Musings & Meanderings

One of the themes that I return to often is about desire to learn and to listen, to really hear and understand. Whether in personal relationships or in business, it’s one of those tools that, when applied, can expand our horizons and potential exponentially.

Jason at 37signals posts about mini desserts arrayed on your coffee cup saucer. I agree with Jason that this is a great marketing idea, the basis for which can be applied to many things. Here are just a few of the thoughts I took away from Jason’s post.

The selling proposition here does not lead a customer to a purchase decision in the straightforward way that we’re accustomed to approaching this goal. We typically start with a desirable product or service, identify the features and benefits of it that make it a superior choice, and then wrack our brains for ways to get that message to the consumer effectively. If the product/service is our baby, we can even sometimes be unreasonably disappointed if a marketing person creates a compelling call to action using a cheesy inducement, even though it has resulted in sales of our creation or offering.

The mini desert strategy isn’t about the desert itself. It has people saying, “I’d love that!” without even asking what kind of desert it is. The strategy isn’t about selling the product at all. It doesn’t offer any price advantage. The only unique selling proposition is that less is better. This strategy is totally about the user’s needs and desires.

We’re living in a world of endless menus and choices. So many that it can be overwhelming and even paralyzing to some people. This does not mean that they aren’t dazzled and attracted and tempted by all the offerings, just that people get flooded.

Here is a personal and unrelated product example that comes to mind based on my own consumer habits. There are endless publications that I used to subscribe to in print. Subscribing to and scanning those available online is different and more difficult. I sometimes hesitate. I find myself frequently wishing I could pay for selected articles and pieces by individual feature writers.

That seems to make no sense economically. I know that buying individual articles online from most serious publications could end up totaling more than the cost of a full online or even my print subscription. The psychology, however, doesn’t always make sense until you look at it differently. Both business and non-business customers will sometimes choose to pay more for a bite sized portion of something for a lot of good reasons, including the value of their limited time and attention.

I hesitate to fill more computer screens and lists with a gazillion more things to wade through. I expect an endless more to require more of my time to wade through and even then more of a likelihood that I’ll miss some of what I would have enjoyed most. It even ‘feels’ wasteful …similar to wanting a bite of dessert with coffee but not wanting to see a huge slice of cake sitting uneaten. This isn’t related to spending a few dollars. It’s an issue of overload. There is too much of everything in front of us already. Too many choices.

As consumers, we often respond to this overload by closing ourselves off and backing away. We create blinkers and tunnel vision in order to cope. We exercise discipline in order to attend to our responsibilities.

Conversely (or perversely?), in perusing many web offerings I find myself wishing for more. The desire for more depth in online networks once the initial commitment in terms of time and/or money has been made is one that a lot of development energy focuses on, resulting in more longer menus and features, that possibly scare off many users.

It is less common, though, to see simple alternative choices given for one specific offering or feature at a time. A current example of this is the ability to make some entries public and others private on new social sites. We’ve had either/or public and private community sites forever, and finally are seeing that option handed to the user. Privacy options in business (and some academic) applications have been around even longer. How many years did this simple choice take to go mainstream?

I’d bet that the option of smaller ‘bite’ sized pieces is a welcome proposition in many other circumstances, and also that enabling simple consumer choice should and will become a much more common feature.

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Later:

Seth Godin’s post titled Extra Profit responds to Jason’s 37signals post also.
Seth’s response is anti profit(eering?). Instead of trying to gouge an extra dollar from customers, he argues, restaurants should, for example, give small samples free to reward the best customers. I’m not sure whether that idea is more about preferential treatment in exclusive circles or about customer service as a relationship element.

Many of the comments on Jason’s original post are negative also. I wonder how much this relates to the regular reader/commenter demographic and how that demographic differs from the general population.

Positive reactions to the dessert choice proposition seem more likely to come from women. Hmmm.

Thank you to John Lam, .NET and Ruby developer on his way to Redmond, whose post yesterday led me to the Long Now Foundation and then to Long Bets. Awesome.

Predicting the future can be as entertaining a pastime as reliving highlights of the past. Connecting both, from the perspective of the present, is an integrative process I espouse as a foundation for clear vision. On a spiritual level, unity of all 3 is one aspect of the divine.

We live in a culture that has elevated instant gratification to an art. Cool is the latest hottest thing and uncool is yesterday (or even 5 minutes ago). Anything from the dusty musty past is considered a tiresome anachronism and only timid stick-in-the-mud souls spend a great deal of time on life plans. The only exception to the latter is planning responsibly for others, including as a parent, but even this is considered a rather boring business, and any enthusiasm about it is to be shared only with others directly involved in the same. In the bigger picture of business, as well, we tend to fixate increasingly on evaluating current circumstances and building road maps to immediate and short term goals. Thinking big often translates into doing a bigger deal for bigger bucks. Now.

