P Morgan Brown

5 TED Talks Every Marketer Must Watch

February 8th, 2010 Comments

If you’re a marketer and serious about improving not only your craft but how your profession impacts the world around you then you must watch these 5 TED talks and share them with fellow marketers and human beings around you. They will get you thinking, they will get you working harder and most importantly, they will get you caring more. If there’s a talk you love that I’ve missed please leave it in the comments!

Malcolm Gladwell on Spaghetti Sauce

Gladwell, best selling author of The Tipping Point and Blink talks about the pursuit for the perfect spaghetti sauce and how looking outside your preconceived limitations can pay huge dividends. Gladwell makes you think and his stories take a small application and suggest big ramifications. I love reading his work and listening to him speak; because every time you do you have a little moment of eureka that makes you better.

David Pogue Says “Simplicity Sells”‘

If you’re responsible for product design and development, particularly in technology, Web services or consumer electronics you need to watch this video. Simplicity is elegant and sophisticated. Simplicity is what has made the iPod, Twitter and countless other devices best sellers. Removing features, making things easier, more intuitive and consumer friendly. As Twitter founder Evan Williams said “What can we take away to create something new?”

Tim Brown encourages designers to think bigger

Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, has presided over some of the most incredible “design” work in the world. IDEO is the leader when it comes to design thinking, especially their work put into the idea of Human Centered Design. In this talk Tim Brown encourages designers to think bigger – like not how to build a better ship, but how to move people from one city on one continent to one city on another. It’s amazing what you can achieve when you remember it’s ok, in fact critical, to think big.

Dan Pink on the Surprising Science of Motivation

Best selling author Dan Pink dives into what makes us tick. He uses a great psychology experiment called the candle problem to show how many of our corporate rewards diminish creative thought. If you’re in leadership in marketing, or you’re wondering how to get the best out of people around you watch this talk and read his new book “Drive.” Also, make sure to read “A Whole New Mind” his earlier work on the rise of the creative class – a must read.

Elizabeth Gilbert on Nuturing Creativity

The best selling author of Eat, Pray, Love talks about coping with the pressure of creativity and success and the idea that maybe we’re not entirely responsible for our creative successes and failures. What I like about this talk is that it takes a very humble person to disown success or lay success at another place than our own feet. I also like how she talks about dealing with the pressure of being creative for a living and how it’s ok when we’re not creative.

Seth Godin on Tribes We Lead

And what would a marketing talk at TED be without a bonus one from Seth Godin? So here’s a bonus sixth one.

The Process Matters

January 25th, 2010 Comments

I was reminded of one of my favorite fables involving Pablo Picasso and the 5 minute portrait tonight after a visit to the doctor’s with my son.

Fable copy via 37signals:

Legend has it that Pablo Picasso was sketching in the park when a bold woman approached him.

“It’s you — Picasso, the great artist! Oh, you must sketch my portrait! I insist.”

So Picasso agreed to sketch her. After studying her for a moment, he used a single pencil stroke to create her portrait. He handed the women his work of art.

“It’s perfect!” she gushed. “You managed to capture my essence with one stroke, in one moment. Thank you! How much do I owe you?”

“Five thousand dollars,” the artist replied.

“B-b-but, what?” the woman sputtered. “How could you want so much money for this picture? It only took you a second to draw it!”

To which Picasso responded, “Madame, it took me my entire life.”

We (my ex-wife and I) took our son to see an ENT (ear, nose, throat) specialist because of some fluid behind his ear drums which makes it hard for him to hear soft noises. The doctor was very efficient. Asked a few questions, looked quickly in my son’s ears and in this throat (I think for a total of 2 minutes, max) and then said “we should take his tonsils out.” You could see my ex reeling a bit as she tried to slow down the doctor to get a better understanding of what that meant and why after such a quick examination she could make such a “drastic” recommendation.

It was the Pablo Picasso fable all over again. And at the end of it (10 minutes later) my ex said “I’m glad she won’t be doing the surgery, she’s cold,” and it struck me how little the doctor’s expertise mattered at that point to my ex. The efficiency, the expertise actually hurt my ex’s impression of the doctor. And why was that? Because the doctor didn’t make us a part of the process. The process, the thinking, the decision making, was all hidden out of view. We weren’t part of the process, just like the lady in the sketch and it negatively impacted the experience, even when the result is “correct” or appropriate.

