Archive for April, 2005
April 6, 2005
19 Comments
Fred Wilson makes an encouraging point about globalisation:
Why should my country matter more than my world? If the world is becoming smarter, more open, more free, and with more opportunity for everyone, I think that’s a wonderful thing. My kids are going to have to step it up a notch to keep up with the competition. And I think they will do just fine.
I have a friend who’s a carpenter. Most of his business is within a 20-mile radius from where he lives. I suggested he started blogging. Make his schtick global. Who knows, maybe some Japanese guy will see it, dig his work and offer to fly him over to Japan to build a new house. That kind of thing.
Why not?
April 5, 2005
7 Comments
Link
1 Comment
The PSFK Cool Hunt on FLICKR.
PSFK is a blog about planning/luxury branding/advertising/marketing.
4 Comments
From Hamish, my old high school buddy:
In Genetics I once saw the growth curve of a yeast population, in a jar, and the growth curve for the human population overlaid, and statistically they were more or less the same. Only problem is that the population collapses about fifty years from now to a steady state of about ten percent of its current level.
18 Comments
More controversy/conversation about fake blogs.
Frankly, it’s all a bit of a storm in a treacup. OF COURSE a blog can be “fake” and still work well, and be considered a great blog… BUT ONLY IF the voice behind the mask is authentic. Monolo The Shoe Blogger is a fabulous example.
But if your voice/persona/alter ego comes off as phoney, whether it’s “real”, “fake”, or a bit of both, you’re going get hammered, and not just by kvetchy bloggers like me. But by the market you’re in.
Why is this so hard for some advertising/marketing/PR people to understand? This has a lot to do with it. Pure marketing meltdown denial.
[UPDATE:] Monolo sends me a note:
Hello to the Hugh!
It is most amusing indeed that you have today singled out the Manolo for mention in your blog, for it was it just the last night that the Manolo he had discovered your witty and most perceptive blog. Indeed he spent much time reading and considering your Hughtrain Manifesto. (There is much good in this work.)
As for the controversy about the “fake” blogs, you are exactly correct. It is the load of the dung.
As the aside, the Manolo he recently participated, as the Manolo, in the internet focus group for the marketing company that was seeking the information on how to build what the Manolo assumes is the “killer” marketing/corporate blog.
Many were the times during the course of this “discussion” that the Manolo he tried to tell the peoples (who were clearly not listening to this wisdom) that it was not the topic, or the design of the blog, or even the “information” that the blog delivered that determined the success or failure of the blog, but rather the personality and the “voice” of the blog. And this it is the function of the talent behind the blog. Of the course, the Manolo he could not but point to his own humble efforts as the example of the blog that succeeds, and very rapidly at that, by having the distinct personality and voice, ones that mesh well with the purposes of the blog.
Which means, sadly for many corporate/marketing blog-builders, that much of the success of the blog depends much upon the talent of the blogger behind it. Happily, when this it is realized (however many years down the road) it means that the best bloggers will be paid handsomely. Of the course, the Manolo he is not holding his breath while he waits for this to happen.
Best of the Wishes,
Manolo
[NOTE TO SELF:] It’s FUN watching the dinosaurs die!
6 Comments
Great Article by The New York Times. “It’s A Flat World After All”:
It all happened while we were sleeping, or rather while we were focused on 9/11, the dot-com bust and Enron — which even prompted some to wonder whether globalization was over. Actually, just the opposite was true, which is why it’s time to wake up and prepare ourselves for this flat world, because others already are, and there is no time to waste.
As over 90% of my business and readership is abroad… Rock on.
[NOTE TO SELF:] Possible book idea/book title: “How To Create A Global Microbrand In Six Weeks On A Taco-Stand Budget”.
[UPDATE:] Some more discussion on the subject over at Metafiter. Thanks to Peter for the link.
April 4, 2005
7 Comments
A Savile Row suit takes about 4 – 8 weeks to make, from placing the order, to having the “forward”, to getting the final product on your back. And if you live abroad, it can take even longer.
In a recent gapingvoid comment, John ponders “whether the extended delivery times of old were due to inefficient businesses or a desire to artificially make the product seem special.“
My reply:
Shortening the delivery times is definitely cutting corners. But sometimes that’s just as much the customer’s fault, for not understanding how the game actually works.
