Lightpierce: Core

A firm grip on the market

Church of the Customer blog makes some good points about “free marketing” with the following video,

Jackie uses this video to make a compelling argument for giving away stuff to build an audience. However, I think basically the same thing would have occurred if the hugs were being sold for profit at a reasonable cost.

• Find a favorable market for your product (in this case, a mall safe enough to approach strangers for a hug)
• Employ a safe, approachable and friendly marketing strategy — hugs are intimate things, after all
• Be persistent
• Have an unyielding belief your product is what the market needs and wants
• Get lucky in finding the one person who will trust in you and your product and influence others to do the same

If there was one thought I’ve ever pulled from Jim Collin’s book, “From Good to Great” it was the idea of building momentum, or what he referred to as the flywheel effect,

…picture a huge, heavy flywheel. It’s a massive, metal disk mounted horizontally on an axle. It’s about 100 feet in diameter, 10 feet thick, and it weighs about 25 tons. That flywheel is your company. Your job is to get that flywheel to move as fast as possible, because momentum—mass times velocity—is what will generate superior economic results over time.

Right now, the flywheel is at a standstill. To get it moving, you make a tremendous effort. You push with all your might, and finally you get the flywheel to inch forward. After two or three days of sustained effort, you get the flywheel to complete one entire turn. You keep pushing, and the flywheel begins to move a bit faster. It takes a lot of work, but at last the flywheel makes a second rotation. You keep pushing steadily. It makes three turns, four turns, five, six. With each turn, it moves faster, and then—at some point, you can’t say exactly when—you break through. The momentum of the heavy wheel kicks in your favor. It spins faster and faster, with its own weight propelling it. You aren’t pushing any harder, but the flywheel is accelerating, its momentum building, its speed increasing.

This is the Flywheel Effect. It’s what it feels like when you’re inside a company that makes the transition from good to great.

If anything, the free hug video is, to me, more of an example of pure marketing gaining momentum than it is in the power of free.

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Hilarious Goals: The Joke’s on Them

There’s a good deal of attention being paid to a 1995 Newsweek article by Clifford Stoll these days.

From the article,

Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney.

Of course with these thoughts, Stoll soon became the punchline of the then hilarious goals of visionaries who were bold enough to swim upstream through the prevailing laughter and ridicule of inadequate knowledge, unproven experience and unavailable technology of the day, to completely change the tide of our experiences.

Want to achieve hilarious goals? Stop measuring your vision against the known of today and the proven of yesterday. Pursue your passion and do it. Finally, understand that while they may laugh at you today, the joke will be on them tomorrow.

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Fruit Salad, the great connector

Tonight’s the first time I’ve caught the show “Carpoolers” on ABC. I’ve always been aware of the show, but never found any motivation to watch — until tonight’s episode.

While channel surfing earlier this evening to just have some ambient noise while doing some work, I stopped momentarily on ABC for no real reason other than my attention being diverted away from the television remote. In that moment of time, a scene came on where one of the characters, Aubrey, is taking his little girl to take you daughter to work day, and she is riding along with the other adult members of the carpool.

The moment that caught my attention was the little girl singing the “fruit salad, yummy yummy” song by the Wiggles. I was instantly hooked, and now totally diverted from what I was doing, to focus on the show.

I have two small children, and they love the Wiggles. Additionally, the Wiggles are the one child-based act that doesn’t disturb me with their content or just annoy the tar out of me with cuteness. That connection with the familiar, hooked me into the show. It wasn’t my familiarity with the product, nor the design of the packaging. I didn’t care about any of the industry reviews and reviews by my peers didn’t sway any interest in me.

It was a moment in a scene that played a snippet of a goofy song about fruit salad that brought back fun memories of my children growing up. The show connected with me.

There’s an important lesson to be learned in there, somewhere.

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It’s time to put some real context into advertising

I just came across an interesting post over at MarketingProfs Daily Fix about a company called Neurofocus, “an innovative company applying the latest advances in neuroscience to the world of advertising and messaging.”According to Ted Mininni’s article at MarketingProfs, the Nielsen Company apparently is looking to partner with Neurosoft and their capability to track consumer brain responses to various product touchpoints at 2,000 per second, stating that,

“…“This alliance will enable us to gather truly unique insights about consumers’ attitudes and behavior about which they themselves may not even be fully aware and will complement our other measures of consumer behavior.”… 

Sigh.

Does marketing and advertising really need to be this complex? Or can it still work with just a simple formula of community, familiarity, confidence and convenience, just like it did for generations before us who didn’t have to don a sensor loaded cap (or ask anyone to) in order to guage an experience.

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If you want something done right…

If you want something done right, do it yourself!

We’ve all heard that at some point in our lives — we’ve probably muttered it ourselves in the direction of our source of aggravation a time or two as well…why isn’t he getting it? Out of frustration, we usually just take over the task and do it, unnecessarily increasing our own workload and possibly adding an unwarranted burden to our deadline.

However, let’s think about this for a minute. If someone is seemingly just not getting it, is it a sign that the subject of your frustration is truly dense, or could it because of the role model leading him? What if we took the statement, “if you want something done right, do it yourself” and turned it inwards to ourselves, approaching it instead from the viewpoint of a “do as I do” standpoint?

For example, from our very earliest days of childhood, we all learned and reflected back the model of behavior and environment presented to us. Positive role models, environments and balanced control usually get things accomplished. Constant nagging and lectures on correct behaviors by our parents and other senior people, however, are largely ignored because of the negative feelings attached to them.

For me, the idea of this came while working at my study, and having my children tug constantly at my arm for something. My response would be, “just a minute, let me finish this” or “I can’t right now”. Invariably the situation would turn around a mere few hours later, when I would have to tell the kids numerous times that it was time to go to bed. Their non-verbal response, as they were dazed by the glow of the television monitor, being the same “let me finish this first” as I had unwittingly taught them earlier. Except in this case, I was the boss, and they had no choice but to comply now.

So what’s the bottom line? If you want others to buy into your great idea, then be excited and knowledgeable about what you’re selling. If you want things done now, lose the phrase “just a minute” from your own vocabulary. Create and constantly build a “One Another” culture, setting expectations not with words and compliance dictates, but rather with your own behavior and responses.

Do unto them, as you would have them do unto you, and you’ll get things done more efficiently, effectively and effortlessly.

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This post is a rework of an article originally posted at Squint in May of 2006. 

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