The problem with assumptions is that they always come with blind spots.
The friendlier and human a company is, the more potential for success it will have. This goes back to the theory that the company with the least amount of assholes wins. I think it goes without saying that unfriendly, emotionally disconnected, self-interested employees (and managers) always act as hurdles to internal collaboration, process improvement and the adoption of new ideas. They build walls. They create silos. They are agents of “no.”
Friendly companies are created by friendly employees and friendly management. Great customer experiences (whether they come in the form of great customer service or simply pleasant shopping adventures) begin with a culture of “we give a shit.” These customer-centric companies understand the need for fluid internal collaboration and the continuous improvement of process that affect, somewhere down the line, consumers’ perception of the brand.
But is that enough?
Consider the following two lists, and ask yourself which company you would rather buy your products from:
Company A:
It’s a great place to work.
I read an article about how cross-functional teams brainstorm to develop new products.
They offer trainees $5,000 to quit their first week. No one ever takes the money.
They have awesome customer service.
Returns are never a problem. They treat you so nicely.
I love shopping there.
Their CMO seems like a really cool guy on Twitter.
Company B:
I’ve heard it’s kind of a revolving door there.
Made in China, I think.
They have horrible customer service.
Have fun getting them to send you a replacement.
The lines at their stores are a pain.
I have no idea who their CMO is. He sure isn’t on Twitter.
Obviously, Company A probably has a market advantage, right?
Maybe. What if Company B makes much cooler products?
What if Company B’s products are equal in every way to Company A’s but at a much lower price?
That changes the equation a bit, doesn’t it? Now, Company B might become far more competitive (and successful) in spite of all of the negatives listed above.
Now let me throw in a twist: What if, against all logic, Company B’s process actually requires an antisocial environment in order to produce cooler products? What if it requires a quasi-tyrannical leadership and hermetically-sealed silos in order to be successful? What if becoming a “social business” actually ended up hurting it?
Under Steve and Walt, Apple and Disney weren’t exactly examples of what a “social business” should be, and yet they became, in spite of many of the things that the social business model preaches, enormous successes. They changed technology. They changed entertainment. They changed culture. They changed the world for the better.
How can this be?
Would Apple and Disney have been better off with a stable of bloggers and community managers on their payroll? Twitter accounts? Facebook pages? Youtube channels? Foursquare promotions? Would they have been better off if Steve and Walt had been avid proponents of “social business” ideals, flat organizations and cowdsource-driven product design? Really?
I want you to think about that for a minute, before you go back to reading blog post after blog post about the coming “social business” revolution and all the good it will bring to the world. It just isn’t that simple. Becoming a social business doesn’t necessarily help a businesses create more value for anyone or become better at what it does.
Becoming a more social company is not the same as becoming a better company.
I am not at all suggesting that companies are better off ignoring the social space. I wouldn’t dream of ever advising a company to stay off Twitter and Facebook. It would be irresponsible of me to drive a wedge between an organization and the amazing potential that social media has in store for them. BUT, it would be equally irresponsible of me to suggest that trying to become a “social business” is always going to be in their best interest.
If you are a CEO, ask yourself why you really want your business to become “more social.” Is it because you really love your customers? Is it because you are looking for better, faster, cheaper ways to gather consumer insights? Is it because becoming “more social” allows you to increase your reach into social channels? Is it because industry experts told you it’s the thing to do this year? Why are you really focusing on this?
Here’s a better idea for you: Focus on building a better company, not just a more social one. Identify key areas of potential improvement and make those your focus. If social media can help you in this endeavor, then by all means find out how and do it:
Use social technologies to improve your customer service and reduce purchasing barriers.
Use social networks to help more people discover your great products or recommend wonderful employees.
Use social platforms to give your customers a reason to be loyal and act as good will ambassadors for you everywhere they go.
Improve internal collaboration and organizational efficiency.
Infuse your product management groups with insights and ideas from followers and fans.
Use social monitoring tools to identify new opportunities and spot potential threats.
The sky is the limit when it comes to how social media can help you become a better company.
But “being more social” doesn’t, in and of itself, amount to a whole lot. What does that even mean in a business context? Paying someone to hang out on Twitter all day and push out links to marketing content? Write formulaic blog posts to hopefully attract visitors to your website? Hire an agency to manage a Facebook page for you so you appear to be “more social?” Hire a ghost blogger to pretend that your CEO is committed to the social web? What’s the point of any of that? Why waste so much time and energy on pointless bullshit that isn’t benefiting anyone?
Now consider these two questions:
1. Will adopting a “social business” model really help patent-driven, data security conscious companies like Michelin, 3M and Pfizer become more competitive, more successful, and better at what they do?
2. Would adopting a “social business” model have helped Apple and Disney accomplish what they did? Or might it have gotten in the way by creating too much of a distraction or altering internal focus? Might an effort to become more “social” instead of generating brilliant products have worked against Apple and Disney?
Before you answer, consider this: The value of social media adoption and social process integration comes in degrees. Because every company is unique, every company will become more or less “social” based on its needs, capabilities and the dynamics of their internal cultures. Each of them will decide to what extent, and in the service of the improvement of what function, “social” will become part of its process. And guess what: There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
So again…
Question: Should Michelin, 3M and Pfizer, Disney and Apple become more “social?”
Answer: Only to the extent to which they and their customers will benefit from it. That could be a little, a lot, or not at all.
There’s a why question hidden in that Q&A, and a how question as well. You need to help companies answer both if you really want to help them.
Recap.
1. The “social business” ideal doesn’t apply to every business. That’s the problem with ideals: Ideally, they’re great. In reality, the world is messy. Things don’t always work the way we wish they would. “The road to hell,” as they say, “is paved with good intentions.” The road to epic screw-ups is as well. Proceed with clear purpose, and caution will mostly take care of itself.
2. Beware the salesmen of utopia. Selling ideals is one thing. Adapting them to your company’s needs is another entirely. Good consultants should be able to successfully put their advice into practice, not just suggest unrealistic goals and then watch you fumble at an impossible play.
3. If you focus less on “being social” and more on becoming a better company, you will be much better off by the end of the coming fiscal year. If social platforms can help you become that better company, great! Get working on it. If not, don’t sweat it. Focus on what matters, not on the flavor of the moment, no matter how many consultants and tech bloggers come to you carrying buckets of freshly brewed Koolaid.
I want to share a head scratching moment with you for a sec. See if you can figure out what’s going on over at Ferrero (the makers of my beloved Nutella).
First, this article/press release found in The Drumfrom 6 November 2011:
Ferrero is to launch a £6m campaign to promote both flagship brand Ferrero Rocher and the Ferrero Collection.
The 30 second ad, by RKCR/Y&R will launch today (6 November) during Downton Abbey on ITV1, with a second standalone film also set to launch on 21 November.
Entitled ‘Food of the Gods’ the new campaign aims to change consumer attitudes to the brand, to make its range more social, having established the brand as one of quality for special occasions.
> UPDATE (11/30/11): A Ferrero representative contacted me today to let me know that the above statement (“Entitled ‘food of the Gods'”) was removed from the article published by The Drum. The email suggests that The Drum made an error in regards to the campaign’s name. This change affects certain elements of this post as it was written before the change.
Both campaigns will run until Christmas.
Mauro de Felip, marketing director for Ferrero, said: “The launch of these new creative advertising campaigns provides us with an excellent platform to exhibit our market leadership in special sharing and gifting. Both creatives capture the ‘new’ special that is relevant to consumers, and demonstrates our ability as a business to adapt to current market conditions and understand shifting consumer attitudes.” (Source.)
Let that soak in for a minute.
Now… I am a very big fan of Ferrero, and have been since childhood. As a little French boy, I remember their ads, I was raised on their products (my allowance went almost exclusively to Kinder Surprise eggs for many years), and if you have been following this blog and its twitter feed for the last few years, you know how much I dig Nutella – one of Ferrero’s signature products/brands. So you can be assured that I am not writing this post to bash the company or throw them under the bus. I want them to do well. In fact, I want them to do VERY well. Perhaps that is why I notice their mistakes more than mistakes made by companies I don’t really care about: As much as it sucks to see companies do the wrong thing over and over again when you don’t care of they succeed or fail, it is terribly frustrating to watch a company you actually care come off the tracks again and again and again.
Okay. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, read Mauro de Felip’s statement again and let’s look at some of the things keeping Ferrero from being a lot more successful than it already is.
Note: If you are in a hurry, skip 1-4 and go straight to 5 and 6.
Error 1: Brand Identity Disorder.
The folks at Ferrero still think Rocher needs to be a luxury or prestige brand.
Let’s think about what qualities are innate to luxury brands: One is price. The other is exclusivity. You can’t just go to your local CarMax and buy a Bentley. Target doesn’t carry Cartier timepieces. K-Mart doesn’t have a Gucci section. The bakery at Publix, BiLo or Piggly Wiggly doesn’t sell Lenôtre confections.
See where I am going with this? Luxury brands don’t place their products in convenience stores and grimy old grocery stores. Where do I find Ferrero’s products? In the case of Nutella, between the peanut butter and the grape jam squeeze bottles. In the case of Rocher (the gold-wrapped nutty chocolate balls Ferrero considers ), somewhere between the beef jerky and the nail clippers, right by the cash register, or in the chocolate aisle at your local CVS.