Let’s say you’re Mr Jones, and you bought a suit last year from Tom, which you loved. So let’s say you want another one, just like it. Quite right.
Well, for that to happen you need it seen by the same guy who sewn it last time, say, Peter G (not his real name), one of the best 3 – 4 sewing tailors in the world.
Hey, guess what? I saw Peter G yesterday [true story], and he’s currently busy sewing 15 suits for a certain New Yorker who is both very rich and famous. And after that he’s got another job of 12 suits for another hot shot of equal fame and social standing. And who knows? Maybe the Sultan of Brunei will fly into London for the day and order 30 suits, as he’s been known to do in the past. So our friend Peter G is busy for a while.
Mr Jones, you as a customer have two choices– wait for Peter G to fit you in or give Tom permission to give your job to another tailor.
What would be your answer?
By automatically shortening production times you are basically allowing the suit to be handled by different tailors, every time.
You think you get to cut coats for Mr Brunei Sultan Chappie, or let’s say Calvin Klein, Donald Trump, Graydon Carter [all 4 of these gentlemen have had coats made by tailors I know personally] etc, by having “a desire to artificially make the product seem special”?
No, sorry. This isn’t Designer Label. This isn’t Madison Avenue. This is a whole different league.
I really like that last bit. “No, sorry. This isn’t Designer Label. This isn’t Madison Avenue. This is a whole different league.” So nice to be part of a business where the usual cultural and marketing bullshit most of us have to hack through on a daily basis is completely irrelevant.
10 Comments
Just got off the phone with my t-shirt vendor.
The website should be ready to go in a day or two. Just one or two details to be ironed out. We’re hoping Wednesday-Friday for launch.
We’re limiting the subscription service[*] to 100 subscribers only to start with, to give non-subscribers a chance to buy the 100 remaining shirts[**].
Sounds fair enough, right?
[*] The Subscription Service: Sign up and every time there’s a new design out, we ship it to you automatically, and deduct from your credit card. And again, yes, you can unsubscribe at any time etc etc.
[**] As I’ve said before, we’re doing limited editions of 200 shirts per design, and no more than 4 designs available at one time. Undersupply is better than oversupply etc.
[UPDATE:] People are asking questions in the comments; I’m answering them in the comments. Go there if want to know more etc.
April 3, 2005
2 Comments
I’m currently reading The Marketing Playbook for the second time (you can also go read the matching blog here).
I have to tell you, I’m loving it second time around, far more than the first time. That’s no fault of the authors. When I read it first time last year, I was pretty busy at my advertising day job, The Hughtrain was in the middle of being written, and my head was already pretty fried from all that day-job marketing stuff.
Being able to read it with a much less career-orientated, jaded perspective makes the message far more interesting, not surprisingly.
I’ll write a more complete review once I’m done reading it…
11 Comments
In the comments of a recent post, Ulrich says:
It seems you don’t understand the difference between having an order system and giving a T-Shirt you offer to everyone who asks (let’s say, that would be 334 people), and offering something at Wal Mart.
I was criticizing what Rick Segal said: that selling more than 200 shirts would piss people off. What an elitist attitude is that? “I want to be the only one (with 199 others) who has that shirt; if there’s demand from 334 people instead of 200, f*** them.“
Sorry, but this is just creating artificial shortage of a product. Of course the situation is totally different for bespoke suits, where supply is limited by work capacity! And Wal Mart is a whole different issue, too.
Funny, Ulrich. I chose the number 200 because that’s the minimum number per design the factory will handle.
Had their number been lower, let’s say 50, I would’ve gone with 50.
Firstly, to make large amounts of designs available, to anyone who wants them, when they get around to wanting one, while still retaining high quality control and a competitive price is an expensive business. Spending large sums of money “just in case it gets really successful” isn’t my style.
Secondly, the simple fact is, I don’t want to make lots of designs available in large, mass quantities, and I believe the majority of my most loyal readers don’t want me to, either.
And since I care about what these people think FAR MORE than what “Hypothetical T-Shirt Customer Number 334″ thinks, the scarcity you mention is not in fact artificial; it is real. Until I change my mind.
Thirdly, how do you know there are more than 200 people wanting a certain t-shirt design? Are you willing to put up your money to cover my surplus stock if there isn’t? I’m assuming you are not, but still, feel free to send me a check for $250,000 and I might reconsider changing my business model to fit your anti-elitist worldview.
