as anything else.
The core problem here was that cheeseburger is a lousy flavor for Doritos or any chip. It ended up tasting more like a charcoal briquette with ketchup as anything else. No amount of cool marketing would make me go back and buy that chip again. You might say that they got me to buy one bag, and that was the end goal. However, if you have lost my trust by this weird marketing misstep, I am not coming back, and I may even be less inclined to buy your current products, which are just fine.
The bottom line here is that great marketing can never make up for a bad product. If you have a fantastic, remarkable product, you may want to market it to get it to a wider audience, but no amount of marketing will actually improve a lousy product- it will, at best, give you a modest return as you dupe people into believing you- but their loyalty and return visits won’t pan out for you. The word of mouth about you and your product will start to turn, and making up for that loss of trust will take much longer than waiting and marketing your product when it’s ready for prime time.
it’s really hard not to talk about the things that excite you. It’s next to impossible to keep some great innovations under wraps, because people are eager to be surprised and engaged, and if you have a great thing going, the word will travel quickly. As a business, you may need to identify influencers and the people who act as social nodes into a bigger community, but word of mouth will spread, if you have something worth discussing and mentioning.
So there’s no need to rush the publicity part of the program- wait until you have the underlying product in great shape, whether it’s yourself, your show, product, service or whatever- think it out beforehand and be ready.
Marketing before the product exists will only frustrate everyone, especially your future business partners and clients, so wait. Talk about your ideas with friends and colleagues to get initial feedback, but don’t open the social media and marketing flood gates until you are really ready. Marketing is the decorating or staging of a house to help it sell; It’ the window displays, the eye-catching moment of attention, that gives you permission to give someone more information. It’s important, but you don;t want that attention all the time, and certainly not before you are ready to go.
As my mom used to say about teens in low cut garments, complaining about getting too much of the wrong kind of attention: “Don’t market if you aren’t selling.” In the business context, this also means don’t market until you are actually ready to sell, and then don’t be surprised by the overwhelming positive response you receive.
Tags: foundations, marketing, social media, window dressing
