Archive for October, 2008
October 31, 2008
13 Comments
From my recent ‘Ten Questions’ with Mark Earls:
7. In “Creative Age”, you destroyed a very sacred cow of the agency world, The Brand. With your second book, “Herd”, you successfully went after an equally massive agency sacred cow: The Idea of Consumer as “Heroic Individual” [Embodied by cultural icons like The Marlboro Man, or the existential athlete wearing Nike’s]. Your message seemed to be, actually guys, we’re social animals. We’re social primates; we behave more like chimps and gorillas, more than we behave like lone, cigarette-smoking cowboys. Care to explain the idea further?
[Mark’s Answer:] Again to simplify: Human beings are to independent action, what cats are to swimming. We can do it if we really have to, but mostly we don’t… Instead, we do what we do because of what those around us are doing (Whatever our minds and our cultures tell us).
So if you want to change what I’m doing, don’t try to persuade me– don’t try to make me– do anything. Instead, enlist the help of my friends…
But not crudely (as in “Recommendation”). That’s just persuasion by another name: another “Push” tactic. I’m convinced the answer lies in creating “Pull” (i.e. Social) forces.
When I wrote that question for Mark, I’d been thinking a lot about the “Heroic, Lone Individual” schtick in mass media, particularly with mass marketing.
Most mass-market messages are consumed alone. Most of the ones we see are so unremarkable– think of a late-night TV commercial for a local car dealer, for example– they’re not Social Objects, they don’t warrant us doing the social, they don’t warrant us sharing them with people. Sure, we can gather in groups around the TV and be watching the same commercial, but the commercial is not genuinely addressing us as a group. It’s trying trying to pick us off, one by one.
Ergo, the world of mass marketing is basically a lonely place. Which makes the Marlboro Man- think riding the range with no other people for miles around– or the existential athlete– think Tiger Woods, about to make the amazing putt– the perfect citizen for it.
Then along comes the internet. Along comes interactive. Along comes “sharing”. Along comes media that actually creates real social behavior, as opposed to just trying to create idealized, theatrical versions of it..
Suddenly Mr. Lonesome Heroic seems a bit out of place.
October 30, 2008
12 Comments
[Blue Monster PDC Edition– it’s colored azure for a reason.]
It was two years ago today that I first posted the Blue Monster on this blog. Thanks mainly to Microsoft’s Steve Clayton running with the idea [At great risk to his own career, I might add], it’s been quite an adventure for us both, to say the least.
Microsoft’s James Senior posted this two days ago:
About a year ago, my pal Steve Clayton (happy birthday buddy) unleashed a genius viral marketing ploy aimed at starting a conversation about Microsoft. It was really a call to arms challenging the company to reinvent itself. To innovate. To change the world.
Today we really did announce some stuff that will change the world, and it’s an amazingly exciting time to be at the company. Here’s the stuff that we announced today at PDC 2008.
* Windows 7 features
* Office Web Applications
* Office 14 features
* Live Framework
* Live Mesh Beta
* Live Mesh Dev Platform
* Live Mesh on the Mac
* Live Mesh on Win Mobile
* Visual Studio 2010 WPF
* Visual Studio Editor extensibility
* Windows Live ID and Open ID
* And more…
I think we’ve finally answered the call of the Blue Monster. We’re not going home, we’re going to change the world! Rock and Roll.
Here are some random notes on our little blue friend, in no particular order of importance:
1. I always liked what Dave Armano had to say about it:
Because everyone at Mix 08 who worked for Microsoft and handed me either a “Blue Monster” business card or had the sticker, seemed different. It was hard to put a finger on, but although they were believers in Microsoft, they also seemed to believe in an external vision that challenged Microsoft to make a meaningful impact in the world. It’s a non corporate honest opinion, and some at Microsoft embrace it publicly.
What’s to be learned? Blue Monster shows us that no matter how big or small the company that the world is a bigger place. And external influences can become internal influences. And it teaches us that if we are interested in the evolution of corporate culture, that symbols are important. If we don’t find our own — someone will find them for us.
2. There was a time, maybe a year ago, when I could have feasibly turned the Blue Monster schpiel into a full-time gig. A combination of random events and my equally random self somehow decided against it in the end. Probably just as well. It’s more interesting without it being tied to a private, commercial agenda.