It hit me. Process is everything.

Your satisfaction with the end result is directly tied to the process you went through to get there. When we short circuit the process or hide it from our customer’s view we don’t let them participate. We don’t let them collaborate, we don’t let them experience the value that we bring through what we do. And when we fail to do that the end is always less satisfying.

You can see it with Picasso and the doctor. If both of them had taken more time, had invested more interest, had made the customer part of the process and made that process visible and understandable the customer, with the same exact end result, would’ve been much happier. Now art is tough, creativity is rarely process driven; but the doctor has no excuse. Neither do the rest of us.

What can you do to highlight the process and the value it brings so that your customers feel more ownership of the end result? The more you make them a part of it the more satisfaction they’ll get at the end.

Hang in the Question

January 24th, 2010 Comments

It’s amazing the number of “brainstorming” meetings I’m in that fail to inspire any truly creative solutions at their conclusion. And it’s a big problem. Brainstorming meetings are expensive. Take the hourly rate of the people packed into the meeting space multiplied by the amount of time spent, and you have yourself an expensive session with a negative return on investment. If you’re like me you’ve probably felt that same underwhelming feeling when you walk out of another one of these lackluster meetings. And if you’re like me, you’re probably trying to figure out how to fix them.

I think you fix brainstorming sessions by hanging in the question.

We’re often in too much of a hurry to reach a decision. To solve the problem. To find an answer which everyone agrees on. To get on with our busy work lives and out of another meeting. And this, in the instance of brainstorming, actually hurts our results. Because our desire to solve the problem hones our focus to the most visible solution. The low-hanging fruit, if you will. And because it’s readily visible other people reach the same point quickly too, creating consensus and forming a decision.

But is that the right thing to do? What if we hung in the question longer? What if instead of accepting the most visible solution as the consensus pick, we put it aside and kept pushing? What if we truly brainstormed in an environment where all ideas were welcomed and more solutions were proposed? What if there was more discourse, different ways of looking at things, and more spontaneity? I believe we’d get higher-quality thinking, and more often than not, we’d end up with higher-quality solutions to our problems.

So the next time your’e in a brainstorming session challenge yourself and your colleagues to hang in the question a little while longer. Even if you all agree to the obvious solution, put it aside and explore other possibilities. Even if you come back to the first choice it will be good practice.

The idea of “hanging with the question” comes from Think Better: An Innovator’s Guide to Productive Thinking (affiliate link).

Location and Lifestyle Design

January 22nd, 2010 Comments

In a recent post, Andrew Hyde announced his location-based suicide. Recent stalking incidents left him believing that the personal safety and privacy risks of location sharing outweigh the benefits. It’s a common concern that I hear among non-early adopters and particularly women – and for good reason. There are people out there that will use this information in ways you don’t want them to. His post, however, finally inspired me to write this one, which is not about how other people use location based information; but how we can use it to impact how we design our life.

Lifestyle design is a term coined by Tim Ferris in The Four Hour Workweek, and its definition according to Wikipedia is:

Lifestyle Design is the design of one’s ideal lifestyle, especially an unconventional one, providing good opportunities for personal growth, leisure and adventure. Detailed methods include: career planning, entrepreneurship and travel.

I’ve used Foursquare since its launch at SXSW last year and enjoy the game of it, unlocking badges, earning points, etc. Lately I have been paying a lot of attention to where I check in, and more importantly, become mayor. Because in this data lie answers to my lifestyle and, I believe my overall happiness and health. I believe that these answers are an important part of location applications and services. Using them to see what you’re doing and what patterns and habits you’ve established and then evaluating your choices and adjusting your decisions going forward.

For example I recently noted that I was mayor of the following places (note these are all in Orange County, CA except where noted):

Ralph’s supermarket
Del Taco
Taco Bell
Chipotle
Walmart
Costco
Panda Express
McDonald’s
Fatburger
John Wayne Airport
Woodfin Hotel Emeryville, CA
Starbucks Emeryville, CA

There are more, but I think it’s pretty easy to see a pattern in my mayorships. It’s more than a pattern, it’s more like a sad commentary on my life. It’s also an eye opener. Now, a man’s mayorships do not necessarily define the man; but there is something to be said for the choices I’ve been making out of convenience or habit and my overall health and happiness.