[MORE THOUGHTS FROM CHRIS:] “The Psycology of Scarcity”.
3 Comments
Have you ever wondered why English Cut has such an unconventional business model by Savile Row standards? An article in last Friday’s Evening Standard magazine (The ES is the big London paper that everybody buys to read on their evening commute) went a long way to explaining why. The business is changing, and methinks in English Cut’s favor.
I couldn’t find a URL on their website. Luckily Dominik sent me scans of it. Go see:
Page One. Page Two. Page Three.
April 2, 2005
16 Comments
Tris, you made a few good points about Gourmet Station Blog, which I, for good or ill named as this week’s winner of “The Beyond Lame Award”.
Now that I know more about the story behind GSB, my attitude has softened. This is due in no small part to the President of GSB personally leaving a remark in my comments section (You see what a little honest conversation can do? CEO’s, take note.).
But let’s face it, using stock photography of posed, fake, happy, smiling yuppies ANYWHERE near the blogopshere is just asking for trouble.
Frankly, it just screams “pretentious”. And “pretentious” doesn’t get you the benefit of the doubt in the Blogopshere. It gets you “Beyond Lame Awards”, as GSB found out. Harsh but true.
Whatever. I’m sure GSB is a good company with a great product run by nice people, even if their blogging prowess could use a refresher course. I sincerely wish them well.
But there’s a bigger issue, which affects anybody trying to make a living in the ad business, to greater or lesser degrees.
The bigger issue is that a lot of people and businesses are now entrusting advertising agencies to build their blogs for them. If your blog building is currently entrusted to an ad agency, I’d be REALLY careful, and REALLY ruthless with them.
The fact is, ad agencies hate blogs. They utterly despise them, even if they tell you otherwise. They hate them because if done well, they’re cheap and they’re easy. Frankly, they’re in the business of selling you stuff that is neither.
They also hate blogs because blogging rewards authenticity and punishes insincerity, whereas the ad agency business model does EXACTLY the opposite.
Blogs have a fundemental conflict of interest with the economics and ethics of running a traditional ad agency, and no slick, Cluetrain-savvy agency pitch is going to change that.
Seems to me GSB got caught in the crossfire.
6 Comments
The gapingvoid t-shirt conversation starts to get interesting:
1. I decide to limit each design to 200 shirts, and no more. And no more than 4 designs available at one time, ever.
I do this for reasons stated in a recent post, “The Tao of Undersupply”.
2. Chris over at The Social Customer Manifesto pipes in:
You have hundreds (thousands?) of cartoons you’ve drawn over the years. Of the four you pick at any one time, there will be some folks who like them, and pick them up. But isn’t it considerably more likely that a far greater number of folks would want some other design that you are not producing?
By way of comparison, there’s (frankly) no reason why an individual can’t, say, grab one of the .jpgs of one of your cartoons, upload it to CafePress (or their local t-shirt shop), and make themselves a t-shirt of it. Once those images are out (and a lot of them are), there’s really nothing preventing that. And if that individual is just producing that one shirt for his or her self and not selling them, it’s likely you’d never know.
Then Rick Segal pipes in:
There is more to it then just the shirt.
By way of another example. I have a collection of Hard Rock polo shirts from the Hard Rocks around the world. I only get them from the places where I have been and ordered food. I don’t have people get them for me nor do I buy them just in passing nor do I even like them as gifts.
If the hard rock offered all the shirts on a website for any store they had, I’d drop collecting them in a second because there is no story, no personal story around the shirts.
These days, it’s not about price or maybe even supply, rather it’s about buzz and the story behind whatever I’m buying.
The key thing to watch? Assume Hugh gets two hundred people signed up for the automatic t-shirt fix. That’s the entire run. Now what?
Do you have a waiting list for people to cancel so you can get onto the list? Do you piss off 200 people by secretly making some extra? Do you ‘cop out’ in the name of greed/making money and make more while telling the original 200 people, sorry, demand thing.
If Hugh ends up with, call it, 100,000 active readers of whom 10,000 are die hard fans and you have only 200 getting t-shirts with a 400 person waiting list to get into the queue for a t-shirt fix, I wonder how people will define that. Some pundits will say, goofball coulda made more money while others will do a case study on creating buzz.
And everybody will be right.