3. So Microsoft wants to change the world. But as JP once reminded me, with the Blue Monster the converse is also true: the world wants Microsoft to change as well. Which is exactly how it should be.
4. When the Blue Monster first started getting traction, Sarah Blow and others warned me that there was a lot of talk amongst the geeks, about how aligning with Microsoft might damage my own personal brand… “Hugh embraces The Dark Side” etc. I was perfectly aware of the risk; and frankly I didn’t care. I liked the people from Microsoft I had met up until that point, I also had a point to prove about large companies and their internal cultures, about how the internet made it possible for large companies to talk to the world in new ways. The “Porous Membrane” etc. To hell with “Personal Brand” crap. Whatever.
5. There are a lot of gapingvoid readers who don’t much care for Microsoft, and don’t mind telling me so. Do I worry about it? Not really, hell, some of it I actually agree with. They’re entitled to their opinion. They may not care for the car, that’s fine by me, that doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to amuse myself, checking under the hood.
6. I am not a techie, I am not a coder. I’m useless at that stuff. What interests me about Microsoft is the “Culture” bit i.e. keeping 70,000 people happy and productive, while making a profit by selling nothing more than ones and zeroes. The “Purpose-Idea” of the place etc. When you have a company that large, that interesting, that passionate and that powerful, it’s a goldmine of new material to write about.
7. I’ve not done much work with Microsoft this year, mainly because I moved to West Texas. In December that might be changing. Watch this space.
8. Props to Steve Clayton for everything. He’s a rare breed.
[UPDATE:] Steve Clayton talks about the two-year anniversary:
What a ride that has been. An interesting ride and at times a dangerous one for me personally. As James Senior said in a post earlier this week the PDC has been a Blue Monster week – for the second birthday we couldn’t have picked a better week. PDC has been full of world changing announcements. Maybe they’re just world changing from where I sit so please don’t think I’m suggesting we just cured cancer or something….but I continue to believe this company does world changing stuff. Stuff we should be proud of and that’s the kind of stuff we announced this week. For me, the coincidence of timing is amazing.
[Digg This Story Here.]
October 28, 2008
24 Comments
[Me working on “DesertManhattan”. Photo courtesy of Deborah Smail.]
After a couple of years of thinking about it, I’m finally moving forward in the lithograph department. Here are some initial thoughts:
1. Yes, I’ve done lithographs before e.g for Techcrunch, Stormhoek and Microsoft. Those were produced digitally, for high-numbered editions [one thousand or so]. This new effort will be much more high-end and exclusive. We’re talking very small editions [say, 25 or so], done not via digital, but by old-fashioned etchings on metal plates.
2. We’ll be using the highest-quality paper and inks we can find, bar none. We won’t be sparing any expense.
3. The pieces will all be framed by hand, using highest-quality woods and mats. No industrial factory-framing for these babies etc.
4. As of today, I have no idea how much I’ll charge for them. My plan is to put the first few ones onto Ebay, let people bid for them openly, and see what happens. I reckon this will establish a solid, relatively transparent market price, a lot better than mere guesswork ever could.
5. The size will be roughly the same as my recent large works on paper i.e. approx. 23x29 inches etc.
6. I haven’t decided what image, or what style of image I want to use for the first run. Do I go with my familiar cartoon format say, something like this, or do I go with something a bit more “arty” say, something like “Fred 44″? This is a conversation I hope to be having with y’all over the next few weeks, so please feel free to leave a comment below, Thanks.
7. Yes. I am SERIOUSLY excited about this project. Rock on.
2 Comments
From August, 2004:
Every now and then the urge to write something about blogging hits me.
It’s the future, it’s the revolution, it’s the citizen’s media, it’s The Cluetrain, it’s The Hughtrain, it’s The Cat’s Pyjamas etc.
Usually by the third sentence I am so utterly bored of thinking about the subject matter, I quit and get back to work.
October 24, 2008
12 Comments
[This card, which was drawn at the table during dinner, was photographed by the lovely Anne. She wrote about last night’s soiree here.]
I’m in Amsterdam. Not much to report, other to say I’m having a lovely time at Blog08.
[This is the card that I gave to Anne.]