Media gives us the most vivid imagery of our ‘now’ culture, with its focus on the freshest breaking news and the envied scoop. Money, in substantial quantities, takes on a competitively driven constructed power, and acts as an engine, encouraging and enabling the ‘faster bigger sooner’ motivation. Even the dullest long term investments typically focus on profiting on a large scale from immediate human necessity rather than gain. Boring as it may be, taking good care of our needs is a prerequisite to fulfilling our desires. Living in a place and time where we enjoy unprecedented prosperity affords us the freedom to indulge our impulses, but in doing so excessively we disconnect ourselves from meaning and consequences.

I adore surprises, revelations, new ideas. My personal definition of cool has as much to do with both creative energy and meaningful impact as anyone’s. I just happen to believe that both are constrained and hampered by the culture of ‘now’. Living only in the present or short term is just as limited as living only in the past or in the future. A full scope and balance of all 3 is a recipe for not just a great feast now, but a deeply satisfying and lasting nourishment of everything that makes us special.

It’s been a while since I posted a personal rant, so here goes.

Bookstores are one of my weaknesses. Yesterday, I visited the World’s Biggest Bookstore downtown. In need of computer books, my wily subconscious delivered me first to a different department, where, of course, I found more books I hadn’t known I needed. As I looked up to orient myself and head to the computer section, a nice young man offered me a discount flyer, telling me that if I spent more than $50 I would receive a free $10 purchase coupon. Yes, it was in addition to the regular discount that I have a card for. Special 2 day only promotion. Since getting out of a bookstore for less than $50 is nigh impossible for me anyway, I accepted delightedly.

After collecting my other books, I arrived at the front cash registers. The clerk gave me a total which did not seem to reflect the $10 off so I asked for an explanation. Well. I shortly had 2 clerks involved, with a third looking on. The promotion was a few hours old, and they’d already put together sample receipts and other tools for trying to explain it to customers.

The $10 was deducted in prorated portions from the cost of each book as a percentage of the total. The unnecessarily complicated math seemed a red herring at that point, considering that after the various amount totaling $10 were deducted, there next appeared a charge of $10 for the purchase coupon itself. Ok, I asked, so where is the gift or discount?

The clerks, I am assuming, had also been coached not to give me a straight answer to this one. After listening to some meaningless mumbles and obfuscations, I spied a hint. Asking directly, I received a confirmation that after completing my purchase I would be given the gift, and that this would, apparently, induce me to return to the bookstore (in this same 2 day period) in order to use it. At no time did they suggest that I could split my books into 2 purchases in order to use it immediately, although this was done once I insisted on it.

Later, mentioned in a negligible manner, they threw in the information that if I wished to return or exchange any of the books, I would also be required to pay back the portion of the gift associated with it. That referred to the books in the primary purchase, where I had paid back the deducted $10, and also explained the complicated math. I don’t remember the last time I returned a book, but the idea that I would ‘pay them back’ for a deduction that I’d paid for (shown on the receipt) took the whole fabrication to yet another level of stupidity.

This is not promotion. This is a con. I’d expect it from a street vendor perhaps, but not in a large store.

Let’s not forget the introduction of the ‘promotion’ was a straightforward offer of $10 off a purchase of over $50, clearly designed to induce a customer who’d planned to drop $30 to double their spend. The manipulative trickery of this convoluted exercise was the most off-putting retail experience I’ve had in a while.

Uninformed and unhelpful sales clerks are so common now as to seem normal, but this sort of business practice in retail is more than a snubbing of customers. It is an insult. The marketing person who dreamed this up should be very relieved he did not get to meet me. Had I the time and strength yesterday, I’d have tracked down the store owner and not let up until the promotion was pulled. Yes, I do such things. As it was, I doubt that anyone took the trouble to note my views or convey them further.

Many of us often don’t have enough time to argue. The changing retail landscape makes it harder to walk out and go elsewhere. Are these things encouraging more such behavior? There may be some instances I can think of where I might not be able to find the same books elsewhere and only if I need them immediately, but that store definitely lost most or all of my business yesterday.

In past times, when communities were physically limited, ascending levels of authority were easy to comprehend. Divisions of authority were very clear based on skillsets and experience, as was the definition of each individual’s domain. (I’m not dealing with class systems and hereditary entitlement in this post.)

In a small physical community each member understands clearly their own and others’ roles and what each is able and expected to contribute. For most of us, though, delineation of domains has blurred in direct proportion to the size of our communities. As the internet leads us forward to the ‘global village’, where even niche categories of knowledge and competence can potentially contain a million individuals, our comprehension of personal authority is becoming further eroded.

