Hugh MacLeod Cartoons drawn on the back of business cards
Hugh MacLeod
I’m Hugh MacLeod. I’m a cartoonist. Occasionally I write books.
gapingvoid is interested in start-up culture, because changing business for the better is what we’re about; that’s what Social Object Factory is about. We live and breathe it; we help everyone from lone entrepreneurs, to mid-sizers, to Fortune 500’s do the same. Check out our work here.
We create art that helps companies kick ass, end of story.
If you want to talk business, then it’s probably best to please contact my business partner, gapingvoid CEO Jason Korman, here. We look forward to working with you. Thanks!
It always excites me to see someone trying to shake up the art industry, so I was sad to learn about Jen Bekman’s fine art retail site, “20x200” suspending operations. Though I didn’t know the people personally, I’d been rooting for them. It seemed like a neat idea, and I loved the name.
So why did it fail? In retrospect, it isn’t too hard to see why: High overheads (Since when did you need a fancy office in SoHo, New York to sell art prints online?). Investors vs Founder conflicts. Beaucoup Employees, Pas Beaucoup sales. Nothing that any of us haven’t seen before…
But here’s another thought:
20x200’s official tagline was “Art For Everyone”. Or to put it through a Marxist lens, art for the masses.
“Bringing Art To The Masses” is a well-meaning idea, sure, but hardly a new one. The early Soviets tried the same thing, coincidentally, around the same time they also discovered that ruthlessly exterminating people en masse (no pun intended) was good for business.
John Ruskin, William Blake, Durer, La Trec, Hogarth, etc etc were trying even before that [Though Ashille Gorky, one of my favorite artists, didn’t like the idea so much. He famously called 1930’s Social Realism “Poor art for poor people”, but I digress…]
The thing is, like Seth Godin says, does anybody really belong to “The Masses” anymore? We’re all weird, we’re all niche, and thanks to the Internet, we’re all getting weirder and nichier by the day.
In other words, “Art For Everyone” is a nice enough thought, until you realize that few potential customers actually like being put in the “Everyone” basket.
So what basket do people like being put in? A basket with a strong, passionate, relatively unique sense of PURPOSE that defines it. A niche that matters.
And yes, you guessed it, what is true for the online art sales market is also probably true for your industry as well.
It’s either that, or get crushed by Amazon…
[UPDATE:] Jen just sent me a nice email– Operations are suspended, not ceased. So it seems there’s going to be a second act, they’re going to regroup… Stay tuned. Hurrah!
In this episode of the Gape Into The Void podcast, Hugh and Jason have a discussion with bestselling author, speaker, and marketer, Seth Godin. Seth has been an inspiration to many, including Hugh, and over the years gapingvoid has produced many popular images that were based upon, or included the words of Seth Godin. We even have a dedicated Seth Godin Store! Most recently, Hugh illustrated one of Seth’s three new books, “V Is For Vulnerable.
We hope you enjoy listening to the talk with Seth. If you like the show, please tell your friends about the “Gape Into The Void” podcast and leave us a review on iTunes.
We started off talking about the children’s book Seth and I made together, “V Is For Vulnerable”, but the conversation went way beyond that.
Seth, as always, was his very lucid self. As always, he’s pushing us to raise our game in the meaningful” and “creating art” departments.
My big takeaway was, that in spite of Seth being very successful and well-known in my circles, he really isn’t trying to reach “Everybody”, just the small few who are ready to hear it. It’s easy to think that everybody digs Seth’s message, that’s not actually true. Most people just aren’t ready.
But that’s OK. Though Seth fans are a definite minority, the good news is, that’s still enough people to make a huge impact.
We can all learn something from that…
Todd’s Show Notes:
1. “If Dr. Seuss wrote a book that would make a middle manager cry, that is what we set out to do.”
2. It is about being hopeful and brave again, like we were as children.
3. Making art is about being vulnerable to the world.
4. “If it is certain to work, it’s not innovation. And if it is not innovation, than it is not art.”
5. Too many organizations are afraid to say to the world “This might not work…” And that fear holds most back from creating art.
6. “Failure is something I look forward to, because it shows me I’ve gotten to an edge.”
7. “Work is love.” Or at least it should be.
8. Imbalance makes good things happen, and makes real, honest connection possible. And it’s that feeling of almost falling from imbalance, that you really begin to start feeling alive.
9. Hard work vs. Doing something that is hard, risky, meaningful.
10. How people apply “one-buttock playing” to their daily lives.
11. Hugh and Seth discuss the creative process in how they created this book.
12. “Surround yourself with people who are on a journey…and help them make that journey with more gusto. And to make more of a ruckus.”
13. Mattering, is more important than focusing on quality…And mattering, is doing something that cannot be specified…
Decades ago, before my first cartoons were ever published, I had this idea that my first published work would be a children’s book.
That didn’t happen, of course. After years in the cartoonist game, my first children’s book was only just published this month.“V Is For Vulnerable”. Check it out.
Though actually, it’s not a children’s book. It’s really a book for entrepreneurs, fiendishly disguised as a children’s book.
But Shhhhhhhh! Don’t tell anybody.
This is what I wrote in the dedication:
These drawings are dedicated to my nephews and nieces, all five of them. May these words resonate with you one day, and God Forbid that they never do. Lots of Love from Uncle Hugh
I meant every word to them, I assure you.
Heck, and it isn’t even my book, not really. My friend Seth wrote the thing, it was all his idea. I just illustrated it, long after the really hard work was already done.
That being said, I’m very proud of the work nonetheless. And even more proud that Seth chose me for the job.
There are many lessons about the nature of work, love and enterprise, that we are neglecting to teach our children…
… at our peril.
This must change, if we are to thrive long-term.
Hopefully this is a step in the right direction. Kudos to Seth for writing it, and to y’all for supporting it. Thank you.
[Thanks to Seth Godin for sending in these two photos: First, himself sitting underneath the “Dip” piece (he added the speech bubble himself) and then a “gapingvoid Wall” he has in his office of some of the the work I’ve done for him over the years. VERY Cool.]
[From yesterday’s newsletter:]
In 2007, when Seth Godin asked me to draw some cartoons for his little masterpiece, The Dip, I had no idea that an eighty-page book could touch so many people, so profoundly. If you haven’t read it, you must– and you can get a copy here.