So I leave the following comment in Rick’s blog:
My own two cents: if demand exceeds 200 shirts per design, like I said, when they’re gone, they’re gone. I’ll just make more designs available.
If you give people an incentive to act quickly (“There are only 200 in the world, and they’ll be sold out in 3 days”), they act quickly. If you give people an incentive to delay (“Come back next year when they’ll be 75% less”) they delay.
I’m not bothered about counterfeits. All the fake Beanie Babies did was drive the price of real Beanie Babies sky high. The fakes became first-class adverts for the real thing, fully funded by third parties. Indirect marketing at its best.
And what about secondary markets possibly developing? What if demand for shirts were such that anybody who owned a shirt could pretty much be guaranteed to sell it at a high profit on E-Bay?
Then we’re talking microtulipmania.
So I suppose what I would need then are just 200 out of 100-odd-thousand gapingvoid readers to help me create this secondary market… it’s one business model, anyway.
So… anyone want to buy a tulip?
4 Comments
Now this does pleasantly surprise me. Donna Lynes-Miller, who works for the company that won yesterday’s “Beyond Lame” Award, left a message in the comments:
We appreciate your comments about the GourmetStation blog and our fictitious character and site host, T. Alexander. We are a small pioneering food company and we see the blog and its content as a way of adding value to our patron’s experience. What T. Alexander has to say about food is not as important as what our patrons have to share about their culinary adventures. We believe that our blog strategy is appropriate so long as there is full disclosure that T.A. is fictitious. We believe that blogging is not yet a fully defined term, process, or model… so it is difficult to say what is fake and what is real. Time will tell. In the meantime, we appreciate your feedback.
Perhaps more difficult for some people than others, Donna.
One of the most unpleasant jobs I ever had was writing a 10,000 word brochure for a luxury 60-foot yacht.
The agency thought because the product was “upscale”, the writing style had to be pretentious and fake. “Imagine yourself surrounded in the sumptuous, princely luxury that only the discerning few will have the rare priveledge to experience yak yak yak…“
It was 6 weeks of hell, writing that. Utterly dreadful.
Sounds like your ad agency sold you that same schtick. Yak. Yak. Yak.
A great food brand or a great food blogger is no different than a great chef. She needs passion and authority. Methinks your T. Alexander persona has little of either.
As an upscale food company, can you really afford that?
Still, kudos and thanks for stopping by and giving your side of the story.
April 1, 2005
14 Comments
Couldn’t wait a whole week before posting this latest “Beyond Lame” Award:
It’s fake, and it’s upscale. Just like the people you hope to one day be like.
Nice one.
[Thanks to BLOGthenticity for the pointer.]
6 Comments
A familiar theme in various e-mail exchanges I’ve been having recently:
The Long Tail notwithstanding, if you’re in an ever-increasingly crowded market where the (A) the barriers to entry decrease with every passing day and (B) your competition get younger, hungrier, sexier and cheaper than you by the hour, then I’d be concerned.
With the internet [not to mention, ummmm.… WalMart, China etc etc], if you have to compete on price, you’re dead…
Make your product as freely available as possible to the greatest number of people possible? Hey, Commodity Boy, Fetch!!
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Suw is talking about Blogospheric Glass Ceilings.
People like Searls, Gillmor and Rosen have whuffie in spades, and this is why they can start snowballs rolling downhill and why those snowballs grow as they go. If you have no whuffie, your snowball will just melt — no whuffie means few readers, no one gaining kudos off developing your idea, no whuffie coming back to you for having had it. The idea goes nowhere.
It’d be nice to think that it’s the quality of the idea that gets the snowball moving, but more often than not, that has nothing to do with it. Hugh Macleod, for example, has so much whuffie that all he has to do is fart and the trackbacks start rolling in.
Fair enough (even if I’m not convinced that my <a href=”“Wuffie” is as high as she claims).
It’s a funny one, this topic. Treating wuffie [the measure of one’s influence in an internet-enabled sphere] like hard currency (gold, diamonds, The American Dollar etc) is tempting (because it’s easy) but at the end of the day, ill-advised (because you will starve if you do).
But Suw is right. The Blogosphere isn’t a meritocracy. Of course it isn’t. To paraphrase Seth Godin, nobody’s going to read your blog unless there’s something in it for them.
“Something in it for them” has always had little to do with merit.