Since reviewing this list I’ve decided that I’m in serious need of a dose of lifestyle design recalibration. A recalibration focusing on exploration, sampling local fare and shaking myself out of the comfortably numb routine that I’ve fallen into lately – one primarily made up of airports and fast food restaurants.

This self awareness is a powerful feature of location awareness. We have the ability to reflect, to look at our actions over time, evaluate small choices that don’t seem like much individually, but add up to habits that we’d probably rather not have when all is said and done. So I’m using Foursquare now to help shape my life in the way I want, which is to experiment with more local restaurants, to get out of my habits and try new things.

In addition to helping improve my personal lifestyle I expect it to improve my ability to think creatively, to view new solutions, to be more willing to try something new and take risks, to get comfortable feeling uncomfortable. I believe that these are all powerful and valuable opportunities.

Would I have realized this without Foursquare? Maybe. But it might’ve taken a change in pant size before it clicked. Now I know much faster. So while Foursquare and location have it’s downsides, it’s important to look for other non-obvious benefits. I plan on using it to make sure I’m not the mayor of too many places I’d rather not be; and instead focus on getting out of my routine and seeing what’s out there. I encourage you to do the same.

What’s the problem?

January 20th, 2010 Comments

As a marketer you always need to be asking yourself “What’s the problem my [product/service/company] is trying to solve for the customer?” This is the simplest, easiest way to figure out the best way to talk about what you do in terms of providing a solution for your customers. It’s easy to look at your product and say it solves whatever is the opposite of what it does. But that is company-centric thinking, not customer-centric. You need to solve a real problem from the customer perspective, not just a problem that that matches up perfectly with your product/service. Stop short of identifying that and you’ll be trying to identify where all of your sales are.

But not every product or service solves a problem you say? You point to the iPod and say that it was just a well designed gadget. You point to Starbucks and say that it was just an overpriced cup of coffee. I say you aren’t looking hard enough. The iPod serves a very real problem brought on by the digital music revolution. It elegantly solved the problem of purchasing and managing music from your computer to your MP3 player. Starbucks solved the problem of making people feel connected to one another and their community. They solved the problem of a communal meeting area where people were free to lounge, converse and share experiences over coffee.

Both were problems that aren’t easily visible. Both probably aren’t the first problem that come to mind. And that is the second challenge.

The problem Starbucks solved wasn’t that there wasn’t any good coffee out there. If they just went after that one they would’ve found themselves in a commodity industry, fighting with Dunkin’ Donuts over the cheapest mega-sized coffee they could offer. Instead, they solved something much more important and were rewarded because of it.

As a marketer you have to dig for the essence of the problem you’re trying to solve. Often times your customers can’t even consciously identify the problem, but when they see the solution they know they needed it all along. And some problems they don’t even know they have at all until you present it in a way that grabs their attention and spurs them to action to resolving this suddenly very real problem.

So what is the problem your product or service solves? And is it really what it seems to be at first blush, or can you dig deeper and get to something much more profound and important. Because without a problem, there is no need. And without a need you severely cripple the demand for whatever you’re selling.

Are you high fidelity or high convenience?

January 18th, 2010 Comments

In his book, Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don’t, (affiliate link) Kevin Maney examines the importance of being either exceptionally convenient or exceptionally high fidelity if you hope to resonate with consumers. If you’re somewhere in the middle, look out. You’ll get clobbered by one end or the other. As a marketer it’s important to evaluate your product and see where, on that continuum, you fall. And if you’re in the middle you need a product plan to get the hell out of there or suffer the consequences.

Maney got this idea from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings who saw that consumers would trade ultimate convenience for less quality, and vice versa; but were unwilling to settle for the middle ground. To continue this example, Netflix is the ultimate in convenience, movies are mailed to you or streamed right to your TV. You don’t go anywhere, they come to you. On the other end is IMAX, stadium seating movie theaters. This is inconvenient. Movies play at prescribed times that you have to plan for, you need to drive to get there, and you pay an exceptional premium for the privilege.