Given the simple, yet powerfully insightful lessons of the book, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great for all of us Dip-fans out there to have all the cartoons inside a single hanging frame?” Something that would be a bit of a reminder — in the moments when you really need one?
It was so obvious, and Seth has them hanging above his desk [see above].
It was a big Ah-Ha! moment for me. This enormous feeling of “Yes! Finally! This is the kind of space I want my career to live in!” That feeling, FINALLY articulated, after years in the career-hell desert. It was very liberating.
And so one day I decided to pay tribute to that feeling, by creating a hand-drawn Purple Cow print.
I figured, there’s got to be people out there who were as affected by that book as I was, so why not create something to celebrate that? It’s a very iconic book among my friends, so why not make an actual icon out of it? It was a no-brainer, really.
Basically, it’s the cover of the book, all drawn by hand, with my all-over squiggly style. It’s the largest print I’ve ever done, and it’s pretty intense. It also came with Seth Godin’s blessing (Thanks, Seth!)- it goes without saying, I wouldn’t have gone ahead without that.
One more thing: Of all the prints I’ve done, it’s the hardest one to capture via photography; posting on the Internet really doesn’t give it justice. That’s OK, that’s kinda what keeps it special, too.
Hope you like purple
UPDATE: Seth left a kind comment below:“There’s one on the wall of my office. It’s even cooler than Hugh says it is.” Thanks, Seth!
[Visit the gallery here to purchase the print and/or view other prints from the gapingvoid “Seth Godin” series etc.]
[Yes. I know. We didn’t use my drawing style this time. The Factory is really about Social Objects, not about Hugh etc.]
One thing Seth and I always had in common, is that we both believe in writing short books. My personal rule is: All my books have to be short enough to be read on a plane ride between Miami and New York. And they are.
A book that makes you feel hopefully really inspired and really excited, that you close and put away satisfied, just as they’re dropping the landing gear, coming into La Guardia. It’s simple enough goal to aim for; certainly a lot less deluded than “Write the next ‘Sun Also Rises’ or ‘Ulysses’”.
Seth talks about his “short format” philosophy some more in a brilliant post, “Tracts and Books”:
The Communist Manifesto is 80 pages long. Certainly long enough to make an impact.
It has never taken me beyond a hundred pages to be persuaded. Sure, there are times when the pages after page 100 help me pile on, give me more depth and understanding. But a hundred (and usually fifty) is enough to get under my skin.
Or to steal heavily from George Bernard Shaw, “I’m sorry my last book was so long, but I didn’t have time to write a short one”.
It’s dirty little secret that most of my business-book author friends (and I have more than a few) will freely admit off the record: Most business books are lucky if people read more than the first hundred pages.
So why write more than a hundred pages? You tell me…
It’s never quite that simple, of course. There are as many ways to write a book as there are authors. If you want to spend the next seven years teaching junior college in order to be able to write the next Great American Novel in your spare time, that works too, go for it.
But if you’re just trying to get ideas to spread– if it’s the ideas that actually matter, not the book itself– I’d pay attention to what Seth is up to, very carefully.
Like I’ve said many times before about Media, we’re now living in the era of #CheapEasyGlobal. And thanks to that, I do honestly believe, it’s never been a more exciting time to be a writer.
7. Being in the same room while Babson’s President, Len Schlesinger interviewed CNN senior political analyst, Dave Gergen in Boston a few months ago. Gergen’s advice to students? “Learn how to invent.”
8. A tweet I made earlier: “I’m not sure if America is ready to be a second-rate nation quite yet”.
A lot of people worldwide are relying on America not becoming, like I said, a second-rate nation. Even some of the people who don’t particularly like America.
And how is that going to happen, exactly? How are we going to remain at the top of our game, or at least, make a damn good show of it?
The same way we’ve always done it: by creating new, interesting products and ideas that people need, want, value and are inspired by.
PART TWO: THE PREVIOUS TWO AGES OF EDUCATION.
To massively over-simplify, there were two main phases in the history of education, pre-industrial and industrial. The first meant only the clergy and the sons of the elite were properly educated. Then along comes the second, industrial phase, which meant universal education on a mass-scale, that emerges along with the “Age of Reason”, the industrial revolution and the whole modern era.
As Seth Godin famously likes to talk about, in this second, industrial phase, schools became little more than factories, churning out young people educated enough to work in bigger factories one day. Whether we’re talking blue collar or white collar, it didn’t matter, it’ still a factory job, basically. You’re still a cog in the factory machine, basically. This factory-model was perfect for when the factory was still the cornerstone of the industrial economy. A factory-centered model for a factory-centered world. This was true whether in elementary school in Iowa, or Harvard Business School in Cambridge, your reality was the factory because your career was the factory. Own the factory, work in the factory, live near the factory, become the factory. Factory, factory, factory…
And of course, this factory-centric model which worked fine for a hundred-plus years is now broken. We can no longer compete long-term that way. Just owning a factory doesn’t give us the same edge it used to, the same economic security, as anyone who’s ever tried competing lately in the global economy has been finding out.
A new model is needed.
PART THREE: WE ARE READY FOR THE THIRD AGE OF EDUCATION: THE CREATIVE AGE.
Personally, I had a pretty good formal education, where I learned the basics– reading, writing, math, a bit of science, history, languages and a wee smattering of the arts. I learned to study and pass tests. Like most students, I learned how to learn, basically. I leaned how to work in a foctory, basically.
I don’t think that’s enough anymore, as the THOUSANDS UPON THOUSANDS of under-employed and unemployed university graduates with good grades in Europe and America will testify. They passed all their tests fine, they all ticked off the right boxes… and yet, look at them now, poor things.
Kids in the future are simply not going to leave school with this big, bumper crop of plum jobs waiting for them to fill, not like they used to. In the future, kids will leave school and increasingly be expected to create their own viable realities.
Like David Gergen alluded to, these young adults will be expected not just to do the work, but expected to ACTUALLY invent something. Create something, not just obey orders, not just fulfill some sort of social role.
And somehow, we have to teach our schools how to teach our kids exactly that. It’s not going to be easy.