The idea of connecting global pools of human knowledge and experience on every subject appears to promise many new benefits. This is easiest to see in areas of science and technology. Looking at the sum of global knowledge and experience, the necessity of categorization, classification and sophisticated indexing becomes a prerequisite to the usefulness of the parts. The fact that this is potentially accomplished via technology itself is awesome, but can technology alone address the real human need for personalization of authority? What of the many facets of knowledge that are less closely connected to technology?

I have been thinking that venues addressing our needs and desires in a broader and more balanced way is a path to incorporating what I’ll call micro authority into the development of the wired world.

Pre industrialization, when North America was gradually being settled by small communities in the traditional manner, it was natural for everyone to participate in an activity such as a barn raising. There was no difficulty determining who would do what; everyone did whatever they were best at. The point of this example is that everyone knew not only what they personally did best, but also who would know the most about any given topic or task.

Today, most of us live in communities where we might come in contact with thousands of people without having the first clue what the majority of them are good at or know much about. Our interaction with them tends to revolve around generalities, as well as whatever superficial specific brings about the contact. We still recognize many academic and professional credentials, but even these have ‘grown’ with the scope of our world to encompass fields often too broad to relate to on a personal level.

Nevertheless, most everyone is potentially an ‘authority’ on something, be it as narrow a field as tree pruning. Choose a few dozen people of your acquaintance due to physical proximity and take the time to express a true interest, and you’ll discover troves of knowledge on a range of topics that will surprise you.

In a neighborhood I once lived in for some years, there was not one person I spoke to at any length, on a block with approximately 20 houses, who did not have a great depth of knowledge on something. The range of topics included medieval maps, the physiology of cats, local zoning bylaws, children’s literature, continental European cuisine, and music theory. This was in a gentrified urban location where the majority of residents were white collar workers, but my personal experience is that the same theory applies everywhere. I’m simply more likely to find expertise on car mechanics or economizing in one neighborhood or on the stock market in another. Sometimes these mini troves of knowledge aren’t predictable based on socioeconomic demographics. The range of individual expertise is often astonishing, and the extent to which most people believe their personal knowledge to be of little value, to anyone other than themselves, is also unexpected.

For a long time, I believed that web enabled aggregation of people with specialized knowledge in common formed the strongest basis for growing online communities. This is also related to some of the theory behind aggregation. Although I still believe that there is a solid foundation and real value offered by this method of community creation, I no longer see such groups as communities. They are all special interest groups, which interact much as their real life counterparts always have. This applies whether their passion is antique dolls, coding in Perl, or Libertarian politics. Such profiles reflect most web communities of the past and the present.

My viewpoint continues to evolve, and I now believe that focusing on how virtual communities can evolve into more human communities, that fit together well enough to effect a virtual barn raising (or whatever the equivalent will be), is where much future potential lies.

The key to how real virtual communities might evolve most robustly requires an understanding of, and new ways of recognizing, micro authority. This idea goes far beyond the current mantra of developers and designers and coders learning to listen to users. It requires a re-evaluation of the value and applications of what users can contribute and generate, and further, a circular design process. Non tech community members have, collectively, plenty of intelligence, passion, and skillsets which, at present, are mostly disconnected from and irrelevant to a good deal of web development. This is typically more recognized by proprietary software companies building business tools and applications, and by academia focusing on open source development.

It isn’t Microsoft or the open source guys who are distracting us from rich potential here, though. They are each devotedly mining their particular lodes of it. The biggest distraction right now is the hard push of development through venture capital and tied to big media dollars, which tends to focus on the lightest fare and gear itself to the lowest common denominator in any development process. The current trend is to equate popularity with authority. This compounds the difficulty of learning how to identify and give weight to quality in general and the vast troves of micro authority specifically. Publishing, including wikis, and blogging are among areas that offer the best opportunities (so far) for more multi-dimensional communities.

I’ve recently read that a majority of the most successful tech companies were built by two individuals, and inside and an outside person. Beyond the few strong entrepreneurs who can execute and deliver though, are many millions of participants, and on a lot more than two sides.

There weren’t any other voters present when I visited my polling place this morning. Where is everyone? Get out and vote!

It matters as much on a municipal level as it does on a provincial/state or federal level. Whether you consider the current state of affairs unacceptable or not, our votes contribute to either the status quo or to change. The size and extent of the contributions we are each able to make to our communities may differ, but the number of us who care enough contribute makes a difference in itself.

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later: I want to be Hazel McCallion in my 3rd life. Both the part where she used to come downtown and drink all the guys under the table and the model grassroots ironfist combination.
85 years old. Starting her 11th term. 91% of the vote.