But guess what? Both parts of the industry are thriving. The super-high end and the super-low end.

Guess what’s getting killed? You guessed it. The middle. The Blockbuster Video and Hollywood Videos of the world. Things that are a little more convenient than the theatres – you can take one of many movies home with you – but not so convenient – you still have to drive there and back – and it’s not so much better than watching a movie on HBO in terms of fidelity. This middle ground is what is killing Blockbuster.

The recipe for failure today? A little convenience, a little fidelity. The market no longer has room for moderation when it comes to new products and services.

So what can you do to move your product one way or the other? That answer may be the difference in making your product or company a success or making it one that we wonder what happened to it.

Rewarding Hard Work Rewards the Wrong Thing

January 17th, 2010 Comments

Hard work and good work. Two things that should be rewarded and are. But sometimes I believe we place more reward on hard work then on good work. I think this is backwards, and it hurts companies more than they know.

It goes something like this. Stay late, get rewarded. Deliver a day ahead of a deadline, get rewarded. Create a great design in half a day and cut out early? Well, the boss wants to know, what else could you have done with that extra 30 minutes?

It doesn’t always happen like this, and, in the long run, good work is what is rewarded, by the market. But for the day-to-day it’s the martyrs that tend to get the kudos. Regardless of whether that extra work is of any real benefit to the company at all.

Why is this? I think it’s two fold. One, good work is much harder to do than hard work. Hard work, ironically, is the easiest pursuit in business. It’s easy to put your head down and grind out a ten hour workday. Much easier, than say, creating a product that resonates with your audience. Two, it is exceedingly hard to evaluate good work as it is happening; to the point where it’s easier to revert back to the tried and true, and ask “how hard are they working?”

In this TED talk Daniel Pink, author of the new book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (affiliate link) describes a fascinating study call the “Candle Problem” wherein a group of people motivated by financial rewards based on performance (speed in this case) perform worse at solving the problem than those without any incentive to solve it as fast as possible.

And I believe that this thinking, that rewards for metrics like speed and volume over quality, is what ruins many work places and diminishes the value of the employees that work there. For example, it’s been said that Apple’s upcoming tablet computer has been in prototype for at least 6 or 7 years. Never quite ready for the big time in the world of high Apple standards. Is there any question that it will crush the slew of PC-based tablets just released at CES last week in order to get “ahead” of the Apple launch? There shouldn’t be. Apple will own the dominant tablet device.

Now, do you think that the product managers and designers on the tablet are more worried about making the tablet their life’s work, or shipping something quickly? The answer is obvious. Apple values good over hard or fast or any other attribute. More and more the successful companies are the ones that value good thought and products over hard work and speed.

It’s not that hard work and speed to market aren’t important. Of course they are. But on a continuum of business priority in what order do they fall and in what way are they rewarded? Is good thought rewarded above hard work? Is it even rewarded in the same way that hard work is? Highly doubtful. Highly foolish.

So back to you. When is the last time you evaluated how you reward your people? If successful companies are more successful at rewarding good thought over hard work, it seems imperative that your people are rewarded the same way.

What if there was no one to tell you no?

January 16th, 2010 Comments

What if there was no one to tell you no? How would that change your job? What would you different? What if the way things ran in your business/department/division was your call? What if there wasn’t the excuse of someone telling you no to hold you back. What would you do right now? I’m betting that for most of you it’s different then what you’re doing right now. It’s probably more interesting and exciting as well. It probably pushes the envelope and redefines the way your company thinks about itself and how it interacts with your customers.

It’s probably a really good idea. It probably won’t get the thought it deserves.

I think we’re often too quick to kill our most creative ideas. It’s easy to look at how the corporate bureaucracy grinds down true innovation and give up before you even really get started. Why waste time and energy even thinking about an idea when time and again you’ve seen exciting ideas replaced with middle of the road compromises that feel and look safe? Why try, when it is so clear that your idea faces long, long odds? It’s easier to just go with the flow and shelve that idea for another, safer time.

This is a grave mistake.

As marketers it’s our job to continue to not only got to the well for great ideas time and time again; but it’s also our job to fight for our ideas, to champion new ways of doing things that make our businesses better and our customers happier. It’s our job to keep envisioning what it would be like if there wasn’t anyone to say “no.”