4. HOW DO YOU BEST PREPARE FOR THE CREATIVE AGE?
As I see it, there are basically two ways, at least if you go at it from a college-age, entrepreneurial, startup mentality. One is the more risky path advocated by my wonderfully lucid friend, Jason Calacanis, to forget college and instead, “Spend Your College Tuition on Being Mentored and Starting a Company.” That’s probably what I would have chosen for myself, nowadays. That, or apprenticing for a master at something, the way English tailors learn their craft, or how the advertising legend, Dave Trott used to hire kids right off the street in London and give theme a chance at writing ads (Hence the earlier Jiro/Mastery reference]. Learning on the job, as it were. The street-fighter’s approach. Tough, brutal, intense, but nonetheless a first-class education in the University of Life.
The second way is what I see Len Schesinger trying to do at Babson.… shaking things up… evolving the idea of school (business school, anyway) as not just a place of learning, but also as a place of DOING.
Where. Stuff. Gets. Done.
In the real world. Here and now.
Where students don’t just learn about running businesses, but are expected to actually start running businesses and making them viable. All while still getting good grades. It’s a pretty intense curriculum, but hey, the best students seem to thrive at it.
Michael Dell’s company was started in a dorm room. Ditto with Mark Zuckerberg. Hey, my cartooning career was, too.
This is the idea of a college as not just a seat of learning, but an incubator, of sorts.These days, business schools like Babson aren’t just competing with Harvard or Wharton, they’re competing with Y Combinator and 500 Startups. The most talented kids in the country aren’t waiting around for the grownups in the ivory towers to get their act together. They’re already inventing their own futures; they’re in a hurry.
I don’t have all the answers. All I know is that it’s already happening. It’s already begun, the genie is already out of the bottle… and it’s damn exciting to watch.
[PS: This blog post only took me a short morning and a couple of hundred words to write. Ideally, it would’ve taken me a couple of years and enough words to fill an entire book. I’m sorry if it’s incomplete, I’m sorry if there are massive holes everywhere. It’s a vast minefield of a subject that’ll take the cleverest people in the land more than a few decades to work out fully. But like I inferred, it still damn exciting to think about. I just hope we’re all up for it.]
Hewlett Packard is kicking off its cybersecurity conference today, HP Protect 2011, and they kindly hired gapingvoid to design some posters for them.
Basically, I wanted to draw something kinda cool n’ fun, something that computer security people wouldn’t mind taking back home and hanging on their office walls.
To the uneducated, the cartoon might seem trivial, but actually, it’s not. Like Lennie Bruce famously said, “Humor is serious business”.
Fred Wilson is right, we are indeed in the middle of a major, long-term, global trasformation, and Obama (or anybody else who wants his job) is NOT, REPEAT NOT going to save us.
So what IS going to save us? The SAME DAMN THING that has ALWAYS saved us:
All serious work begins with serious play first. AND NOT the night before, but FIRST thing in the morning.You think Jony Ives works for a living? Hell, no, he plays for a living. So do I. So do my friends, Charles Hope, Seth Godin and others like us.
And YES, you can bring that sense of play anywhere– to a conference on cybersecurity, for example. Don’t get me wrong; cybersecurity is also serious business. Our collective safety and our livelihoods as citizens depend on it, and companies like HP work to help protect our culture’s critical infrastructure systems and generally keep us out of trouble.
It’s a nasty, dangerous world out there, after all…
That being said, security nerds are also people who like to play and get paid for it, more than most. They like to have FUN, at conferences and anywhere else, of course they do. Who says the good guys cannot be sweaty and unshaven? News to me. To PLAY means to HACK something. Hacking is INHERENTLY playful. Of course it frickin’ is.
[Note to non-Nerds: the reason that nerds don’t spend a lot of time on their personal appearance is because they’d rather spend their brief time here on Earth, working on something that actually matters to them, not spend it on something that matters to the usual crowd of clueless, superficial, hipster knuckleheads.]
Thanks to Hewlett Packard for giving gapingvoid the opportunity to live in a place it hasn’t yet i.e. the complex and mysterious world of cybersecurity i.e. the world where the hackers live and thrive happily. It’s good to know that some of them are on our side. So far, it’s been a blast. Rock on.
[Bonus Link: The ever-brilliant Ben Hammersley gave a great talk to a bunch of high-level UK cybersecurity nerds recently. A wonderful read.]
Earlier today I was thinking of certain “thought leader” friends of mine, people that I know personally. Rockstars in their field.
Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, Kathy Sierra, Gary Vee, Prof. Brian Cox, Joi Ito, Ben Hammersley, Doc Searls etc.
Looking for a common thread, it suddenly hit me– besides being hugely talented in their field and the aforementioned rockstardom, what else do they have in common?
Short answer: Presentations. They’re all REALLY REALLY good at standing in front of a crowd and wowing them. Every one of them. I’ve seen them. They knock your socks off. No wonder they get invited to speak at TED, SXSW and other places. No wonder they’re able to command the big bucks for doing so.
And then, when you look at the great world-changing figures in history, you see the same. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Cicero, Winston Churchill, or Shakespeare’s fictional Henry V (“We band of brothers, we happy few” etc.)- it’s right there, front and center. The presentation.
And then if you read your ancient history, what were the most privileged people in Rome and Athens taught how to do as part of their classical education? That’s right. The art of Oration. Again, presentation. This explains why getting on the debating team at Oxford or Harvard is still considered a big deal for anyone in the know.
For anybody who ever aspires to lead.
So the question I’m asking is, if presentation is SUCH an obvious part of the magic leadership formula throughout the ages, and leadership is so integral to success, why isn’t presentation better taught in schools nowadays? Why aren’t third graders taught how to use Powerpoint, as standard? Why isn’t presentation emphasized as highly as say, grammar or history or math or athletics?
The reality is, the average person doesn’t spend one-hundredth the time working on their presentation skills, as they do on their hobbies or watching TV or going to the gym or whatever.
I think that might be a mistake…
[AFTERTHOUGHT: Yes, I know. Presentation isn’t everything. Steve Jobs’s legendary keynotes wouldn’t be nearly so impressive if Apple products sucked etc. But that’s not an excuse, either.]
Seth’s take on the future of publishing is similar to what I’ve been saying for a while: “The book doesn’t matter. The conversation matters.”
A book, as an object, has no inherent, objective power. Which is why it’s so hard to predict bestsellers, why you can’t judge a book by its cover.
The REAL power of a book comes from lots of people reading it and, MORE importantly, people talking about it.
