The tag on my new (favourite) t-shirt:
“This will be your new favourite t-shirt. If you’re rich, buy one for every day of the week. If you’re not, wash it or just spray with cologne.”
Makes me smile every time I put it on.
This is all kinds of awesome - MINI are giving away a Countryman to whoever ‘holds’ it in their virtual-but-real game through the streets of Stockholm. It’s a perfect marriage of social- and location-based technologies and deserves some kind of award.
With less than a day to go the map is rather quiet, but no doubt this will heat up in the final few hours. Brilliant marketing, and I wish I was in Stockholm right now.
(Source: frederiksamuel.com)
Speaking of Facebook being ‘evil’:
If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.
If this doesn’t make you feel awkward then you probably work for Facebook (or Google). Whilst it’s true that we get a great service out of Facebook and Google, it’s incredibly important to remember where their true loyalties lie. They’re still businesses, and both are based on the model of selling your attention to the highest bidder. Are you comfortable with being sold?
David McCandless (of InformationIsBeautiful) tapped into Facebook’s data feeds and learned a little about human behaviour - when do relationships break up? (Watch the linked TED Talk for even more facts).
I’d never thought of using Facebook like this, but it stands to reason that there are many lessons to be learnt from the third largest nation on earth. With all the talk of Facebook being evil, I’d love to see them give something back to the community and start teaching us about ourselves. (Knowing what questions to ask is the difficult bit).
“Let’s Find Some Beautiful Place to Get Lost” (via Dustin Curtis)
Fascinating five-part series from the New York Times on the Anosognosic’s Dilemma:
Donald Rumsfeld gave this speech about “unknown unknowns.” It goes something like this: “There are things we know we know about terrorism. There are things we know we don’t know. And there are things that are unknown unknowns. We don’t know that we don’t know.” He got a lot of grief for that. And I thought, “That’s the smartest and most modest thing I’ve heard in a year.”
This series will screw with your mind a little - how do you know when you’re incompetent? You can’t self analyse accurately without having the skills to do it right in the first place. (Read that again).
This isn’t uncommon. Anosognosic’s aren’t lying to you, and they’re not lying to themselves. Rather, their lack of skill prevents them from having awareness of their lack of skill, leaving them with the impression that nothing is wrong. It’s a self-fulfilling problem.
Sadly, I can’t do this theory justice (but at least I’m aware of it, right?), but understanding that you could be wrong and never know it is an enlightening first-step.
Speaking of unexpectedly delighting your customers, this was an order I got from Rushfaster a few days ago. Note the free fun-size pack of M&M’s they threw into the express bag. Totally unexpected, but totally made my day. It’s a simple gesture worth telling others about (evidently).
Most other businesses would write this off as a needless expense. That’s why those other businesses don’t have loyal customers.
Barry Schwartz, in one of my favourite TED Talks ever:
“The secret to happiness is low expectations.”
This is perhaps the most fascinating thing I have ever heard: the notion of promising less than you will deliver so that you delight your customer unexpectedly. To my mind, it blurs the line between deception and liberation, but is it evil or genius?
There’s no doubt that being pleasantly-surprised is more rewarding than having your expectations met. My textbook example is phone support: I always warm myself up for 45 minutes on hold, and hence any support line that answers my call within a few rings is automatically superb, and gets my praise for days on end. (Unless they screw up the support, but I’ll be slightly more forgiving in this case).
But how do you achieve this level of pleasant-surprise in regular business? You can’t talk down your competitive advantages in the hope that people will be surprised by what they accidentally encounter. You can’t sell your business on the basis of low expectations.
Recently, a prominent restauranteur gave us this underpromising tip: “the floor might be dirty, and there might be cobwebs in the bathroom, but the food is superb.”
Maybe that’s the key. Perhaps the details don’t matter as much.
Actually, that’s a stupid idea. Surely there’s more value in doing things right all the time than in surprising your customers when you don’t get things wrong.
Underpromising is for underachievers.
Amazon’s product development strategy is genius - start with the press release you want your customers to read (and get excited about), then work backwards to develop the product:
There is an approach called “working backwards” that is widely used at Amazon. We try to work backwards from the customer, rather than starting with an idea for a product and trying to bolt customers onto it.
Of course it makes sense in retrospect, but I wonder how many products or companies were actually born this way? (Zappos, Apple and 37signals come to mind).
It’s also a perfect marketing strategy, guaranteeing that the product you finish is one that sells itself. Does this make marketers redundant? Not at all - if anything it shows that good marketing is integral and should be the first point of call for any new product. Your marketers are your best product managers.
Amitabh Jotwani on following your dreams:
“I work for xyz company, but you know I always wanted to get into animation design and work for myself. It was my dream. I got stuck in the wrong industry” “You ain’t dead yet, are you?”
The worst thing you can do with your career is to play it safe.