Ferrero Rocher is no more a prestige brand than Toblerone. The emphasis of their marketing should be on letting consumers feel like treating themselves to something delicious (and as often as possible) rather than making them feel like they only deserve to enjoy them mostly on special occasions, or when they can afford to spend more on chocolate products than they really want to.
The lesson here is that when you position your product as a luxury product (especially when it isn’t), you screw yourself in 3 ways:
1. You create a socioeconomic disconnect between your market and your product. People can’t relate to it as well as they might a more “down to earth” alternative. That creates a barrier between your product and your market. Your job is to break down barriers between your products and your customers, not erect them.
2. Because your premium pricing can’t bridge the gap between image and actual value, it teaches consumers to look for more budget friendly alternatives. In other words, it makes them buy from the competition instead of from you. This is how you guarantee that your market share will remain stalled for years.
3. Even if your pricing is competitive, too much of an emphasis on building a premium image will give consumers the wrong impression. If consumers believe – before they even walk into a store – that they can’t justify the expense of buying your product, they will stick to more budget-friendly alternatives. This is how you ensure that your consumers’ buy-rate will never increase.
Error 2: Chasing very bad assumptions.
Someone at Ferrero Rocher still seems to think that people feel better about themselves when they spend more money on chocolate than the average consumer. This is true of some consumers IF you are a boutique chocolatier or confectionary, but the moment you a) begin selling your products alongside commodity products in everyday grocery stores and b) try to appeal to the average consumer rather than an exclusive clientele, you’re in the weeds with that theory.
There was a time when it was cool to blow cash on flashy sports cars, mansions and champagne breakfasts just to show off. Here’s the problem: The 80’s are long gone. The average consumer is looking to satisfy a need for the best price possible. Strangely though, Ferrero Rocher ads are still clinging to the same outdated narrative as if the 80’s were still going strong. Only now, we have moved Rocher from the manor house to the outer reaches of Mount Olympus.
Here is a dose of reality the folks at Ferrero probably need to hear: Nobody cares that you are serving mounds of Ferrero Rocher at your house parties, just like the fantasy millionaire models in all of their commercials. It’s a chocolate and nut ball you grabbed at the local Walgreen’s, not caviar from Caspian Sea belugas.
This outdated world view has to be hurting the Ferrero business, especially in a market like the United States, where 99% of consumers look for value and flavor rather than the notion that a chocolate treat will make them look or feel like a billionaire.
As for that billionaire market, the 0.o1%, how many boxes of Ferrero Rocher is it really buying?
Ferrero should be focusing on fighting for relevance and wallet share rather than perpetuating an image that is no longer relevant in today’s world.
I am struck by Mr. de Felip’s admission that the company wants to change perceptions about the brand. That’s terrific. If Mr. de Felip has any hopes of changing perceptions, increasing both market share and boosting monthly sales volume (objective indicators of that change), he and his team need to drop their internal assumptions, go out into the world, and look very closely at how they position the brand from the perspective of 2011 consumers.
Error 3: Holding on to outdated business dogma.
Because it has always been strong for them, the folks at Ferrero Rocher still think the Christmas season is the key to boosting sales. Even today, Ferrero Rocher still places its bets on Christmas season campaigns.
Here’s the problem: Teaching consumers that your product is a seasonal treat is the best way to make sure they won’t think about you for the other 11 months of the year.
The term you are looking for is strategic myopia.
Fortunately, this is an easy fix. Even if Ferrero executives aren’t yet ready to focus on boosting sales for Rocher year round, other holidays can help spread the sales load to all fourquarters instead of just one: How does Ferrero leverage chocolate-rich holidays like Easter, Halloween, Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day? Not well, if at all. My question is why? Time to spread the advertising budget to other holidays and look for alternatives in terms of consumer engagement. (If only someone were to invent digital social networks where consumer communities could be… oh, never mind.)
As for the other 7 months of the year, it isn’t so hard either. With Rocher being pretty much everywhere now, the problem isn’t one of availability or distribution. So what is it?
The answer might be found in the context of the brand’s narrative. It is still so deeply rooted in the Christmas season that Ferrero is simply not top of mind for consumers at any other time during the year.
Think of this process as an internal Google search. When you think about Easter in the US, you think Cadbury eggs and Peeps. Valentine’s Day: Russel Stover, maybe even M&Ms. Halloween: Reese’s, Kit-Kat, Snicker’s, M&M’s again, etc. If Rocher is not top of mind, your marketing isn’t working. It’s that simple.
Shifting to year-round relevance wouldn’t suck. What’s strange is Ferrero already knows how to do this with their other brands: Nutella, Kinder, and the ubiquitous Tic-Tac. Why not do it with Rocher as well?
Error 4: Thinking that buzzwords and wishful thinking will save you.
Ferrero Rocher doesn’t need to “make its range more social.” It just needs to actually connect with its market. I am referring to this:
Entitled ‘Food of the Gods’ the new campaign aims to change consumer attitudes to the brand, to make its range more social, having established the brand as one of quality for special occasions.
Both campaigns will run until Christmas.
I have no idea what that first sentence is supposed to mean, so let me try to paraphrase it. Here we go:
Ferrero, let me share a few very important market insights with you:
1. Just because you use the word “social” in a sentence or attach it to a campaign doesn’t mean anything you are doing is actually social. Say no to buzzwords. If indeed you have something social to offer your consumers, great. If not, don’t pretend you do.
2. Nobody cares how much money you blew on your upscale advertising campaign. This is especially true now, during a global recession. People are too savvy to be impressed by that, and far too cynical right now to find it charming.
3. The gods of Olympus don’t make your brand narrative more social. In fact, they do the exact opposite: How much more exclusive can you get than the gods up on their mountain, looking down on us mortals? Are the gods not the prefect metaphor for the super rich? At a time when income inequality in Europe and the US is at its highest, when movements like #OccupyWallStreet illustrate a growing disdain for the super wealthy, is it really intelligent to align your brand with that 0.01% of the population that the other 99.9% isn’t all that happy with? (Especially if your market is that 99.9%.) More to the point, can someone explain to me how the penultimate aura of exclusivity embodied by Mount Olympus makes a brand’s range “more social?”
4. You don’t have to be a trained Jungian analyst to understand that Ferrero Rocher’s ads are 100% about ego projection. They have nothing to do with the reality of the market, which is to say the experiences of the consumers they aim to influence. Whomever is signing off on these ads and the direction of the brand’s marketing might consider walking out of the palace gates, coming down from the mountain and hanging out with average mortals, if only for a few days. A recalibration might be in order. These choices are not happening in a vacuum. Someone’s ego is driving this trainwreck.
Back to the “social” thing: Being “social” is not the end game. Connecting with your audience, with your market, with the people who will make you part of their lives for the next 50+ years, THAT is the goal. Focus on creating that connection.
Making a brand’s “range more social” means nothing and accomplishes even less. Buzzwords can’t take the place of results.
Error 5: Believing your own spin.
Denial cripples brands and erodes their relevance with every passing day.
“The launch of these new creative advertising campaigns provides us with an excellent platform to exhibit our market leadership in special sharing and gifting. Both creatives capture the ‘new’ special that is relevant to consumers, and demonstrates our ability as a business to adapt to current market conditions and understand shifting consumer attitudes.”
No.
– Advertising campaigns don’t provide brands with a platform to exhibit market leadership. They’re ads, not annual reports. Market leadership is exhibited by numbers. If you really want to talk about market leadership, let’s see the numbers. What makes you a market leader? What does that mean?
– There is no “new special,” and even it there were, it can’t be “relevant to consumers” if those consumers have no idea what it is or what it means. If you really want to talk about the “new special,” it has to be understood by the market. It has to be real. It can’t just be the product of an internal memo.
– Spending £6,000,000 on an ad campaign in 2011 doesn’t demonstrate a company’s ability to “adapt to current market conditions and understand shifting consumer attitudes.” In fact, it demonstrates the exact opposite.
But none of what we have talked about so far is as tragic as my next point:
Error 6: Allowing bullshit to pile up in your front yard.
New is new. New is not old. When a concept has been at the core of an ad campaign for 4+ years, it cannot be refered to as “new.”
Here is the quote again:
“Entitled ‘Food of the Gods’ the new campaign aims to change consumer attitudes to the brand, to make its range more social, having established the brand as one of quality for special occasions.”
“The launch of these new creative advertising campaigns […]. Both creatives capture the ‘new’ special that is relevant to consumers, and demonstrates our ability as a business to adapt to current market conditions and understand shifting consumer attitudes.”
So the assumption here, or the message being conveyed by Ferrero, is that the brand is doing something new with these ads. They are “new campaigns” with “new creative” that aim to capture the “new special” and change consumer attitudes. One might expect, then, that these ads would be nothing like Ferrero’s previous ads. Right?
Wait a second… Aren’t those… gods? Isn’t the ad about Ferrero Rocher being the food of the gods? Wasn’t the ad campaign actually called “Food of the Gods?”
I’m confused. What’s so new about this year’s campaign then?