Or as Mark Earls would say, what makes any object REALLY interesting (in this case, a book) is how it changes the human interaction around it, not the actual object itself.
Again, “The book doesn’t matter. The conversation matters.”
But this has always been the case.
A famous author has always been a global microbrand. A publisher’s power has always been in its ability to provide a platform for the author, not in its ability to chop down trees and create printed paper products.
And an author’s power has always been in her ability to affect human interaction through her writings, not in some magical, superhuman quality.
And of course, all the Internet has done is make these truths even more self-evident than they already were.
“The book doesn’t matter. The conversation matters.” That, my friends, is the future of publishing. The actual media– be it Kindle, iPad, hardpack, paperback, whatever– is irrelevant.
And if your publisher doesn’t really get that, then find another one. Seriously.
PS: Seth mentions me about eight minutes into it as a case study of what he’s talking about (Thanks, Seth!).
What I’m going to do is recommend to the CEO, Mike Natalizio to get it made up into a stack of signed, limited edition prints. Say, 30 or 50 of them.
Then get them framed.
Then send them off as gifts to the the 30 or 50 most influential people in the trucking business. As a conversation starter.
“Let’s talk about the issues, People.”
The trucking business is full of messy issues [e.g. people dying in road accidents every day, which HNI is in the front line of], so why not address them more openly, more forthrightly?
Now, of course, most blogs are one-person operations. Which means that successful blogs are often run by restless, outward-bound people in a hurry. And a lot of bloggers either have day jobs or passionate sidelines. I think that’s a good thing, even when they fail. It’s frustrating for me to hear, “stick to your blogging,” when people criticize a project created by a blogger – because it’s part of the blogging, part of the learning, part of what’s unfolding. I’d rather read a book that’s informed by the activities (not the reporting) of the writer, and I’d rather read a blog that’s based on the successes (and failures) of the blogger.
Which brings us to Hugh MacLeod and his work for Microsoft. Some critics think he’s selling out. I don’t. I think he’s having a huge impact on an organization –from the outside– at the same time that he demonstrates how just about any large organization can rethink its role in the world. And he’s doing it in front of all of us, without a net.
Mark’s personal catchphrase is “Making Ideas Happen”, which is what I used for the base of the cartoon.
And as it turns out, it’s also the title of his new book, which came out in April. [Disclosure: The book is also published by the same publishers I have i.e. Portfolio Imprint, Penguin Books.]
Besides writing books, Scott has two other businesses up his sleeve, The Behance Network and Action Method, so he’s a busy guy. Another one of those very bright people, like Tom Peters or Seth Godin, where the job titles “Author” and “Entrepreneur” get increasingly blurry. A quality that makes their books far more interesting in the long run, I would say.
[Scott, we’ll be in touch soon via gapingvoidbizcard@gmail.com to collect your details for the back of the card, so we can ship a free box of 100 to you etc. Thanks!]
[This is the first of a series of guest blog posts, based around the “Remember Who You Are” riff I’m always going on about. Today’s post comes from my friend and mentor, Seth Godin, the great marketing author.]
Forget who you are
When most people say, “remember who you are,” what they’re really saying is, “remember who we think you are, remember who you were born to, don’t overreach, wait your turn, don’t get uppity.”
They rarely mean it the way Hugh means it. Hugh, I think, is saying that you are whomever you decide to be. That’s a statement of astonishing audacity, one that could only be said by an artist and understood by one as well.
I have no illusions about the mobility of our society. While it is far more flexible and open than some societies in the past, there are huge impediments to entering a different class.
And yet…
And yet art in all its forms belies that. Art, whether it’s the drawing art that Hugh does or the business art that a great Wall Street trader does or the customer service art that Tony Hsieh at Zappos espouses… that sort of art isn’t limited by social boundaries. When you connect and change another human being, when you create upside wherever you go, then who you are is decided by you, not by them.
Let’s change the mantra, then, from “remember who you are,” to “decide who you are.”
Decide to be the generous, change-making, scarifying, delighting, over-the-topping dreamer you’re capable of being.
Last month my friend and mentor, Seth Godin released his longest and probably most important book, “Linchpin”. I interviewed him about it here.
To celebrate the book, Seth let me design a portfolio of four fine art prints, inspired by the book, entitled “The Linchpin Series”. You can go check out over on the gapingvoid Gallery here.
What else is there to say? Seth wrote a great book. Like I said in my review on Amazon,
“And Seth then challenges us, the readers, to become linchpins ourselves. To make the leap. To become artists. To do emotional work, whatever the sacrifice may be. It’s our choice, and it’s our burden. Seth won’t be there to catch us if we fall, but to become the people we need to be eventually, well, we probably wouldn’t want him to, anyway.
Congratulations, Seth. You have penned a real gem of a book here. Rock on.”
I basically wanted to create a set of prints– “Cube Grenades” — to go on the office wall, as Linchpin “Idea-Souvenirs” to kick the viewer in the pants. “Remember Who You Are” and all that.
I hope you’ll pay the gallery a visit. Meanwhile, you can check them out below as well.
Thanks, Seth! I had a lot of fun drawing these. Rock on.
Life is too short not to do something that matters, not to become a “Linchpin”. I know it, you know it, we all know it, so let’s stop futzin’ around at get on with it. Like Seth says, “Decide”.
Why do people become what Seth Godin calls “Linchpins”? Becasue to not do so would drive us crazy. Eventually we have no choice. And we’ve all been in worse places– when you know you’re capable of doing great things, being in “The Zone”, but every external marker out there indicates otherwise– that you’ll never get to do the “life’s best work” that you’re capable of. That your career will be nothing but drudgery and abuse, in exchange for what seems an increasingly meager paycheck.
And after being there long enough, the decision to become a Linchpin eventually becomes an easy one. But it can take time.
By Seth’s definition, an artist is not just some person who messes around with paint and brushes, an artist is somebody who does (and I LOVE this term) “emotional work.”
Work that you put your heart and soul into. Work that matters. Work that you gladly sacrifice all other alternatives for. As a working artist and cartoonist myself, I know exactly what he means. It’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it.
It’s easy to tell somebody to get into The “Linchpin” Zone. Much harder to live it. But fight like hell to get there, regardless, every friggin’ day, or else you’ll never make it.