This is my first time being back in Europe, since I left for West Texas in February. Nice being back on this side of the pond, in a trippy kind of way etc.
October 18, 2008
12 Comments
If had to pick the two or three business books that have “changed my life” in the last couple of years, Mark Earls’ “Welcome To The Creative Age” would be on the list, without question. Recently he also published his second book, “Herd”, which picks up where “Creative Age” left off.
In order to turn more people onto his work, I prepared for him ten questions, which like Seth Godin before him, he kindly agreed to answer below. Rock on.
Ten Questions For Mark Earls
1. I remember “Creative Age” sending shockwaves through the British advertising establishment when it first came out in the early 2000’s. You basically came out of nowhere and declared that marketing and branding, at least how we generally defined it back then in the advertising world, was dead. That it was intellectually bankrupt. Care to elaborate?
Thinking back now it must seem a bit odd — a bit presumptious, maybe — to make this kind of dramatic declaration. But remember this was a turbulent period — Fukuyama was declaring the end of history, ideology etc etc. And there was a fresh feeling in the air in Britain — the arrival of a New Labour government after more than a decade in the wilderness felt to many of us like the passing of a baton from one generation to the next. I was having the time of my life working in the crazy creative co-operative St Luke’s, where we were pushing the idea of “What it is to be a creative business” to the limit, and then finding that there were no limits (Apart from ourselves, as it turned out).
Part of my thinking was shaped by all of this contextual stuff, but I think the most important thing was the realisation that the cluster of ideas we sold as “marketing” was basically the product of a particular time and place (they bear the cultural and intellectual imprint of mid-Century, Midwest United States) and not some collection of eternal and irreducible truths (like the laws of Maths, say). This — and my day-to-day experience trying to use these old ideas to shape creative communications and behaviours that really work — led me to work out what was wrong AND offer something that better reflected what we’ve learned about humans, business and creativity over the last half-century.
2. You were the first person to make me actually ask the question, “When I say ‘Brand’, or ‘Branding’, what do I actually mean by that? Do brands actually exist as we say they do, or are they just a mental construct to make us advertising types sound more clever in client meetings?“
So here’s Mark Earls, this highly respected British brand guru, getting paid lots of money to better articulate the idea of ‘The Brand’, and suddenly you’re telling your clients, “Hey, you know all that clever ‘Brand’ stuff you’ve been paying my agency lots of money for? It’s actually all a load of crap.“
So I’ll ask you the same question your clients undoubtedly asked you: “Why is it crap?“
Let’s start with the good stuff about “Brand”: it’s clearly a popular idea, it’s spread far and wide into politics and self-help books. It’s useful, in that it allows us to talk about the cluster of stuff that floats around reputation and perception and so on. It looks like we can measure it because it’s something that seems like folk out there in Consumerland can talk about.
So what’s wrong with it: well, first of all “Brand” is a metaphor. It’s not a thing, even though we talk about it as if it were: it’s a way of talking as if.
Second, it’s a fat-metaphor: there is no agreed definition, so we can use it to mean just about anything we want — to pre– or proscribe whatever we want. Most brand conversations need an agreed set of definitions or…
Third, “Brand” is what you get as a result of doing great , not a good guide to what to do — it’s the scoreboard, not the game.
Fourth, “Brand” is a distraction from the main game, which is doing great stuff for customers and staff (“baking it in”, as for example the Zeus Jones go on about). P***ing about in Brandland is a good excuse not to really get to grips with the stuff you need to get to grips with, and it tends to lead you off into “communications” rather than actually doing something.
Fifth, “Brand” perpetuates the myths we like to hold tight to, about the power of marketing and communication — sometimes when you hear brand folk talk, they seem to imagine they are sorcerers and magicians, weaving binding spells and illusions. More often than not, they like to use military metaphors. The truth of course is that mostly were neither of these things and have a marginal effect at best.
3. Then after you convinced your friends and colleagues [some of them, anyway] that all this was ‘crap’, the first thing they would’ve asked you is, “Well, OK, so what else ya got? What comes next?“
And your answer turned out to be a big one. A VERY big one, Indeed: “The Purpose-Idea”. I’ve told a LOT of people about the P-I over the years, since first discovering it in “Creative Age”. This time, I think we’d all rather get it from the horse’s mouth. Please explain the P-I to us mere mortals. Thanks.