Here is another one, also from 2010, which features not only the gods but mythological hero Ulysses:
I really want to ignore the fact that this 2007 ad is about the gods of Olympus inviting their “Nordic cousins” (Norse gods AND Mr. Santa Claus himself) to share with them their “Food of the Gods”. I really do. I really, really, really do.
Now you see why I find myself scratching my head at what Mr. de Felip is talking about:
What precisely is “new” about this £6,000,000 ad campaign?
How will using the same narrative and imagery (the Gods of Olympus) that have been used since 2007 somehow “change” consumer perceptions or give the brand a more “social range?”
The myth you might be searching for is The Emperor’s New Clothes.
If nobody cares, nobody cares. But… what if someone actually cares?
No matter how off-target a company’s ads may be, no matter how poorly devised that company’s product positioning or how outdated its brand narrative may be, no matter how disconnected from reality its marketing executives may be, a good product is still a good product. Ferrero Rocher is pretty tasty, and Nutella is simply one of the most delicious chocolate-related products on the face of the Earth.
Those of us who have already discovered these products and love them won’t stop buying them just because their advertising misses the mark or the company’s marketing executives spout nonsense at journalists through their PR teams. We will continue to recommend them and help other consumers discover them. So… does any of it matter?
Yes, but only if someone at a company like Ferrero wants to become the market leader they claim to be. Only if someone there wants to see high double-digit growth in sales, an acceleration in market penetration and a real, concrete, sticky increase in market share.
If the powers that be at Ferrero are truly happy with the company’s performance as it stands, then this is all moot. If that were the case though, would Ferrero blow £6 million on an ad campaign whose aim is to “change” consumer perceptions? That tells me that somewhere at Ferrero, someone cares. That’s good.
Ferrero vs. Apple by the numbers: The importance of relevance.
Now, with €6.6 billion in global sales in 2010 (an increase of 4.3% over 2009), the Ferrero group as a whole is doing extremely well. But I want to throw a couple of quick questions at the Ferrero folks:
1. If the Rocher brand were managed better, could that €6.6 billion look more like €8 billion? Wouldn’t that be better?
2. Strong balance sheets aside, is 4.3% YoY growth for the entire group really all that stellar?
Every company I have ever worked for would have fired me if I allowed my growth numbers to drop that low. The most anemic of my employers limped along at 6% growth YoY before they hired me out of desperation. 6% YoY growth was considered horrible.
Much to my chagrin, the jump from 11% to 14% I managed in my first year at another company still wasn’t enough to uncork the champagne in the CEO’s office, even though they had been stuck at 11% for half a decade.
It has always seemed to me that somewhere between 18% and 20% was the magic YoY growth figure for most executives and investors. I certainly never received any significant accolades if my numbers fell below 16% YoY growth.
Here’s a sobering little bit of insight: Most years, 4.3% barely keeps up with inflation.
For some context, let’s compare Ferrero’s 4.3% YoY growth for 2010 to Apple’s numbers for the same period:
87.2% YoY growth for iPhone and 24% for Mac.
Granted, using the incredible 87.2% YoY growth figure for iPhone might be a little unfair since the product is fairly new and cool and relevant, but… that is precisely why it matters: iPhone is exciting and relevant. Rocher no longer is, for the reasons outlined in this post. 87% growth vs. 4% growth. The numbers don’t lie. Ferrero needs to take a long look at their business and be realistic about what is happening to it.
But okay. To be kind, let’s instead compare Rocher to Mac, since the product was launched in the 1980’s, which was Ferrero’s heyday:
In an economic downturn, Mac is still seeing 24% YoY growth. Ferrero is only seeing 4.3% YoY growth.
What is going on?
Ferrero vs. Hershey by the numbers: Why Ferrero should be seeing double-digit growth.
If you feel that comparing a candy/chocolate company to a technology company isn’t fair, fine. Compare Ferrero’s growth to Hershey’s for 2010, and what you will find is a near stalemate:
Hershey’s 2010 YoY growth was 7% (source, source).
Now consider that Hershey is a far more established brand than Ferrero, especially in the US. Let me illustrate:
Ferrero owns Nutella, Rocher, Kinder and Tic-Tac.
Hershey owns… well, all of the Hershey bars, Hershey syrup, Hershey’s Kisses, Twizzlers, Reese’s, Kit-Kat, Almond Joy, Mounds and Ice-Breakers mints.
When was the last time you bought or enjoyed a Hershey product?
When was the last time you bought or enjoyed a Ferrero product?
What does this illustrate? An enormous gap in market penetration and market maturity between Hershey and Ferrero, at least in the US. As an established brand, Hershey’s market is relatively saturated. People already buy Hershey products regularly. EVERYONE has heard of and tried Reese’s, Kit-Kats and Hershey’s Kisses. How do you squeeze 20% growth out of a fully penetrated, mature market? With a lot of ingenuity. (Probably more emphasis on Frequency and Yield than customer acquisition.) I am amazed (as in impressed) that Hershey still manages to score 7% YoY growth, honestly. Someone over there deserves to be paid some big bucks.
Ferrero, on the other hand doesn’t have Hershey’s problem: Nutella, Rocher and Kinder are outliers in the US market. They haven’t really been discovered or adopted by the average American. Only Tic-Tac has seen real penetration. Ferrero still hasn’t connected with that market. Unlike Hershey, which finds itself forced to focus more on influencing buy rate and yield, Ferrero can focus on not only buy rate and yield but good old customer acquisition. The market is wide open for its products to be discovered, adopted and shared by delighted consumers. Once customer acquisition is in full swing, it becomes a question of positioning products so consumers buy more of them and more often. Addressing the 6 mistakes outlined in this post would certainly be a good way to get things back on track.
If Hershey can manage 7% YoY growth with virtually no new markets to conquer or customers to acquire, surely Ferrero should be able to see double-digit growth in markets where most consumers are not yet their customers.
4.3% growth is indicative of one thing: A company running out of ideas and losing touch with its market. Time for a reboot.
PS: Start with the basics.
Here’s a little bit of analyst insight – based on the numbers rather than internal “brand-driven” assumptions – that Ferrero needs to pay attention to:
“Despite economic woes, Hershey sustained its top-line momentum with consumers preferring moderately priced candies compared to premium ones.” (source)
Ferrero, here’s hoping that you will start turning it around in 2012.
Can Apple survive without Steve Jobs? Will Apple’s stock bounce back? Is this the end of innovation and genius at Apple?
Who gives a shit. Companies come and go. Innovation still happens. If Apple falls apart a decade from now (and it would take at least that long for that to happen), another company will take its place. Maybe a Sony. Maybe an LG. Maybe a company some kid working out of his parents’ garage half a world away will start a year from now with some friends. And maybe in twenty years, Apple will still be the innovation juggernaut it is today, the game-changer, the company that year after year, manages to both redefine and advance the way human beings interface with technology.
So who gives a shit. Really. There’s something bigger here than the race to predict Apple’s future and write this week’s definitive article on Steve Jobs, and it’s this: Steve Jobs. The human being. The husband. The father. The friend.
Maybe you’re worried iPhone 5 and iPad 3 won’t come as fast or be designed as well as their predecessors. Well, maybe it isn’t really about you and that fancy little piece of technology that you think makes you the coolest kid in the coffee shop. Maybe there is more to Steve Jobs than being CEO of Apple. Maybe this is really just about a guy fighting for his life.
If Steve were my son, my father, my brother, my best friend, I would trade Apple and all of its success and revenue a thousand times over if it meant saving his life. No hesitation. Not even a hint of it. You can always rebuild a business, start over, change the world again. People though, when they’re gone, they’re gone.
So can Apple survive without Steve Jobs? Who gives a shit. It’s a selfish question. Get over it. The baker is dying and we’re sitting around wondering if his apprentice’s croissants will be as delicious? Seriously? Forgive me, but that seems a little cold, doesn’t it? We can do better.
So today, this week, next month, I won’t sit here and add to the fray of discussions and opinion pieces regarding Apple, the future of the company or the evolution of the brand post-Steve Jobs. There’s no need, and I don’t need the traffic that badly. Will I write about Apple again? You bet. Will I dig into Apple’s universe for insights into brand management, the importance of design, leadership lessons, the importance of vision and a million other topics? Of course. I just won’t do it now. Not under these circumstances.
Mr. Jobs, sending good vibes your way, sir. Beat this thing.
If, like me, you are watching Google+ fever spread across the twitternets with a mixture of bemused fascination and eye-rolling annoyance, read on.
If, however, you have jumped heart and soul onto the Google+ bandwagon, gorged yourself on its koolaid with such gusto that your sweat now tastes Googlicious, and think Google+ would make a fine spouse were you able to marry a digital platform… read on.
Based on some of the questions I have been asked repeatedly these last few weeks, here are 8+ things you probably should know about Google+:
1. Will Google+ change the world or the internet?
No. Google+ will not change the world. Or the internet. But if it scales, it might help Google buy a lot of really big yachts, really fast private jets, small countries whose names end with “-Stan,” and install a few hundred thousand solid gold toilets in its offices and server farms around the world.
2. Will Google+ kill Facebook?
No one really knows. I suppose it could, but the odds are not in Google+ killing anything anytime soon. If it does, it will be to some degree related to Facebook’s inability to compete both as a social network and as viable revenue model and not because Google+ is particularly awesome or groundbreaking.