You know you’re capable of doing great things, being in “The Zone”, but every external marker out there indicates otherwise– that you’ll never get to do the “life’s best work” that you’re capable of. That your career will be nothing but drudgery and abuse, in exchange for what seems an increasingly meager paycheck.
Yeah, it’s a painful place to be. But it doesn’t last forever, not if you don’t give up. Not if you don’t succumb to all the overpriced, “treadmill-enabling”, external markers of success– fancy houses, cars, schools, vacations and “stuff” that you can’t really afford, that you don’t really need nearly as much as the guy in the next cubicle says that you do.
What a deal, what a steal etc.All four, 11“x14” each, proper archival paper, inks and printing tech, all hand-signed by me, for the price of a moderately-OK-but-not-great meal for two in Manhattan. And of course, for hardcore Seth fanboys, there’s the “Purple Cow” print from early 2009.
These eight smart, kind, great people, some more well-known than others, are masters at what I call “Selling by Giving”.
They put stuff out there, as gifts. Great content, great ideas, great insights, great personal connection. By giving so much of themselves, for free, every day, they build up huge surpluses of goodwill, so when you’re finally in the market for something they’re selling (and they’re ALL selling something, trust me), they’re first on your list.
I do it, too, just not as well as these guys. I’ve published thousands of cartoons on this blog over the years, and that’s gotten me a lot of business. And not just fine art prints, either. It’s gotten me consulting gigs, full-time salary jobs, book deals, paid speaking gigs, marketing jobs, I could go on…
Selling by giving. Anybody who’s been watching any of these guys for a long time will know exactly what I’m talking about.
But here’s what’s interesting to me: I can remember not that long ago, say 5 years, when this type of marketing seemed pretty freaky to most people. Now it’s considered normal, at least to smart marketers. FIVE years. That’s all.
I could see that in another five years, ANYONE who wants to market ANYTHING successfully– be they small mom n’ pop shops to large companies, will have to be fluent in Gift Economics, to a level that seemed COMPLETELY alien only a few years ago.
As has become a regular habit with his last couple of books, to celebrate the launch I asked him ten questions, which he kindly answered below.
LINCHPIN: TEN QUESTIONS FOR SETH GODIN.
1. HUGH: OK, let’s get it over with– What is a “Linchpin”? What is the book about?
SETH: You’re a linchpin, Hugh. So are all those crazy people we can’t live without, people who bring art to work, people who reach out, make a connection, cause change to happen. The linchpin is the person who is indispensable, because they refuse to become an interchangeable part, someone who merely follows the manual. In the hardware store, the linchpin is a lightweight little piece that holds the wheel to the axle. Very difficult to live without.
2. In your book, Purple Cow, your message was “Everyone’s a Marketer, now.” In All Marketers are Liars, the message was, “Everyone’s a Storyteller, now.” In Tribes, it was “Everyone’s a Leader, now.” In Linchpin, the message surprised me: “Everyone’s an Artist, now”. Tell us about your thesis.
Artist doesn’t mean painter or cartoonist or playwright. Artist means someone willing to stand up, stand out and make change. In a stable environment, we worship the efficient factory. Henry Ford or even David Geffen… feed the machine, keep it running smoothly, pay as little as you can, make as much as you can. In our post-industrial world, though, factory worship is a non starter. Cheap cogs are worth what they cost, which is not much. In a changing environment, you want people who can steer, innovate, provoke, lead, connect and make things happen. That’s my thesis. This is a new revolution, and just as Marx and Smith wrote about the industrial revolution, I’m writing about ours.
3. A key term you used throughout the book was “Emotional Labor”. Please explain what that is, and why that matters to anyone wishing to become a Linchpin.
It’s emotional labor to insist that your publisher leave the sexy and dirty bits in your last book, even though it certainly would have been easier to take them out. It’s emotional labor to move to Texas even though it might be easier to just hang out with friends. It’s emotional labor to do the work even when you don’t feel like it. Mostly, I’m talking about doing the difficult work of bringing your very best self to each interaction, because to do otherwise is a mortal sin.
4. Obviously, we’re not all artists, in the strictest sense of the word. I’m a professional artist myself, and even I don’t much like using that term. But here’s Seth, trying to bust the definition of “Artist” wide open. I get the feeling this was not you trying to redefine the term in order to create controversy for the sake of being clever, but you are trying to challenge people to think about their work differently, to make them think about WHAT EXACTLY has to happen, for them to become a Linchpin. Yes?
Well, what should we call these people, these linchpins? I mean, we have a word for a painter who merely does derivative work: a hack. But what do we call a customer service rep or an insurance adjuster or landscape architect that changes the game, that elevates each interaction and that takes enormous emotional and professional risk with their work? I think they need a name, so I stole one. I call them artists.
5. One thing I find interesting about the book (and all your other ones, as well) is that you don’t offer any easy answers. You never say, “This is where the world is headed, and this is how WE ARE going to make it work”. Your shtick is more, “This is where the world is headed, and this is what YOU have to think about, if you don’t want to be thoroughly crushed.” And yet I still see people asking you, “Please tell me what to do to incorporate your kind of new, groovy thinking, WITHOUT ME having to change my life or my modus operandi in an way whatsoever. Please show me where the autopilot button and the cruise control are” etc. Do you find that frustrating? Is it happening more as your work gets more well known? Less?
Frustrating isn’t really the right word. I think it was sad at first, because it’s almost like the Wizard of Oz… Dorothy had the power all along, right? But now I view it as an opportunity. It’s so tempting to start drawing maps for people. It makes them happy and it makes me feel smart. But resisting that temptation is the right thing to do, because once someone does it on their own a few times, they become unstoppable. Watching that change occur is one of the highlights of my professional life. And in fact, every great teacher I’ve ever known seeks the same outcome.
6. If I had to describe your typical writing style (of which I am a huge fan, of course), I’d call it “Dryly understated, humorous, streetwise and lucid”. This book somewhat surprised me. It seems to have a more angry and more emotional tone than your previous books. Was that just me? Is your writing style becoming angrier in general, or did the inherent subject matter in the book just get you more riled up than usual?
It’s not angry, Hugh. It’s urgent.
I don’t think most people realize the precarious nature of our current situation, how close we are to the edge, and how little time we have to get our act together.