Put really simply, the Purpose-Idea is the “What For?” of a business, or any kind of community. What exists to change (or protect) in the world, why employees get out of bed in the morning, what difference the business seeks to make on behalf of customers and employees and everyone else? BTW this is not “mission, vision, values” territory — it’s about real drives, passions and beliefs. The stuff that men in suits tend to get embarrassed about because it’s personal. But it’s the stuff that makes the difference between success and failure, because this kind of stuff brings folk together in all aspects of human life.
4. I like The P-I. Explaining it to people pretty much has made paying all my bills a lot easier in the the last few years. The Blue Monster was a P-I. When you see a real P-I working in action, it cuts through the clutter and ignites passion in a way that, for the money, your standard “Here’s why you should buy my product” message simply cannot compete with. In spite of this, I see people in the business resist it. Something about it that scares them. What do you think that might be?
Like I say, I think it embarrasses the grown-ups: a lot of folk think business is some separate rational sphere of activity, in which maths, analytics and rational thinking prevail (whether it’s in customers’ or employees’ minds). P-I makes things personal — makes you put your balls on the line. It cuts through the crap of “strategy” and all that pseudoscience that we hide behind.
5. One thing that makes your work so compelling, I believe, is that you have a lot of conversations with people who are NOT in the advertising world, but instead inside the world of academia. You also seem to devour books on social and behavioral sciences. Did these interests predate your advertising career, or did it develop on the job?
I’ve always been interested in how things (really) work but my job has allowed me to indulge that more and more. Over the years, my curiosity has led me talk to folk who don’t have an axe to grind or a vested interest in marketing’s explanations of how things work. So, for example, recently I’ve been working with a great guy, Alex Bentley, who’s an academic anthropologist who specialises in how ideas and behaviours spread through populations. If it works for stone age pottery styles, 21st popular music, dog breeds, charitable giving and marketing jargon — all things that marketing folks’ models can’t or haven’t bothered to do the math for, I think his explanation of how things spread is a pretty good explanation and should serve as a great place to start. If it is also grounded in the consensus in modern behavioural and cognitive sciences about human beings, well again so much the better.
I’ve been surprised how rarely folk do this — looking broadly across other disciplines. At best we take sliver of some experiment we read about in Scientific American Mind, say and force the new thing to support our old ideas. The snake oil salesmen of the so-called “neuromarketing” are one example; the whole “influentials” word of mouth gig is another. On the one hand, it’s a shame; on the other, it allows me to make a good living!
6. Back in the early days of marketing and advertising blogging, it seems that me and my fellow bloggers were taking great and constant delight in declaring that “Ad agencies are dead”. Five or six years later, and they’re still with us. Have they evolved, or are they just living on borrowed time?
Living on borrowed time. Their economic models are screwed. The one thing you read on the faces of the guys (and it is mostly the guys) who run them is “Not on my watch”: They know that a major discontinuity is coming, they know we’re all going over the cliff, and that it’s all going to be different the other side but they just hope to have paid off the school and college fees before then. They’ve done pretty well to hedge all of this with a bit of digital tinkering but frankly they’re too slow, too fat and not set up to embrace what’s next (Which isn’t about messages btw).
7. In “Creative Age”, you destroyed a very sacred cow of the agency world, The Brand. With your second book, “Herd”, you successfully went after an equally massive agency sacred cow: The Idea of Consumer as “Heroic Individual” [Embodied by cultural icons like The Marlboro Man, or the existential athlete wearing Nike’s]. Your message seemed to be, actually guys, we’re social animals. We’re social primates; we behave more like chimps and gorillas, more than we behave like lone, cigarette-smoking cowboys. Care to explain the idea further?
Again to simplify: Human beings are to independent action, what cats are to swimming. We can do it if we really have to, but mostly we don’t… Instead, we do what we do because of what those around us are doing (Whatever our minds and our cultures tell us).
So if you want to change what I’m doing, don’t try to persuade me– don’t try to make me– do anything. Instead, enlist the help of my friends…
But not crudely (as in “Recommendation”). That’s just persuasion by another name: another “Push” tactic. I’m convinced the answer lies in creating “Pull” (i.e. Social) forces.