Pros:
_ Facebook needs to stop antagonizing people (privacy concerns are still a major Achilles’ heel for Facebook, for starters). Love = loyalty. No love = well, you know.
_ Facebook’s functionality is still very limited. It doesn’t really plug into productivity and collaboration tools, and this is a problem as users (consumers) increasingly look for seamless integration of word processors, email, video conferencing, VOIP, calendars, mobility, spreadsheets with their social platforms. The simplicity of Facebook’s design and the limited amount of customizability that helped it compete against MySpace (and win) may also bring about its own undoing now that digital platforms have matured.
_ Facebook lives in a fairly closed and limited search ecosystem. What this means is that its advertising revenue model is also rather limited compared to what Google is trying to build. Facebook has kind of backed itself in a corner with its model while Google has a lot of breathing room. That gives Google an enormous strategic advantage. (It does not, however, mean it will succeed in doing anything with it.)
_ Speaking of search, it is a lot easier for Google to build and scale a social network than it is for Facebook to build and scale a search engine. And moving forward, you kind of need both to win. (Or at least a model that incorporates rich, real-time consumer data and massive reach.)
_ Facebook is the biggest fish in the pond because it is pretty much the only fish in the pond. It’s the default winner. That isn’t a good long term survival strategy. After all, what is the cost of jumping ship? $0. These platforms are free. Social equity can be both moved and rebuilt pretty easily. Can Facebook stand up to a better, cooler alternative?
So basically, Facebook needs to adapt very quickly in order to stay relevant. Size alone won’t carry its dominance forever.
Cons:
_ Facebook is huge. HUGE. As a social platform, Google+ has an enormous challenge in scaling to size. It has to do it, and it has to do it fast unless it wants to become the Yahoo of social networks. Without scale, Google+ is just a nice little productivity interface, and the only company it will be competing against is Microsoft, not Facebook.
_ Google+ isn’t sexy. Sorry Google+, but you kind of look like crap. Remember that you aren’t just after middle-aged computer nerds, bloggers, social media “gurus” and… well, yeah, what I said: computer nerds. The rest of the world has to want to use you too.
_ Google+ isn’t compelling enough for most people outside of the nerdy middle to want to bother with it yet. Facebook may be annoying, but it’s familiar, everyone is already there, and the effort of having to leave it and start over isn’t being driven by excitement or necessity. (It has to be one or the other in order to enjoy any kind of velocity.) What’s missing in Google+ right now is a compelling reason for people to want to make the effort (and take the risk) of making the switch. For most people around the world, it is missing the compelling “why.” (“It’s new” won’t ever be enough. After 5 months, when the tech bloggers get bored of talking about it and move on to the next Quora or Empire Avenue or Spotify, what will drive an accelerated adoption?)
_ Google Wave and Google Buzz were going to revolutionize the interwebs too. Ooops. Sure, Google does search VERY well, but that doesn’t mean it will do anything else well, even in the pursuit of taking search to the next level.
_ Google and Plus will have to deal with the same privacy concerns Facebook did. Perhaps more so. You don’t have to be the most trustworthy company to win. You just need to be less shady and risky than everyone else. If Google finds itself at the center of enough privacy concern discussions, Facebook might come out the lesser of the two evils. “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t” is a pretty important element when dealing with an adoption campaign. If Facebook begins to feel threatened, expect this topic to magically surface at regular intervals.
In other words, it could go either way. Facebook and Google+ have their own sets of strengths and weaknesses.
3. Is Google+ really the “Blue Ocean” product some tech writers claim it is?
No. Google+ is simply Google building a better data acquisition mousetrap and advertising delivery pipeline. It is Google’s natural evolution. Let’s quickly look at that in more detail.
– Data acquisition: Seeing the majority of search queries isn’t enough. Google also wants to be able to see what Facebook sees, what Twitter sees, what Foursquare sees. Not only that, but it wants to own that data. It wants to be able to understand and profile consumers better based not only on their searches and the content of their emails, but also on the types of conversations they have, on the content they share, who they share it with, where they hang out, etc. This paints a far more granular (see “complete”) model for consumer tastes and behaviors, which allows Google to better target them with ads.
And yes, selling ads is how Google makes a chunk of its money.
– Advertising pipeline: In the same light, Google has looked at how much time people spend on Facebook and did the math. If they can build a platform that will attract as many eyeballs as Facebook and for as many minutes (even hours) per day, it will be able to sell a lot more ads.
This isn’t “Blue Ocean.” It’s just the evolution of an existing model.
And yes, if it pulls it off, Google will pretty much own the web.
If.
Everything else you hear about how awesome and cool and functional Google+ is, is basically window dressing. If you want to get to the heart of what Google+ is really about, this is it: Data, eyeballs, behavioral modeling, better targeting, ownership of advertising revenue on the web.
4. What about Microsoft?
Google+ seems to me a bigger threat to Microsoft than to Facebook right now. Think about how Google has gone after Microsoft Office and Outlook. Think about what Chrome is doing to Explorer. Now bring the Google+ interface into the mix and see how Google’s productivity tools offer a compelling, very well integrated alternative to Microsoft’s aging core products. If you have been paying attention these last few years, you have probably watched as Google has been systematically working to erode Microsoft’s market share, one product at a time. Now Google+ promises to give collaboration and productivity a forward boost. What is Microsoft’s answer?
Here’s the irony though: Microsoft’s R&D people are 5-10 years ahead of everyone else in their ideation and prototyping, but the company still refuses to bring its coolest product ideas to market. Google and Apple are where they are today in great part because Microsoft chose to pass on projects it figured it could always get back to someday. Its weakness has never been technical. It also hasn’t been due to a lack of imagination or access to talent. It is purely cultural. If Microsoft is going to be a contender in anything except gaming (XBox) five years from now, the aging giant needs to change its approach to product development, product diversification, and it needs to work faster. And for that, it has to step away from itself and realize that not fully understanding who you are as a brand, as a company – in other words, having a static vision of yourself – kind of gets in the way of being a market leader. I am rooting for Microsoft, but something has to change. Microsoft simply has to start thinking bigger. In a way, Microsoft has to unMicrosoft itself in order to move forward.
5. What about Twitter?
What about Twitter? It is still evolving and growing. Unless Google builds a solid substitute for Twitter that plugs into its little universe and it all scales really well, Twitter will be fine for a little while longer.
6. What about Amazon?
Amazon has a history of partnering with Google (1)(2)(3) and it makes a lot of cash. Amazon is fine with or without Google+, but yeah, if Google+ scales, Amazon won’t be hurting for chewing gum money.
7. What about LinkedIn?
If Facebook didn’t kill LinkedIn, chances are that Google+ won’t either, even if it becomes the Goliath of the interwebs.
8. What else should we know?
For starters, you should know how to get started with Google+. Whether Google+ is the next big thing or the next big flop, these handy videos by Chris Brogan will help you get started with the new platform and find out for yourself what the big deal is about. And if that isn’t enough, check out Mashable’s complete (and very handy) guide. If you love Google+, great. If you don’t like it, great. The world spins on either way.
Beyond that, I caution you against drinking anyone’s koolaid. Shiny object syndrome is a major source of noise on the web these days. Tech bloggers make a good living creating content on their blogs with the purpose of attracting as much traffic as possible in order to make as much advertising revenue as possible (and catch the eye of larger media outlets like Mashable, CNN, etc.) So every tech story they can get their hands on has the potential of earning them stacks of cash. The incentive then isn’t to truly analyze or report (or even wait and see), but to sensationalize every new platform release, from Quora to Google Buzz. There is nothing wrong with it, but just be aware of how the web “thought leadership” and content curation bubbles work. A lot of noise doesn’t mean a whole lot except a feeding frenzy of web traffic and incremental revenue. Right now, Google+ is the big story. A while ago, Google Wave was too. Don’t fall for the link-bait.
No one can predict the success of a digital platform. No one. Google+ could be the coolest thing in the world and yet never go anywhere.
Apps moving the the cloud is nothing new. SaaS (Software as a Service) is nothing new. Digital social networking platforms are nothing new. Integration of productivity and collaboration tools is nothing new. Will Google+ do it better? Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll see. maybe all Google+ will manage to do is inspire another company to build something that blows everyone out of the water and truly revolutionizes the web and computing. Google+ may simply be a milestone in a fast and long technical evolution. A footnote. A catalyst. No matter what happens, Google+ will be replaced by something else eventually. Maybe in 6 months, maybe in 6 years, but this is inevitable. So stay adaptable and flexible, and don’t get too attached.
If you want to leave Facebook and put all of your eggs in the Google+ basket, that’s fine. No one says you can’t try out Google+ and stay on Facebook as well. There is no need to take sides. You can own a Mac and a PC too without tearing a hole into the space-time continuum. You can like tea and coffee, paper and plastic, surf and turf, Lady Gaga and Mozart. Don’t make Google+ (or any social or digital platform) into a religion. Do you think the first people who tasted Pizza stopped eating spaghetti? Did headlines in the newspapers read “Pizza: The Spaghetti killer?” Did people wear buttons on their lapels at social events reading “I’ve switched to Pizza?” A little perspective goes a long way.