7. I’ve known you for a little while; we met right around the time that Purple Cow came out in 2003. Back then to me you were this articulate, entertaining and successful entrepreneur, who had just written this cool business bestseller. Then more books came out and I started seeing this more “author” sensibility emerging. You obviously enjoyed writing the books, and you obviously liked seeing people reading them and liked helping make change happen. But in this last year or so, I’ve seen your shtick become more “rabbinical” i.e. it seems you’ve gotten more interested in teaching people– younger people especially. Like you no longer care so much about your own success and “affecting change” yourself, but are more interested in teaching people how to become successful and affect change themselves. Am I close? Are you evolving?
I hope we’re all evolving. I think my mission is the same as it has been since that day on the canoe dock in 1978 when I decided it would be very cool indeed to help people achieve more than they thought they could. What has changed is my awareness of how the system pushes people like me to be manual writers. Publishers and others really want to give the market what it wants, and what it wants are Dummies books and fast easy change (Hey! It’s been a year… let’s elect a new senator!). Even now, the single best way to get a lot of blog traffic is to post a list of Ten Ways to… and make sure you mention Ron Paul, Apple Computer and the inherent difference between men and women. Try it, it works.
So I’ve experienced the feedback you get when you draw a map, and it’s nice, but the real win is helping people draw their own. To see the world as it is. That’s a lot more difficult. People need glasses, not a map.
8. I saw this in your last book, Tribes, and I see again it Linchpin. Though I’m sure there are tons of people who would prefer it if they were, your books are not instruction manuals. You’re not telling people what to “Do”. You’re telling people to “Decide”. A subtle difference, but it’s an important one. Please tell us more.
Oh, I don’t think it’s subtle at all. I think it’s a HUGE difference. We hate to decide. We avoid deciding. We hide from it.
Once someone decides, they almost always succeed (unless they want to win an Olympic medal or some other ridiculous prize awarded to just a few). The decision is the hard part, but we spend precious little time on it.
9. We have a mutual friend in New York, Fred, who is a tremendously successful venture capitalist. But as anyone who knows him well will testify, his success has diddly-squat to do with love of money and all its trappings, and everything, EVERYTHING to do with the fact that, quite simply, he utterly loves what he does. He just ADORES waking up every morning and clicking his heels on his way to work. I grew up in a pretty standard, middle class corporate family. Back in my parent’s day, “loving” your job was considered almost a taboo; something inherently detrimental to long-term personal career success, and the success of the company team. But there seems to be an underlying message in Linchpin that THAT THIS HAS ALL CHANGED. That if you don’t love your job, not only will you be a miserable wreck the rest of your life, but hey, you’re less likely to be successful in business, as well. Care to elaborate?
The amazing thing is that in every job, every one, there are people who hate it and people who love it. There are clock watchers on Sand Hill Road. There are people bussing tables at a coffee shop who race to work each day. The job is irrelevant, pretty much. It’s the decision.
Fred does great work as a VC because his motives are transparent, his judgment is excellent and he keeps his promises. All three are essential for him to love his job, and he does. Since he’s not willing to trade that joy for a few bucks, he sticks to his principles. And, here’s the cool irony, the more he does that, the more money he makes!
10. Of all the books you’ve written (and I love them all), this seems to be your most challenging. Your previous messages– Everyone’s a Marketer, Everyone’s a Storyteller, Everyone’s a Leader etc– though compelling enough, somehow seem far easier to digest compared the simple message in Linchpin: “Love what you do, or fail.” Why do you think that idea is STILL so difficult for so many people? Do you expect this book to be as well received as your previous ones? Does it matter?
If you had asked me four weeks ago, I would have been a happy pessimist. Happy because I wrote precisely the book I wanted to write, regardless of the consequences. I was literally ready for almost every one to hate it. And a pessimist because I’m pushing people awfully hard with this one.
My work is done here, as the saying goes. To unleash something like this on the world, to go out this far on a limb and have people support you and embrace you and run with it… it’s the most amazing feeling.
Thanks, Hugh, for giving me something to write about and for showing us all a way to live. We can’t do it without you.
What can I say? It was a blast. Everybody seemed to have a great time. More than one person came up to me and said it was a lot more fun than any art opening they’d ever been to. You can see what people are saying on Twitter (for the time being, anyway) by following the #purplecow hashtag…
Thanks to Seth Godin for being such a gracious co-host, thanks to everybody who helped out, thanks to everybody who came along for it.
A special big thanks to Martha Burzynski, Carlo Balistrieri, and Cecilia Feret for volunteering their time to help us out at the door. That was so kind of you, seriously. Thanks to David Parmet and Sandi Bachom for the great photos and videos [posted above].
And a final thank-you to my business colleagues, Jason and Laura, who worked tirelessly for SO LONG behind the scenes to make sure the evening was nothing short of a massive success. You guys rock. Ok, I’m going to go off and sleep for a week…
In a rather random moment of clarity, I wrote this line on Twitter a couple of weeks ago:
“A good customer base is the best marketing department there is.”
One thing I remember fondly about my college buddies, back in the day: Not only did they all spend a lot of time and energy listening to Grateful Dead records and attending Grateful Dead concerts, they also spent a lot of time and energy trying to get me to do the same.
Though I never became much of a Dead fan in the end, it sure wasn’t for my friends’ lack of trying. Their mojo may not have worked on me, but hey, it worked on plenty other impressionable young people, so it’s all good.
My college buddies were self-appointed team members of one of the greatest marketing departments in history: The Deadheads.
So who are your customers? Are they your marketing department? If they’re not, they should be, yes?
[This reminds me: Seth Godin cited The Deadheads in his wonderful book, “Tribes”. I interviewed him here about the book etc.]
[UPDATE: The 6-9pm signing party is now fully booked. Sorry about that. However, if you want to RSVP via email at gapingvoidvip@gmail.com, we can put you on the waiting list, or just RSVP for the 9pm-12pm after-party: it’ll still be fun, and we still have plenty of room left for that. Thanks!]
Here’s the invitation for the Purple Cow Party on October 8th. Full details here.
Space is limited, so the first 100 people who e-mail an RSVP to gapingvoidvip@gmail.com will be allowed in 6-9pm [PLEASE NOTE: IT’S A DIFFERENT E-MAIL TO MINE etc.]. There will be more room for people after 9pm, so if you miss being one of the first 100, come after that.