8. Getting to know you over the years, it seems a big part of your schpiel is telling people, namely, people who work for companies, that actually, you know, businesses aren’t machines. Homo Economicus doesn’t actually exist. Actually, companies are the same they’ve always been: Human being collected together for a shared purpose. And until you start recognizing your company’s own humanity, you’re just making it a lot harder than it needs to be. That would be an easy sell to me or the average gapingvoid reader. But how hard is it to sell into a large company, one that’s been doing the same old things for years? Do you feel you’re pushing a boulder uphill, or do you find people pretty receptive to your new way of thinking?
It depends. Sometimes — when times are tough — folk will bite your arm off for anything new. At others, it’s no-change-whatever. Other folk do things the reverse i.e Good times = Experiment!
Also, I try to remember that– as I tell them about their own attempts to influence their customers– I can’t make anyone do anything. They do what they do because of their peers.
In this context, it’s worth pointing out how the world has moved since I started talking HERD. I was on the freakier end of things in 2001 – 2; now, I’m mainstream enough that young adfolk are forced by The IPA (the British equivalent of AAAA) to study my work. Weird.
9. You and I have both left the ad agency world, me to become a cartoonist, you to become a consultant. That being said, the agency world still exists, it’s still making money, and we still have some dear friends still in the business, who we’d still like to see do well. From what you’ve learned from the ever-changing world we both seem to be living in, what advice would you give our agency friends? What can agency folk do to create value for their clients, in spite of so many advertising and branding sacred cows already having been turned into hamburger meat?
Start making things (rather than communication — communication is not the answer, in fact it’s an excuse).
AND
Work out — like the dudes at Anomaly and Another Anomaly — how to make money from making things.
Also…
Work out how you can make the kind of places that you or I, or the people who clients really value, want to work.
10. Ok, Mr Purpose-Idea Grand Ninja, if somebody asked you what was YOUR OWN, individual P-I, how would you answer them? Just curious.
Helping us all do better stuff by making sure our thinking is straighter.
You see, I don’t have the answers (and even if I did, it’d be pointless telling the world). But I can make you think a bit harder about stuff — I can help you throw away the useless stuff, the stuff you don’t need anymore.
[You can also follow Mark on Twitter here.]
October 17, 2008
22 Comments
Crystal from Ohio sent me this picture last night. Apparently she liked one of my cartoons so much, she went ahead and got it made into a tattoo. Thanks, Crystal! That’s a huge compliment.
This is the second time I’ve seen this happen with my work. The first time was with the Microsoft Blue Monster.
So if people permanently embellishing their own human skin with my work is anything to go by, it seems my “Tribe” is building (with all these thousands of people seeing my work online every week, I suppose it’s to be expected).
And as our mutual friend, Seth says, every tribe needs a leader:
The next frontier of marketing is in leading groups of people who are working together to get somewhere.
I concur. So I’m guessing that “Leader” job now falls down to me.
Don’t get too excited. I’m not Gandhi, I’m just a cartoonist in West Texas with a few crazy ideas up my sleeve. I find the prospect of leading a “tribe” a bit daunting, to be honest.
Leadership does not exist in a vacuum, you need somewhere to actually lead your tribe to. Moses had the Land of Milk & Honey. MLK had The Promised Land. Thomas Jefferson had the newly-formed United States. Putin has a strong and proud Russia. Doc Searls has The Cluetrain. Steve Clayton and his friends within Microsoft have The Blue Monster.
Me? I have no idea. Like I said, I’m just a cartoonist…
The good news is, to lead a tribe you don’t necessarily have to have a promised land, a utopian vision, or a new world order to lead a tribe. You simply need what my other great marketing friend, Mark Earls calls “The Purpose-Idea”, which as a bona fide Social Object, is THE REASON why people are joining together in the first place.
I’ve been telling my clients for years now, if you’re going to have a following, a community, a “tribe”, it can’t just be about you and your lovely product. It’s got to be about something higher than, and beyond… yourself.
What is true for them is, yes, also true for me. Like I told my good friend, James Governor on Twitter the other day,
If I’m to lead a “Tribe”, it needs to be for MUCH better reasons than “Please buy my lithographs, they’re very nice etc.”