If you want to wait 3 or 6 or 12 months before jumping into the Google+ universe, nothing says you can’t. There’s no rush. Ease into it at your own pace. In the meantime, people will still be able to reach you by email, through Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn, or even by sending you good old hand-written postcards – you know, with stamps.
This post is about movies, but it isn’t. Just bear with me.
What movies can teach us about mass market products vs. game-changers.
Citizen Kane, Dr. Strangelove, 2010, Reservoir Dogs, Memento, Pulp Fiction, Boondock Saints, The Machinist, Kill Bill, Fight Club, 300, Eyes Wide Shut, Moon, and now Sucker Punch.
What do these movies have in common? I’ll tell you: People either love them or hate them. Though some of them achieved mainstream status (in some cases years after their initial run at the box office), many failed to find as broad an audience when they first released. This, compared to sure-fire blockbuster movies like Transformers, Spiderman 2, Shrek 3, Terminator 4, or Fast 5 (the fifth installment of the Fast & the Furious franchise) which have come to be the new model of success for Hollywood: Franchises safely bring in the numbers, even if they often turn once original ideas into hollow shells of creeping mediocrity.
The truth though, and the numbers don’t lie, is that “simple” is safe. Franchises work.
Line up the remakes, sequels and mashups. They mean box office gold.
How many Marvel and DC comic book superheroes are headlining movie studio franchises these days? Spiderman, Batman, Superman, Thor, Captain America, The X-Men and Wolverine, Jonah Hex, Ironman, Hulk, Green lantern, Daredevil, The Losers… The list keeps growing. Transformers and G.I. Joe didn’t escape the great 21st century rehash of pop culture childhood icons. Charlie’s Angels, Starsky & Hutch, The A-Team, Mission Impossible, Green Hornet, and scores of other popular “classic” TV series are being given the same red carpet treatment in Hollywood, and for obvious reasons: Familiar titles sell. Ask anyone associated with the Harry Potter universe. Or Shrek. Or Star Wars. Or Toy Story. In fact ask any movie producer today how much easier it is to get your sequel funded, versus getting a yet unproven original idea funded.
The reality of most businesses is that money talks. Return on investment, for better and for worst, usually trumps creative or UX considerations when it comes to funding a project. There is an accepted success model in every industry – something many of us who try to push organizations beyond their comfort zones and break through stagnation refer to as the status-quo. That ROI should be a key factor (and often the central factor) in business funding decisions isn’t the problem. The problem is an often blind belief in “the safe bet.” The accepted model. The brainless PG13 sequel to the blockbuster or the formulaic movie adaptation of the comic book, complete with merchandising deals. This at the expense of relevance and long term survival. (Ergo: Long term profitability.)
Using the movie industry as a platform, we can make the case that neither studios, directors nor actors can be successful if they focus solely on creating game-changing films or solely on contributing to endless tepid franchise vehicles. Success in the film industry (as with every other industry) comes from being able to balance both. Too much of the same thing pigeon-holes you as either a corporate sellout or a fringe indie eccentric. If you are Daniel Craig, you can get away with filming Bond film after Bond film, only if you also regularly work on projects like Layer Cake and Flashbacks of a Fool. If you are Johnny Depp, you can’t build a career on The Libertine, From Hell, and Chocolat without also signing up for Alice in Wonderland and Pirates of the Caribbean.
Steve Jobs could have decided to stick to his franchise: Computers and software. Instead, he gambled on iPod, iPhone and iPad, and it paid off. JJ Abrams could have stuck to television, but he didn’t. The result: Almost cult-like excitement for every new big screen project he produces. (Super 8 comes out soon.) Steven Pressfield, in deciding to follow The Legend of Bagger Vance (a book about golf) with Gates of Fire, a historical epic about Spartans at Thermopylae, went against the grain, against the accepted model of success in the publishing world: He jumped categories. The gamble paid off, but at the time, industry professionals cautioned him against the move – which they saw as… ill advised.
The lesson here is that success isn’t just a question of repetition. Success is a process of opportunity creation through experimentation. Before you can have a franchise, you have to give yourself the chance to either buy or create a basis for that franchise. Buying it is expensive and limiting. Creating it is riskier, but the payoffs are immeasurable.
image courtesy of Dreamworks
Planting the seeds of mainstream success: Investing in success incubators.
There is nothing wrong with mainstream success, whether it is in the world of movies, TV shows, books, music, games, cars, clothes or electronics. Not every movie needs to change our souls or blow our socks off. Even dumb sequels with mildly entertaining jokes have their place, especially given their role in the cycle of profitability – which makes bolder experimental projects possible: Big successes mean big profits, big profits fuel big budgets, and big budgets often allow for experimental projects and products to be funded.
Experimental projects are, to put it simply, talent and technology labs. More to the point, they are success incubators. As such, they don’t usually exist on the same plane as deliberate blockbuster efforts, nor should they be expected to. Let’s not forget that before Shrek became a franchise, it too was an experimental concept. An original idea. A gamble.
Even within the world of commercial success, different types of products can yield wildly different types of results. Movies with niche audiences also have their place, not only as talent incubators but as gateway products for narrow (and deep) market bandwidths more interested in quality and nuance than quantity and noise. Tom Ford’s A Single Man was an outstanding film (especially for a first time director) but it could not be expected to experience the same kind of success (sales volume) as Sex And The City, for example, or even Ironman 2.
Yet judging by the sudden appearance of tightly tailored suits and Michael Caine-like glasses on the red carpet following the release of the movie, it not only impressed its audience but even impacted the way men began to dress and accessorize after seeing it. Compare Colin Firth’s look in the movie with Sam Worthington’s choice of eyewear at the Oscars just a few months later, where Ford’s movie was nominated for several Academy Awards.
image courtesy of The Weinstein Co.
image courtesy of Google
Uncanny, isn’t it? Sometimes, the impact of a movie or product – its value to the company taking a financial risk to create it – transcends the cash register. As a movie producer or a CEO, you sometimes have to see beyond the immediacy of sales. You have to take a step back and not only see the entire field, but make sure you allow yourself to see the bigger field.
Yet the low hanging fruit usually wins: Pitch the next Batman sequel against an completely original script which has no basis in popular literature or existing franchises, and the outcome of box office sales is pretty much a foregone conclusion: The familiar blockbuster franchise will almost always win. Hollywood producers know this. Distribution companies know it too. And so do movie theater operators.
Historically speaking, Michael Bay, Steven Spielberg and Chris Nolan come to the table with a much stronger sales pitch than, say, David Fincher, Zack Snyder and even Quentin Tarantino, which is why the former’s movies typically find their way to the most coveted summer release dates, while the latters’ films often see themselves released in the fall, winter and spring rather than just in time for 4th of July weekend. I won’t even get into the difference in same theater screen percentages between a Michael Bay release and a David Fincher release.
Art films and so-called “foreign films” (like The King’s Speech) notwithstanding, there is a world of difference between franchise-driven blockbusters and courageous gambles on “concept” movies that aim to provide a certain portion of the movie-going populace with something more original than the usual fare. Directors like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Copolla, Stanley Kubrick, and even Luc Besson (back when he still made good movies) have given us cult classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey, ET, Jaws, Schindler’s List, Terminator, Avatar, The Fifth Element, Psycho, North By Northwest, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and Nikita.
It is worth mentioning that Besson’s Nikita, which inspired an American remake and two separate TV series, still churns out revenue two decades after reinventing a genre on the big screen. The technical aesthetic of Kubrick’s 2001 still influences set design for sci-fi movies to this day, and will probably continue to do so for decades to come. Like most of Spielberg’s work, many of Cameron’s movies were enormous box office hits in spite of the fact that they were not extensions of existing franchises. Tarantino, for his part, has built his entire career on making completely original films… even though each set piece is an homage to not particularly original motifs deeply rooted into our pop culture consciousness. Before these guys became the big names of mainstream cinema, they were revolutionary film makers. Rule breakers. Rebels. They were the wild cards of their respective studios.
image courtesy of Miramax
If mainstream success grows out of cult projects, why does funding rarely fund success incubators?
When Tim Burton Chris Nolan and David Fincher aren’t taking the reins of sure studio bets like Sleepy Hollow, Alice in Wonderland, Batman or an Alien sequel, they give us completely original movies like Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Mars Attacks, Memento, The Prestige, Seven, and Fight Club. Copolla, Kubrick, Besson, Hitchcock and Spielberg are still, to this day, some of the most influential movie directors of all time, and some of their most celebrated movies were not necessarily their biggest box office successes. Burton, Nolan, Fincher and Tarantino are among the next batch of directors future generations of movie-makers will spend endless hours studying and emulating. What is important to note is that they are not influential because they have huge box office successes under their belts. That came later. They are influential because they either reinvented genres or created entirely new narratives. Their true contribution to the world of movies isn’t sales numbers. It is originality. They provide for movie audiences the cinematic equivalent of what Apple’s Steve Jobs provides technology enthusiasts and Zappo’s Tony Hsieh provides shoe shopping enthusiasts (and the online shopping model, for that matter). This is where the catalyst of mainstream success lives: Not in scale and breadth first, but rather the exact opposite: In a chronic devotion to core fans, core users, core customers. Focusing on narrow but deep bandwidths is where lasting mass market success truly begins.