When an idea dies or gets watered down it is not an occasion to give up on innovating – it is a call to push even harder.

Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the highly-regarded ad agency sums it up best in their employee handbook:

It takes a special person to succeed here, one who has a passion, confidence and work ethic to believe in their ability to come up with more great ideas if and when their original great idea dies. And ideas do die here. On every account. In every department. Great, groundbreaking ideas die horribly sad deaths. But what makes us better than most is our ability to go back to the well and come up with more, better and even greater ideas.

This is the charge of every marketer. Keep the innovative ideas, the ones that would see the light of day without the naysayers, coming. Over and over again. In the face of probable defeat, that is the job of the great marketer. Because the next idea may just be the one that changes everything.

The Problem with Minimum Viable Product

January 8th, 2010 Comments

If you work in the online space long enough you run across the idea of “minimum viable product” (MVP). The MVP is the minimum product design/functionality that you can launch with that will give you the learning you need about your customers with the least amount of time and resources poured into the project. It’s an important concept that stresses speed to market, agile development, and iteration on the learnings to build toward your ideal product.

Eric Ries (who I can’t recommend reading enough) has an excellent description of the MVP:

The idea of minimum viable product is useful because you can basically say: our vision is to build a product that solves this core problem for customers and we think that for the people who are early adopters for this kind of solution, they will be the most forgiving. And they will fill in their minds the features that aren’t quite there if we give them the core, tent-pole features that point the direction of where we’re trying to go.

So, the minimum viable product is that product which has just those features (and no more) that allows you to ship a product that resonates with early adopters; some of whom will pay you money or give you feedback.

The problem with the MVP is that too often companies launch the MVP and then don’t build the roadmap to come back and take it to the next level. The business demands leave you with a string of unfinished, unpolished products. And while they meet the basic requirements of the early adpoting users they hamstring you trying to jump the chasm to the mainstream audience.

If you don’t have a road map in place to come back and continue to iterate on your MVPs you create a series of unpolished products which stop meeting the demands of your audience as more people outside the early adopting crowd try your product or service.

As you’re running you end up with an island of misfit toys which ultimately frustrate your customers.

While the MVP is a great concept, and keeps you from waiting too long to launch (and overdesigning for a non-existent audience) it can come back to bite you if you don’t consciously build a road map to improve it after the launch. So if you’re launching a new online service or product and you’re using the MVP approach do you have the time line, road map and resources lined up to take it to the next level once you learn what your customers really want?

Flying the Plane

January 6th, 2010 Comments

I spend a lot of time on airplanes lately. My Foursquare mayorship of John Wayne airport can attest to that. Every time I walk by the cockpit I’m amazed at the instruments and dashboards that pilots deal with on an everyday basis. It struck me again yesterday while I was sitting in a meeting with my CEO who was talking about our company dashboard and using it to “fly the plane.”

I think it’s a great metaphor. Every smart business uses a dashboard to track their progress towards their business goals. Whether it’s paying customers, new leads, subscription rate, average revenue per customer (ARPU), there are important metrics that help you see how you’re flying your business before you get to the destination (business objective, quarterly revenue/profit goals, etc.) You can get down a couple of clicks by drilling down into dashboards for marketing or PR or operational cost, and then further into email open rates and clickthroughs and contact rate and call handle times.

The goal though is to find a dashboard that fits your needs. Here the analogy works again: flying a plane is a lot more difficult than driving a car, so in addition to the car’s fuel, speed and engine heat dashboard you have things like altitude, wind speed, navigation, cabin pressure and hundreds more. If your business is large and complex you’ll naturally have more indicators that you need to track; but if you’re a sole proprietor of small business owner there may be just a handful of indicators that tell you all you need to know.

The important thing is to find the balance between the amount of information you need and the frequency with which you need it. If you have too much information it can become mud. Even worse is if it creates too much work for you to keep up on a regular basis. At the opposite end, too little data won’t reveal critical information that can help you keep your business on the right track.

The goal of course is to find that right balance that gives you timely information about the key drivers of your business so that you can get a better sense of what is happening to your business with enough time to do something about it.

So what does your dashboard look like and does it have the right amount of information on it so that you know how you’re flying the plane?

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