Or my original drawings. Or my book. Or my consulting services. Or my speaking gigs. Or whatever.
So WHAT IS my Purpose-Idea, beyond getting people to read my cartoons and hire me for the occasional paid work? In spite of all the advice I’m always giving to other people, I’m not always 100% sure, myself.
Yes, it’s still a work in progress, though I DO know that doing what I can to help other people and companies learn “How To Be Creative” figures heavily in the equation.
October 15, 2008
21 Comments
Recently I wrote about “crofting”, which has always had a big influence on my life.
My paternal grandfather was a Scottish Highland “crofter”. He lived on a “croft” i.e. a very small holding of land, where he raised sheep and grew potatoes. I used to spend my summers there as a boy. We were very close.
Crofting is a good life, but not a very financially rewarding one. It’s very self-sufficient, though. The interesting thing for me looking back, is that crofters never did “just one thing”. Every day they had something else going on. One day it might be sheep. The next it might be a job working on the roads for the local council. I knew one crofter who drove the mail van. Another who ran the local post office. They would do their jobs, but after work they’d still have their sheep, cows and potatoes to attend to.
As my dad is fond of reminding me, I seem to have inherited the crofting mentality. I DON’T like waking up in the morning and doing the same thing every day. I LIKE having all these different balls in the air– cartooning, painting, consulting, writing, marketing, blogging etc. Sure, part of me would like nothing better than just “retiring to the desert and making paintings”, but another part of me likes all the running around in different directions. And all this running around DOES get tiring, I can tell you that. Sometimes I LOVE the feeling of being constantly overwhelmed. Other times I utterly despise it.
Since that post I’ve gotten more than a few emails, with people basically saying, “Thank you for coming up with a term that totally describes my life!“
The traditional Highland crofter is quickly becoming a thing of the past. As my uncle, a crofter like his father before him, recently quipped, “We just farm manila envelopes now” [Rural subsidies from the European bureaucrats tend to arrive in manila envelopes]. But as the BigCorp job-for-life also becomes more and more a thing of the past, expect to see more “Crofters” out there, even if like me, it’s no longer sheep and potatoes we’re selling. I think it’s a sweet little term that conveys a lot, especially to those of us who seem to have a built-in aversion to salaried positions in other people’s companies. You?
[Bonus Link: Probably the most well-known book on Scottish crofting. “The Crofter & The Laird” by John McPhee.]
11 Comments
[One of my all-time favorite cartoons, from The Hughtrain.]
As the book now stands, there will be about eighty or so cartoons in it. I don’t have the exact number so far, a lot has to do with the actual design of the physical book– dimensions, page numbers, layout, cost of production etc. all factor into it.
Choosing the cartoons has probably been the hardest bit of the editing process so far. Besides the 1,800 or so cartoons on the blog, I’ve got– Wow– AT LEAST another 4,000 unpublished ones just sitting around in cardboard boxes.
I wanted the cartoons in the book to offer a pretty thorough overview of my work– who knows, this might be the only book I ever publish, or whatever. So I wanted to include cartoons from all my various stages in the last ten years. From the early days in New York, to publishing “How To Be Creative” and “The Hughtrain”, to my recent work.
The other thing– I’m older. A lot of my best earlier work has a lot more f-bombs and sexual references than the cartoons I’m drawing today. But I wanted them in the book anyway, regardless of how it may misrepresent my more “mature”, present-day self, or undermine the “corporate” side of the book market. Thank God my editor agreed with this approach. Whittle down the edges too much, of course, and eventually you have nothing left.
The good news is, whatever my petty concerns might be, the people at Penguin, both Editorial and Sales alike, seem very excited and gung-ho. I’m feeling that way a bit, myself. Rock on.
October 13, 2008
9 Comments
[Click on image to enlarge etc.]
“Cardboard 444″. Drew this earlier this morning. A little line drawing on cardboard. 2x3.5 inches i.e. business-card sized.
Since I got back from Austin on Friday I’ve been mostly working on DesertManahttan, and then goofing off the rest of the time.
Well, maybe “goofing off” is too strong a term. Just been doing a lot of thinking recently. A lot of new stuff is coming down the pike, and I’m just trying to re-calibrate my brain to handle it all.