If you wish to bring a guest please remember to include their name in your RSVP. Also, if you could specify whether you’re hoping to come before or after 9pm, that would be great, thanks.
The party goes on to midnight or so. Seth Godin, sadly, won’t be there the whole time. He likes to turn in early.
[CONFIRMED:] The print party will be held at Ilili, 6pm-Late, on 8th October, 2009.
The restaurant will be supplying food, Stormhoek will be supplying wine. Plus there will be a cash bar, if you’d rather have beer or liquor.
[The Purple Cow Print. Click on image to enlarge etc.] Seth Godin and I will be there, signing more Purple Cow prints. Plus I’ll have some more of my art on display & for sale.
It’ll be a fun evening. A good opportunity for Seth and gapingvoid readers to meet & greet, and concoct EVIL PLANS for world domination. I can’t wait! Rock on.
Best Made make customized axes. Like it says on their webpage:
NOTHING WITHOUT AN AXE:
Every high-rise condo, luxury office, executive suite, ranch house, and farmstead must have an axe in it. We know that axes shouldn’t only be in the hands of lumberjacks: anyone and everyone should have an axe in their name. Put it in your cubicle, give it to your niece as a graduation present, or your dad for father’s day (or better yet mom for mother’s day), bring it to the company picnic, carry it to the door next time Jehovah’s Witness come knocking, or just lean it up against your living room wall and admire. An axe is indispensable and sublime, the epitome of self-reliance and independence, a perfect design object, a timeless instrument.
I swapped emails with one of the company’s founders, Graeme. Turns out he and his business partner, Peter, like myself, spent their teenage summers canoe-tripping up in Northern Ontario, where believe me, a good axe is both an indispensable and highly revered piece of kit. So that’s where the love comes from.
I’ve held one of their axes in my own two hands– beautifully made, lovely to hold and to look at.
Good luck to these folk, I say…
[The Purple Cow Print. Click on image to enlarge etc.]
[UPDATE:] CONFIRMED: The print party will be held at Ilili, 6pm-Late, on 8th October, 2009.
Between 27th & 28th
236 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10001, USA
(212) 683‑2929 ililinyc.com
The restaurant will be supplying food, Stormhoek will be supplying wine. Plus there will be a cash bar, if you’d rather have beer or liquor. It’ll be a fun evening. Rock on.
For those of you still in the dark re. The Purple Cow Print that I worked on with Seth Godin, one of the greatest marketing thinkers in the world, this is just a note to say I’ve set up an archive of all the blog posts about it here Seth blogs about it here as well…
And of course, it’s for sale on the gapingvoid gallery
The other bit of news is, Seth and I will be throwing an official launch party for the print in New York City on the evening of October 8th, 2009. A chance for friends of both gapingvoid and Seth to hang out and meet n’ greet. A bit belated, maybe, but we both had very busy summers. We’re throwing the party in a Lebanese restaurant in Chelsea, I’ll also have some of my other works on display– both prints AND original drawings. And yes, they’ll be for sale. So it’ll be a bit like an art opening, with perhaps more emphasis than usual on the people attending [not to mention, food and drink], than the actual art itself. Stormhoek, naturally, will be supplying the wine.
Details to follow shortly. Watch this space etc.
Anyway, I hope if you’re in the area, you’ll be able to make it. Thanks.
[NOTE TO SELF: What a crazy adventure this has all been so far…]
[Me and Seth signing the silkscreen…]
Got back to West Texas last night after almost a week on the road. A quick visit to Silicon Valley for the Techcrunch Party, then an equally brief visit to New York.
I was on the East Coast mostly to co-sign the Purple Cow print with Seth Godin.
That was a great afternoon, visiting his office in Westchester County. He’s a seriously interesting guy. We talked a lot about all sorts of things…
Other highlights were the #NYCtweetup- about 50 people came. Secondly, I got to meet my editing team at Penguin/Portfolio for the first time. They seem very happy with how the book is doing, so it was all good.
Hugh MacLeod (right) became Internet-famous by drawing cartoons on the back of business cards and publishing them online at his Gaping Void blog. Along the way, he gained some valuable insights into marketing and creativity which he also happily shared with readers; that was enough to attract the attention of the Portfolio imprint at Penguin Group, which recently published MacLeod’s first book, Ignore Everybody.
Now, one of MacLeod’s friends (and inspirations) happens to be Seth Godin — if you’ve been reading GalleyCat long enough, you know we’re right there with him on that — and back in April, MacLeod drew a version of the cover to Godin’s Purple Cow (on a much bigger surface than a business card). “To me the book, as a totem, as an icon, represents a huge shift in thinking that came along, almost uninvited, back in the early 2000’s,” MacLeod emailed Godin shortly after. “The drawing represents [to me] my own ability to internalize it.” By the end of the month, he was taking orders for limited-edition prints which he flew into New York City earlier this week to sign alongside Godin. The pre-order price for the prints was $495, but if you want one now, it’ll set you back $1,100.
“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. We have an unlimited need for this.”
Well, Day Six into becoming a “published author”, and according to Google, a lot of people are already talking about my book. Here are some of my favorite reviews so far:
Seth Godin: “Should Hugh swear so much?” This post re-visits a conversation Seth and I had a year ago, when I was first wondering whether or not to keep the “potty mouth” cartoons out of the book. David Armano: “The title says it all. You have to decide if what you believe in is good enough to fight for, to pursue, to risk everything for. Only you can decide this.“ Rick Segal: “Hugh’s advice and commentary should be required reading for everybody doing a start-up, coming up with a earth changing idea or dreaming of the day they punch out of that Dilbert-like cubicle.“ Sex On The Beach: “Hugh’s not coming from some lofty ivory tower, but from a real process of hard work and grit. He’s not preachy; he’s simply sharing what he has learned along his path.“ The CRM Blog- One of my longest (and best) interviews ever:
CRM magazine: Do you think creativity is a kind of currency now? Hugh MacLeod: It’s always been a currency, more so right now because if you’re creating a lot of stuff that’s interesting, valuable, meaningful, that’s a lot safer to me than just pushing paper around a desk all day. Those kinds of jobs are being replaced by computers every day.
We want to be creative. We want to be more useful and tap into something deeper and more meaningful. We don’t want to sit around and be a schmuck our whole lives; what I’m hoping the book will do is get people to start a dialogue with themselves and with other people. It’s an interesting dialogue because [creativity] is such a primal need.