The byproduct of truly original ideas translated into a valuable product – like a movie, a gadget or a UI – is a cult following: A core of ardent fans who absolutely love it, sometimes in spite of mainstream scorn. In some cases, that cult following scales (as it has with Apple) and sometimes, it doesn’t. Nevertheless, the power of the cult classic is not something to be underestimated. Out of cults grow communities, then movements, and these can become the building blocks for broad mainstream success further down the road. Before Apple was the biggest technology in the world, it was the proverbial underdog. The David to Microsoft’s Goliath.
Don’t underestimate the importance of funding and fostering talent and success incubators. Pixar, Lucas Film, Imagine Entertaiment, Microsoft, EA Games and Apple get it. There’s a key success lesson in this. Remember what we said earlier about franchises and commercial success: You can either buy into it or create (incubate) it.
Buying into success should not be your first choice.
Most companies, by the way, neither fund nor actively pursue talent and success incubators. Look around. There is a reason why so few companies produce win after win.
image courtesy of 20th Century Fox
The tax for being first is often scorn, criticism and hostility: Pioneers shouldn’t expect a mainstream praise… yet.
When David Fincher’s big screen adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club first hit theaters, it was destroyed by critics. They tore it to shreds. If you go to RottenTomatoes.com and look at ratings and comments now, you will see a very positive 81% on the tomatometer and a 95% overall approval rate by viewers. Back in 2000, when the movie opened across the US, the picture wasn’t so bright. At the time, Fight Club had one of the lowest tomatometer scores I had seen on the movie review site. People called it mindless and needlessly violent. Most of the reviews looked like this:
“An unhinged mess of a movie, with potentially dangerous ideas handled in a winking, cynical manner.” – Nitrate Online
“David Fincher’s dumb and brutal shock show of a movie floats the winky, idiotic premise that a modern-day onslaught of girly pop-cultural destinations (including but not limited to IKEA, support groups, and the whole Starbucks-Gap-khakis brand-name axis) has resulted in a generation of spongy young men unable to express themselves as fully erect males.” – Entertainment Weekly
“Bloody mess of a guy film loses its battle to have any real meaning.” – Detroit News
“When you see good actors in a project like this, you wonder if they signed up as an alternative to canyoneering.” – Roger Ebert / At the Movies
You get the idea. It got killed. Was it because Fight Club was a bad movie? Was it because the book it was based on was bad? Neither. And more than a decade later, now that fans have had time to find the film and make it their own, its early mainstream rejection seems ridiculous and outdated. It just wasn’t mainstream enough when it was first released, nor was it intended to be.
The film, like the book, were never meant to appeal to the millions of fans of Friends and Seinfeld looking for a light family-friendly comedy to take their kids to on a Friday night. It aimed for the exact opposite: Fight Club‘s target audience was deep, not broad, just like films like A Single Man, Black Swan, Memento, Pulp Fiction, Watchmen and Edward Scissorhands. Sometimes, movie makers turn to projects they know will appeal only to fans of a genre or style, a narrow bandwidth of potential core fans, at the expense of huge bankrolls and mass appeal. If they didn’t, all we would end up with is derivative “content” packaged as yet another sequel to an offshoot of a popular series remake. When does a copy of a copy of a copy finally lose its appeal? (I am not just talking about movies.) How many Rocky, Rambo, Shrek, Spiderman or Kung-Fu Panda sequels do we really need to put ourselves through before brain cells actually start shriveling up like raisins?
image courtesy of Dreamworks
If originality presents the biggest risk for the cash register, it also presents the only hope for evolution of any medium or industry. Risk aversion is a short-term investment philosophy. Risk aversion favors remakes of Clash of the Titans over the pursuit of technical achievements like Avatar. It favors CSI: and NCIS: (insert random city here) over shows like Arrested Development and American Gothic. It favors gray boxes still running Windows XP behind agrarian firewalls over a fully liberated and mobile workforce equipped with dynamic, collaborative social media ecosystems and iPads.
It isn’t enough to understand that risk aversion supports cultures of stagnation. In order to be able to do something about it, you also have to understand that expecting every project to be a blockbuster success creates and supports cultures of risk aversion.
Organizations and cultures that don’t take the time to not only fund and foster but also reward talent incubators are doomed to fall into vicious cycles of “same as” or “also in” mediocrity.
Remember what we established earlier in the post: Establishing a balance between cult and mainstream is crucial to long term success. Too much focus on one or the other, and the equation fails: Your product either becomes too “indie” to scale and succeed, or too generic, and so it ends up becoming commoditized and largely irrelevant.
In order for organizations to build long term engines of success, they must not only treat talent and success incubation projects with as much respect and interest as they do their mass market wins, they must also reward each based on realistic and appropriate expectations. An Avatar sequel may very well gross $1B before it is all said and done. An indie film about an injured athlete trying to put his life back together most likely won’t. Sliding scales are important when calibrating budgets, expectations and rewards along the broad spectrum of what qualifies as “success.”
image courtesy of Warner Bros.
The danger of judging cult and experimental projects as if they were mass appeal products.
When I first saw trailers for Sack Snyder’s latest CGI opus Sucker Punch, here is what I saw: A cult movie. The imagery and stylized visuals were clearly an homage to specific genres in popular culture, namely Japanese animé, steampunk, dieselpunk, heroic fantasy, comic books and video games. Take a look:
What I didn’t see was a family-friendly summer blockbuster. Twenty seconds into that trailer, you know this isn’t going to be Finding Nemo 2 or National Treasure 3. Sucker Punch wasn’t made for the Dancing With The Stars demo. It is, first and foremost, a visual extravaganza, an overflowing dish of eye candy, which is something Zack Snyder is known for. Ever since 300, his carefully manicured comic book aesthetic has become his trademark. Love them or hate them, Snyder’s films are beautiful to watch. The attention to detail he brings into every set, every costume, ever frame and every cut is impressive in its own right, even if his movies aren’t your cup of tea. Here, Snyder also rewards his fans with an impressive soundtrack featuring covers of “Sweet Dreams (are made of this)”, “Where is my Mind”, “Love is the Drug”, “Asleep” and “Tomorrow Never Knows,” though Bjork’s “Army of Me” and Emiliana Torrini’s “White Rabbit” are beautifully woven into the film.
For the cinematic experience alone, movie-goers in my demo (fans of the steampunk genre, comic book aesthetic, hyperbolic martial arts-inspired action sequences, wonderfully curated soundtracks and Zack Snyder films), the movie struck home. Even if the plot had been weak, the characters cliché, the narrative muddled and the dialog uninspired, Sucker Punch would have still been worth the $9 to a fan of beautifully crafted movie sequences.
There are a few lesson here about the importance of taking the time to occasionally make movies (and products) for fans rather than for general audiences:
1. It is how you build your audience, your reputation, and your core community of fans.
2. It is how you build towards the greater mainstream successes of tomorrow, how you progressively change the cultural landscape, one project at a time. It is how you shape it, mold it, evolve it. It is how you turn fringe into mainstream: By being there first, before something is popular. By taking the hits, the criticism, even the financial loss, knowing that somewhere down the road, having affected the currents of popular culture, the crowds will warm to your new ideas and aesthetics, and come back in droves when they finally get it.
The lesson about shooting for safe mainstream success and broad adoption without doing the core work is that you end up with a generic product. You end up with the kinds of products that satisfy but don’t inspire, like a meal that temporarily feeds your hunger but isn’t filling enough to keep you satiated for hours, or even memorable enough to revisit years later as a noteworthy gastronomic experience.
The truth is that in trying to appeal to everyone, you rarely end up truly appealing to anyone. You become the default choice rather than the inspired or enthusiastic one. The danger of turning this sort of dynamic into policy or standard operating procedure is that you end up creating cultures of average. Cultures of uninteresting. Cultures of differentiation through discounts rather than differentiation through outstanding, game-changing, category-changing original design.
Because of the trailer and reviews by mainstream critics, I went to see Sucker Punch this weekend with low expectations when it came to plot and script. I fully expected the movie to be an excuse for impressive visuals rather than a vehicle for them. As it turns out, I was wrong: Sucker Punch is actually a smart movie. A clever movie, even. One of the rare movies I have seen in recent years that makes extensive and unapologetic use of allegory and metaphor. It is bold not only in its style but in its use of narrative devices, which was a pleasant surprise. To have it compared to Inception (as it has been) is actually a bit insulting. Inception was simply a plot about dreams inside of dreams, which is easy enough to process. Sucker Punch goes further: It is a movie about metaphors inside of metaphors, which asks far more intellectual flexibility from audiences. Yes, in spite of its deceptively cliché animé imagery, Sucker Punch is actually the kind of movie that makes you think. It is in every way a genuine intellectual art film disguised as a formulaic blockbuster vehicle.
Anyone who tells you that Sucker Punch is simply a movie about muddled X-Box-fueled teenage fantasies failed to push through their own misconceptions and biases, and in doing so, completely missed the cleverness of this film. Metaphor doesn’t work well in the US. The average US movie-goer doesn’t want to have to think about what a giant ninja golem represents in the world of a young girl who feels utterly helpless and vulnerable in a desperately hostile world. They just want to know that the giant is bad and that it will lose the battle against the underdog heroine because she has superpowers.