3 Comments
[Click on images to enlarge. Click to watch the video here.]
I started adding the acrylic last week. If you click on the top picture, you’ll see I’ve just start applying the India Ink, towards the top. That was yesterday. If you click on the link above, I made a little 2-minute phonecam video explaining everything in greater detail.
This thing is going to take forever to finish. I’m not worried, there’s no rush etc.
October 8, 2008
40 Comments
10 Questions For Seth Godin
My friend and mentor, Seth Godin has a new book out, “Tribes”. As has become a regular gapingvoid tradition, to celebrate the launch I e-mailed Seth 10 questions, which he kindly answered below. Rock on.
1. For the benefit of gapingvoid readers not yet familiar with your work [all 14 of them], let’s get the main schpiel over and done with: From your perspective, what is “Tribes” about?
It explains why top-down, buzz-driven media is the past, not the future.
The world has always been organized into tribes, groups of people who want to (need to) connect with each other, with a leader and with a movement. The products, services and ideas that are gaining currency faster than ever are ones that are built on a tribe.
Barack Obama has one, John McCain tried to co-opt one. Arianna Huffington has built the most popular blog in the world around one. Harley Davidson and Apple are titanic brands for the very same reason. They sell a chance to join a group that matters.
The punchline is that the only way to lead a tribe is to lead it. And that means that marketing is now about leadership, about challenging the status quo and about connecting people who can actually make a difference. If you can’t do that, don’t launch your site, your product, your non-profit or your career.
I’d argue that you understand how to tap into this need, Hugh. Lots of people don’t like your work – screw them, we don’t like them anyway. The people who do like, who find that it resonates… it’s likely that we’ll like each other. You lead us to a place we want to go.
2. Your seminal bestseller from a few years ago, “Purple Cow”, made the assertion that “Everyone is a Marketer”. Though this would now be considered pretty standard doctrine for marketing geeks Everywhere, at the time I remember it seeming a pretty radical, new, challenging thought. In Tribes, it seems to me you’ve upped the ante by asserting that “Everyone is a Leader”. Care to elaborate?
Sure. The idea that everyone is a marketer is still hard for a surprisingly large number of organizations. Non profits (most of them) don’t see the world that way. Neither do traditional factories or many other businesses. But it’s so clearly true, I don’t even have to outline here how the product is the marketing, how the service is the marketing, how every human being who touches something is doing marketing.
Well, if we go a giant step forward and realize that it is for and about the tribe, that tribes – connected, motivated groups of people – are the engines of growth, then it seems clear to me that what marketing means today is leadership. If you’re boring or staid, no one will follow you. Why would they?
3. Anyone who knows you would consider you a leader, in your own unique way. And the same could be said for a lot of the people you personally hang out with. But it seems to me that this book was not written for those type of folk, but for people who have yet to really consider themselves as leadership material. It seems to me that the main thrust of the book is about trying to get them to make the leap from “Follower” to “Leader”. Is there any truth in that?
Everyone isn’t going to be a leader. But everyone isn’t going to be successful, either.
Success is now the domain of people who lead. That doesn’t mean they’re in charge, it doesn’t mean they are the CEO, it merely means that for a group, even a small group, they show the way, they spread ideas, they make change. Those people are the only successful people we’ve got.
So the challenge is: your choice.
4. As you well know, I’m fascinated with marketing, both for myself and for my clients. Looking over my work from the last couple of years, I increasingly see marketing [by that I mean, GOOD marketing] as a function of LANGUAGE and NARRATIVE. In other words, the art of marketing is figuring out a way to talk to people in the market in a manner they SIMPLY HAVE NOT been talked to before. And then when I’m reading your book, I keep thinking that, SO MUCH of being a leader is simply providing people with a good narrative to explain their actions. In other words, it’s far easier to lead if [A] You’ve got a great story that’s easy for you to share and [B], more importantly, you have a good story that is EASY for other people to share.
So much traditional marketing is built around the idea of “Merit” i.e. good quality, good prices etc. But the older I get, I keep asking myself, “What’s the story here? What’s the REAL story that people are GENUINELY going to want to tell other people?” Do you see Storytelling as a form of Leadership? How about vice versa?