Judging a movie like Sucker Punch with the same grading scale and intellectual lens as one would an equally desaturated and Kung-Fu superhero inspired The Matrix is a lot like judging 2001: A Space Odyssey using the same grading scale and lens as a film like Star Wars. It just doesn’t work.
image courtesy of Warner Bros.
The beauty of movies like Fincher’s Fight Club and Snyder’s Sucker Punch is that everything is a metaphor. Everything means or represents something. From the dilapidated house on Paper Street to Baby Doll’s flawless makeup. Sadly, superimposing genuine intellectual sophistication with deliberately gritty and purposely exploitative visual themes is also the initial undoing of movies like this: Too clever, too artsy, too cerebral often backfires when it comes to mass appeal and sales volumes. Fight Club took years to be understood (or at least accepted) by mainstream audiences. Judging from reviews on rottentomatoes.com (21% on the tomatometer and barely a 56% approval rating) Sucker Punch may be suffering the exact same fate.
“The movie spins out of control, until it collapses in a heap, senseless.” – The New Yorker
“”Sucker Punch” is what happens when a studio gives carte blanche to a filmmaker who has absolutely nothing original or even coherent to say.” – New York Post
“The movie is like an arrested adolescent’s Google search run amok.” – Time Magazine
The same thing happened to Fight Club eleven years ago. And just like Fight Club‘s core audience of fans came to the film’s rescue, fans of Sucker Punch (call them early adopters of this new genre) have already begun pushing back against culturally outpaced critics still struggling to adapt to a creative world heavily influenced by comic books, MTV, anime, video games, and a century of cinematic influences from Akira Kurosawa to Miloš Forman. Mainstream critics, just like mainstream audiences, haven’t yet made the transition from yesterday to tomorrow. Zack Snyder and his fans have.
“To me it is a brilliant film. Yeah perhaps a bit over the top in the stylized world, but that is ZS’s style. […] I found this is a movie that requires multiple times watching to really understand and follow the symbolism that is there. SPOILER ALERT – For example, the little sister has a stuffed rabbit which becomes the mechanized rabbit. The stuffed rabbit could not protect, while the mechanized fantasy rabbit could. These kinds of things are all over in the movie.”
“I loved the film. I loved it for it’s fresh feeling, its visual beauty, it’s crazy story line and most of all, I loved it for being DIFFERENT. I’m amazed at the amount of passion from both sides… Hate or Love. With all the remakes and revamps, I fear people are getting used to the same thing over and over only told in a different way. Sucker Punch is unique, even those that dislike it admit that. Unique? Isn’t that something? Mozart was not appreciated during his life. Orson Wells died thinking the public hated his movies… Everything is relative. I enjoy visionary directors. I enjoyed SUCKER PUNCH. I must point out that Godzilla films were never considered GREAT FILMS, honestly they were kinda inept, yet they had a kind of hidden magic to them. When Baby Doll stands against the giant Dmajin Samurai Warriors, I was reminded of that “Magic”.”
“A film has only as much meaning as the viewer watching it can give it. When my fifteen year old son came home Saturday night after watching the film with his friends all I heard him talk about was how interesting the film mixed the action/adventure genre, with the asylum genre, with the prison genre, and with the pre code backstage musical genre of the early thirties like 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933; he talked to me about how the film’s structure advanced the narrative, setting up the asylum story, that eventually becomes a musical, only that the musical story doesn’t build up to singing and dancing set pieces but to big action set pieces; he told me the action set pieces payed homage to all of the great action genres: the samurai film, the war film, the medieval film, and the run-away vehicle chase films; he told me about all of the homages made to Citizen Kane in the beginning of the film, shots that mimicked Kane’s death in the protagonist’s mother’s death, and a few examples of depth staging being executed; and he discussed how the film’s end paid homage to films like One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest, The Shawshank Redemption, and The Lord of the Rings, how in this film the Sam character is played by Abbie Cornish, and the Frodo character is played Emily Browning, the one who carries the burden that frees them all.
One of my son’s favorite parts was how the movie used creative ways in depicting death visually without all the blood and gore used in other films to maintain the PG-13 rating, like the burst of steam from the German’s gas masks whenever a German was killed. In essence the film is a prison film. My son doesn’t think it is an example of great film making, but he doesn’t deny the significance a film like this has on the landscape of contemporary film making. I think it’s too soon to describe Zak Snyder as an auteur, but he is certainly a much more interesting Hollywood director than Michael Bay, Robert Luketic, or Louis Leterrier. My point is, there’s always more to a film the explosions, effects, brawny women, and action sequences, and it is silly to think of them as just that, it only lessens the culture and the efforts of the filmmakers.”
Sucker Punch was never meant to compete against Kung-Fu Panda 2. It was never meant to bring in July 4th or Thanksgiving-size audiences. It was never meant to gross $100M in its first week. To expect it to measure up to box office safe bets is to misunderstand its place in the incubation process. A movie about a girl locked up inside an insane asylum was never going to draw big crowds, even if the desperate fantasy world she creates offers some of the most visually arresting set pieces yet seen on the big screen, and especially if every detail of these fantasies – from the way the camera cleverly travels in and out of mirrors in the brothel scenes to the choice of the bus stop’s color palette – carries a deeper meaning than the obvious. To see a project like this judged by critics against Hollywood’s typical linear three act action fares is disappointing but not surprising. A critic’s point of view is often driven and shaped by the expectations of his audience rather than a clear understanding of the culture of the industry he aims to be a part of. The same is true of tech bloggers, automotive reviewers, and anyone who sees himself as an industry influencer. Case in point, critic Christian Toto’s reaction to the film:
“Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch should send shivers down the spines of Superman fans.”
This in reference to the fact that Snyder is slated to direct the next movie iteration of Superman. (Yes, AGAIN. Talk about franchise overload.)
In spite of the fact that Sucker Punch – like Watchmen – is a niche movie while a Superman remake is a solid blockbuster bet, critics like Toto don’t seem to understand the difference. Critics aren’t necessarily industry analysts. Instead of grading and judging different type of movies with different sets of lenses, they default to their single mainstream lens.
This type of mentality echoes that of risk-averse, mainstream-focused executives who shun experimental talent incubation projects that cater to narrow but deep niches in favor of the mainstream status-quo. It is this brand of operational myopia that forgets to invest in relationships with core fans and users, preferring instead to focus on low hanging fruit “also in” product categories: The 3D animated adventure prequel. The 20th live action comic book superhero movie. The 38th flip phone in the catalog. The 53rd black flat screen TV. The other silver sedan. The other “other” e-reader or tablet.
The inability to understand the need for a different standard of success for bold niche products in a world of same-as mass appeal products stunts the growth of companies in every industry, and jeopardizes their ability to invest in their own successful future. It is as simple as that.
image courtesy of Warner Bros.
In conclusion.
So what have we learned today?
1. Incorporate experimental projects and success incubators into your company culture. Without them, you are merely surviving.
2. Fund them well.
3. Judge them through a different lens than you do mainstream successes.
4. Learn how to scale niche successes into mainstream successes, like Apple, Virgin Airlines, Zappos and Starbucks, for starters.
5. Depth first, then breadth. Not the other way around. .
6. Go see Sucker Punch… unless you aren’t into Zack Snyder movies… or visionary film-making.
Buying a product. Bringing it home. Taking it out of the box. Pressing PLAY. Turning the first page. Pulling the cork. Clipping-in. Hitting the ignition. Biting into the first slice. Slipping into it. Walking into the new store. Spraying it on. Plugging it in. Connecting the pieces. Reading the owner’s manual. Shifting up. Writing your name on it. Clicking SEND on the order form. Taking it for a spin. Just looking at it. Sharing it with a loved one. Holding it in your hand.
It should always feel like this.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a restaurant, a retail store, a website, a bank, a doctor’s office, a manufacturing plant or a creative firm; ask yourself this: Is the work you are doing today going to have that kind of effect on your customers? On your clients? On your fans?
Is your work really going to connect with the people you are doing this for?
Are they going to fall in love with it? Is it going to impact their lives? Is it going to inspire them? Make them smile? Wow them?
When they talk to their friends about you, will it be with awe? Will they be singing your praises?
Are you a lovebrand? (Incidentally, check out Lovemarks.com. Interesting little concept.)
If not, stop what you’re doing. Put your pen down. Look around you. Think about why you’re there, sitting at your desk. Think about the project you’re working on. It could be a product launch. It could be a new menu. It could be a new floor display. A promotion. A party. A speech.
It could be anything.
Remarkable always hits the mark. Lovebrands always win.
The key to becoming a lovebrand is simply to love your customers first. I mean… seriously. Love them. Fall in love with them.
If you’re a coffee shop, love them enough to give them the best cup of coffee they’ve ever had. If you’re a retail outlet, give them the best shopping experience they’ve ever had. Love them like you love a best friend. Do what you know will make them happy. Get to a point where you truly feel joy and pride when they love what you’ve done for them. When it enriches their lives. When you truly become part of it in some way.
Everything you do should be for them, not for you.
What you do, what your company is about, how you design your products, how you interact with your customers, none of it isn’t about like. It’s about love.
Either you’re involved in a wonderful love affair with your customers and clients, or you aren’t.
That is what fundamentally sets great brands apart from the rest of the crowd: Love.
Talk to a graphic designer about their Mac. Talk to a driver about their BMW. Talk to a photographer about their Canon lenses. Talk to a foodie about their favorite dessert. Love.
So, once again…
Buying a product. Bringing it home. Taking it out of the box. Pressing PLAY. Turning the first page. Pulling the cork. Clipping-in. Biting into the first slice. Slipping into it. Walking into the new store. Spraying it on. Plugging it in. Connecting the pieces. Reading the owner’s manual. Taking it for a spin. Just looking at it. Sharing it with a loved one. Holding it in your hand.
“I never knew what I wanted, except it was something I hadn’t seen before.” – Robert Altman
Today is a writing day, but not here. I have a deadline looming – a sizeable amount of content to transfer to the page one tap of the keyboard at a time – so the next few posts will be drawn from the vault. Yes, we will resume our Psychology of Failure series, but not today.
Today, let’s instead talk about how to really get a competitive edge by hiring the right kind of people. Edelman Digital’s David Armano would call them T-shaped people, or even Sun-shaped people. He isn’t wrong. The point is: A company is only as good as the sum of its parts. And by that, I don’t mean equity, technology or assets. I mean people. Invest in people, really invest in them, and your company will soar. Hire on the cheap and treat them like asses in seats, and your company will falter. It’s that simple.
What do you think makes Apple great? Trust me, it isn’t their servers or cool offices. It’s people. People come up with the ideas. People turn concepts into reality. People fight for their projects and make sure they happen. People invent, design and perfect the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. People explore new ideas and figure out what the next big thing is. People make customers feel special. People either make or break companies and brands, from the CEO to the greeter, and from the designer to the cashier.
It’s always been like this. Social Media didn’t invent anything. “Putting the people back in business?” Why did you ever take them out to begin with?
“If I complain about a traffic jam, I have no one but myself to blame.” – Steve Wynn
Neither my posts, my wisdom nor my ideas emerge from a vacuum. Everything I have learned until now and everything I will ever learn in my life will come from doing, learning, experimenting, and from listening to people who tried to do the same thing in different ways before I came along.
I often hear people lament over the fact that there are no truly original ideas left. They’re completely missing the point. The importance some people attribute to the originality of an idea is completely overblown. It’s an ego trip. They’re just disappointed because they couldn’t be known as the guy who came up with it.
The next big product won’t be a completely original idea. It will be an original take on a dozen old ones. What was the first iPod: A portable CD player without the CD. What’s the iPhone: A phone that does more than other phones. What’s a venti latte from Starbucks: A 20 oz cup of coffee with a Starbucks logo on it. What was the first light bulb: A candle without the candle.
Truth: What makes an idea good isn’t how original it is. It’s how good it is and how well it works.
Who cares if you were inspired by a dozen things other people did? Who cares if you borrowed from artists and designers and engineers who solved a problem or created something great twenty years before you became the precious little center of your mother’s world? That’s how it works. You go out into the world and get inspired by other things. To take bits and pieces of things that work somewhere else, and you adapt them to your needs, then piece them together to create something better.
Great ideas, real innovation, the next big thing, no one is going to come up with them sitting at their desk, brainstorming with a roomful of suck-ups.
Great ideas, real innovation, the next big thing, they’re all out there, waiting to be pieced together like a puzzle. And the puzzle pieces, they are scattered all over the place. How are you going to find them? In a meeting? During a powerpoint presentation? At the end of a RE:RE:RE:RE string of emails?
You want to find out how to get better at customer service? Take off the suit, get in your car, and go talk to your customers. Better yet, become a customer all over again. Heck, do both.
You want to find out how to design better products? Start looking at every product out there a little more closely. Things that have nothing to do with your industry. Dog toys. iPhone applications. Action figures. Tennis rackets. Bicycles. Sunglasses. Mechanical pencils. Media players. Faucets. Swiss Army knives. Even cat food is designed to look, taste and feel cool. Learn what works.
You want to find out how to become a wiser business leader? Go out and talk to people who have suffered under some really bad ones. You’ll learn very quickly how to avoid becoming the next mediocre suit with a big title.
If you’re too busy to do this yourself, then make sure the people who work for you get to do this. Give them permission to. Send them out into the world. They aren’t going to learn anything new sitting at a cubicle all day, filing papers.
“If you don’t go, you’ll never know.” – Robert DeNiro
You want to generate great ideas on a regular basis and execute on them the way Apple and Nike do? Surround yourself with creative thinkers who will challenge groupthink, uninspired corporate obstacles and collectively work together to figure out how to rock the As all the way to the Zs.
Inspiration and wisdom are everywhere. Whatever unbeaten path you may find yourself on, it’s still a path. People have been there before. Maybe the path looked very different then, but it’s still the same path. Find these people and learn from them. Since you probably didn’t have time to clear your schedule today, let me bring a little bit of that wisdom to you… but after that, you’re kind of on your own.
Very few of the little bits of wisdom below were meant to be used as business advice, which is precisely why I selected them. They’re all really about life, about decisions, about integrity, about the choices we make. But it doesn’t take a genius to see how some can be applied to customer service, to hiring, to innovation, to career management, to choosing whom to work with, and to coming out of this recession a market leader.
“If a guy doesn’t have a little gamble in him, he isn’t worth a crap.” – Evel Knievel
You don’t get to be a market leader by playing it safe.
“Let’s see what our competitors do first” is not the path to market leadership.
“Can you show us some case studies first?” is not the path to success.
Every time I hear executives speak enthusiastically about the crazy projects their junior teams are working on, I smell success. Whenever I hear career administrators dismiss ideas from junior members of the organization because they’re too bold, because they’re unproven, because they haven’t been tested by the market, because they aren’t guaranteed to work, I smell failure.
Success – just like good ideas – doesn’t emerge from a vacuum. Success is nothing but the final intelligent outcome of a thousand purposeful failures. The light bulb wasn’t invented overnight by a major technology company based in Palo Alto. Neither was the automobile.
Success is a process. It has its own architecture. Its own unique elements. Its very own DNA. Think about the quality of people you hire and promote. Are they just there to be asses in seats? Does their job consist of spending a third of their day responding to emails? Are they merely “head count,” as some companies call them? Do you truly encourage and reward initiative, innovation and courage, or do you make a process of crushing them out of your organization?
Here’s a tip: If you feed your organization average, don’t expect to get anything but average results. If you only feed your business “safe,” don’t expect to get anything but “safe” results (which means no results at all). If you surround yourself with suck-ups and cowardly little self-serving tyrants, don’t expect a whole lot either.
Fortune does favor the bold: Apple takes chances and wins. You could say the same of Pixar. Google didn’t get where it is by playing it safe. Look at what Ford has been doing for the last two years. How do you think Zappos got to be Zappos? Even Old Spice, for that matter, took a chance and scored big – turning a tired, irrelevant brand around with a few deliberate strokes of genius and a healthy dose of courage. Where do you think all of this started? With decisions. Decisions made by people. People who were willing to take calculated risks in order to win. People who were willing to go where no one had gone before and see how far the rabbit hole went.
Imagine where those companies would be today if they had hired unimaginative desk jockeys whose idea of advancement was to fly under the radar long enough to get promoted and just “do their jobs and go home.” Your company should be a hotbed of ideas, not paperwork and reports.
Invest in your people. Treat them like kings. Give them what they need to make you next year’s success story. If there ever was a secret to gain a definitive market advantage, it’s this.
But hey…
“Wisdom is knowing when to shut the f*ck up.” – Adam West
Here are a few additional tips from some people far smarter than I am:
“Courage is doing something you need to do that might get you hurt.” – Bobby Bowden
“Change is not threatening.” – Steve Wynn
“I love discourse. I’m dying to have my mind changed. I want to know, you understand? I like listening to everybody. This to me is the elixir of life.” – Jack Nicholson
“Take a bit of the future and make it your present.” – Andy Grove
“If you’re not nervous, you’re either a liar or a fool. But you’re not a professional.” – Jerry Lewis
“Hire people who will treat the switchboard operator as friendly as they’ll treat the managing director.” – Sir Richard Branson
“My definition of evil is unfriendliness.” – Muhammad Ali
“Tell the truth. sing with passion. Work with laughter. Love with heart. ‘Cause that’s all that matters in the end.” – Kris Kristofferson
“Never accept ultimatums, conventional wisdom, or absolutes.” – Christopher Reeve
“If you want results, press the red button. The others are useless.” – Homer Simpson
“Hypocrisy is a detriment to progress. There’s always a hidden agenda.” – Larry Flint
“Money doesn’t make people happy. People make people happy.” – Steve Wynn
“A nickname means you belong.” – Buck O’Neil
“Risk means guessing at the outcome, but never second-guessing.” – Mel Brooks
“The measure of achievement is not winning awards. It’s doing something that you appreciate, something you believe is worthwhile.” – Julia Child
“Nothing is just one thing.” – Carrie Fisher
This post was written to “Rhino II” by the Stereo MC’s, on DJ Kicks (From myMassive Attack channel on Pandora)