In All Marketers Are Liars, my point was that people buy stories, not stuff, and it’s stories that spread, not stuff. An iPod made by Garmin wouldn’t be an iPod, would it? It’s the story and the affect and the whole aura that makes it worth $200.
I think you’ve hit the issue on the head. Leaders tell stories. Gandhi or King or Che or yes, Rush Limbaugh. They tell stories. The stories matter and the words matter. Of course OF COURSE the product has to live up to the story, the service has to be there, the story has to be true. But no story, not idea, no marketing.
5. We all have different things that motivate us, that gets us out of bed in the morning. Some people want money, some people want power, some people want fame and applause. You seem very driven “To Affect Change”, both on an individual level, and collectively within companies. Where does that drive come from? Were you born with it, or has it just grown with you over the years? Is it something that is still constantly evolving? If so, how?
It used to be a curse, but now I’m getting used to it.
I’m pretty impatient with things that are as they are instead of as they could be. I’m impatient with people who grumble and settle and then get old and die. I’m energized by people who see things differently and make changes happen. We’re all so lucky, what a sin to waste it.
6. When I finished reading “Tribes” I was both stunned and delighted in equal measure to see my name cited in the Acknowledgements section as an influence in the creation of the book [Thanks!]:
“Years ago, Hugh MacLeod, the world’s most popular inspirational business cartoonist (who knew you could do that for a living?), drew a cartoon (his most popular one ever) with the caption, ‘The market for something to believe in is infinite’- as soon as I read it, I knew I wanted to write a book about that idea.”
Well, I certainly have some ideas about what that cartoon means to me, though I’d be curious to hear your individual take on it. What it says to you, personally. Thoughts?
That was the second title I had in mind for the book. And I was going to include the image itself, but then it showed up all over the web and so…
The point imho is this: You can’t drink any more bottled water than you already do. Or buy more wine. Or more tea. You can’t wear more than one pair of shoes at a time. You can’t get two massages at once…
So, what grows? What do marketers sell that scales?
I’ll tell you what: Belief. Belonging. Mattering. Making a difference. Tribes. We have an unlimited need for this.
7. Your books and blog posts seem to have one thing in common, they seem to be getting shorter and shorter with every passing year. I have no problem with that; I think people genuinely prefer short reads, over long ones. For people aspiring to publish their own books one day, what advice would you give them re. deciding on a book’s length?
Try to write a book or a blog post that can’t possibly be any shorter than it is.
8. I think aspiring writers have a lot of romantic illusions about “The life of an author”, which have little to do with the actual hard-nose reality of the publishing business. What do you think are the hardest lessons for a first-time author to learn?
Books are souvenirs that hold ideas. Ideas are free. If no one knows about your idea, you fail. If your idea doesn’t spread, you fail. If your idea spreads but no one wants to own the souvenir edition, you fail.
Book publishers don’t make authors successful (clarification: 175,000 new authors a year, 300 become successful because of publishers). Authors make themselves successful by earning the privilege of having a platform, by creating ideas that spread, and yes, by building a tribe. (Harry Potter anyone?)
9. You’re a busy guy. Besides writing books, you have paid speaking gigs, your blog to keep up, and your various start-ups and businesses to manage. When do you find time to write the actual books? Do you have a regular set time for working on it [first thing in the morning, say], or do you just somehow find the time whenever?
I don’t set out to write books. I don’t make time for them. They just force themselves on me. If I resist, the idea makes me miserable until I write it down.
I can go three or six months or longer with nothing, and then an entire book just sort of appears. If I have to grind it out, I’m not going to write it. That’s not true for everyone, but that’s what works for me.
10. You’ve been publishing your books for about a decade now. Obviously, in that time period there’s been a lot of changes in the world. But for the sake of simplicity, let’s narrow the field down a bit, to the “Purple Cow”, new-marketing world you’ve been happily residing in. What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in this brave new world, since Purple Cow and IdeaVirus first hit the bookstores?
There’s no doubt that the biggest change is that most smart people now realize that the world has changed.
When I started, I was working in a status quo, static world, where the future was expected to be just like the past, but a little sleeker.
Now, chaos is the new normal. That makes it easier to sell an idea but a lot harder to sound like a crackpot.