Jerimiah Owyang: “You see, his book Ignore Everybody, really isn’t a book. Instead, you should think of it as as that friend in high school who never followed the rules, but achieved his goals took you out for a beer 20 years later and shakes your shoulders and wakes you up.”
[The book jacket– click on image to see enlarged PDF version etc.] Here are some brief notes:
1. Big thanks to my agent, Lisa, to Jeffrey and Jillian, my editors over at Penguin/Portfolio, to Maureen Cole, who does my marketing over at Portfolio, to my friend and mentor, Seth Godin, for introducing me to Portfolio.
2. Big thanks to all the bloggers and blog readers who inspired and encouraged me all along the way… You know who you are.
3. The book only took me a couple for months to write. It took me four years to find the right publisher. I feel fortunate that it wasn’t the other way around…
4. Some of my favorite cartoons in the book were drawn at this very small, funky West Village Bar in Manhattan, during my New York days. Probably the proudest moment with getting the book published for me so far, was being able to send an advance copy to the bar’s owner, along with the following note:
“Dear Tanya,
Remember that crazy guy with the tweed jacket who used to sit at the end of your bar every night, drawing those weird cartoons on the back of business cards?
I’m happy to report, he ended up alright…”
5. Yes. I am insanely happy, excited and grateful about all this. Thanks and God Bless to you all. Rock on.
Above is a photo that one of my friends on Twitter sent me. He basically downloaded one of my cartoons off my blog, printed it out, and stuck it outside his cube at work, for other people to see, hopefully to comment on, and hopefully, to start a conversation. This, I believe, is where my cartoons work the best– “Cube Grenades”- small objects that you “throw” in there in order to cause some damage– to start a conversation, to spread an idea etc. [The Blue Monster] The Microsoft Blue Monster is probably my best-known Cube Grenade, which is why I made it into a limited edition print eventually. Seth Godin first put his Purple Cow book into a purple milk carton for the same reason– he guessed [quite rightly, as it turned out] that people would see the carton on somebody’s desk, inquire about it, and a conversation about the marketing ideas contained in the book would be started. [The Purple Cow print]
And the Purple Cow print was designed the same way. OK, it might be a bit big to display in a cube– you need a lot of wall space for this one– but the idea is the same– Conversations that happen around the object are more interesting than the actual object itself.
“Cube Grenades”. Exactly. Cartoons designed to affect change as “Social Objects”. Exactly. [Check out some of my limited edition prints over at gapingvoidgallery.com.]
[Update:]
Since I posted this “Cube Grenades” idea yesterday, I’ve been giving it A LOT of thought. Here are some notes: [More “Cube Grenades” in action. Click on image to enlarge etc.] 1. Like I said, my cartoons work best when they’re used as “Cube Grenades” i.e. small objects that you “throw” in there in order to cause some damage– to start a conversation, to spread an idea etc. But other social objects can be used as well– purple milk cartons, homemade cookies, funky mousepads, rubber toys, newspaper clippings etc. It’s the people that matter, not the object they socialize around. I don’t claim to have a monopoly. 2. Repeat After Me: Cube Grenades are Social Objects. Cube Grenades are Social Objects. Cube Grenades are Social Objects… 3. All big change in companies come from the people in the trenches, who do the actual day-to-day work. To change their behavior, you have to change the way they interact. People interact around social objects. Change the social objects, and you change the company. 4. My friend, Mark Earls once told me a story about a friend of his. The friend played a key role in the massively successful corporate turnaround recently undertaken by McDonald’s.
His friend told him, “We knew we were screwed, NOT when the nutrition and green issues started hitting the newspapers, but by the simple fact that our staff on the floor just weren’t cleaning the tables and the bathrooms like they used to. We knew THEN that our people had lost faith in our company.“
What social objects were people using, both during the company’s decline and during its turnaround? What cube grenades were being thrown about, both before and after? I bet you they weren’t the same. 5. Yes, I am fully aware that your customers are paying for the quality of the products and services your business provides, not for the quality of the cube grenades flying around your corporate headquarters. But they are all related. Everything of value that your business creates is the product of a already-existing social dynamic. Businesses are people, not machines. And people socialize around objects. 6. An Open Letter to Ad Agencies: Guys, you are NOT selling messages anymore. You are selling social objects. The work that you create will affect the cube grenades and social objects, that your clients and their customers use to interact with each other. [More Cube Grenades. “I use them as covers for my binders strewn about my desk, to start conversations”, says the person who e-mailed me the photo. Click on image to enlarge etc.] 7. You see a guy walking out of an Apple store, looking all excited about his new Apple computer he’s carrying under his arm? Why is he so excited? Sure, he just got himself a nice-looking piece of kit, but what REALLY excites him is all of the COOL, DISRUPTIVE STUFF he’s going to MAKE with his new machine. Videos, music mixes, whatever. For his FRIENDS and his PEERS. Again, it’s the SOCIAL that makes it interesting. Apple makes cube grenades, just like the ad agencies. Just like you do. 8. People download my cartoons and stuck them on their walls by the THOUSANDS. A much smaller number spend money to buy the more expensive versions i.e. my prints. But the idea is the same i.e. a way for people to interact. As I’m fond of saying: The conversations AROUND the object are FAR more interesting than the object itself. And what is true for me is true of your product, as well. “People Matter. Objects don’t.” Exactly. 9. So when do I start charging? You can download my stuff for free, so why should you buy a print? Who says you should? I’m guessing that if one of my cartoons is meaningful enough to you, you’ll get tired of seeing it printed on the office laserprinter paper in low-resolution, getting all worn and torn, with the Scotch tape getting all yellow and crinkly. If you like the drawing enough, eventually you’ll want to upgrade. The same way, back in college, that I would upgrade to vinyl or CDs, once the cheap and nasty cassette tape of my favorite band started getting all fuzzy and worn out. The same way I gladly paid $20 to hear the band play live, rather than hear the same songs on the cassette. “Meaning Scales”. The more cube grenades I throw out there, the more meaningful interaction I create for other people, the more people will want to pay for it eventually. If I locked it all down as a cash-only transaction, it would all die a horrible death overnight. [Privately-commissioned “Cube Grenades” i.e. limited edition, fine art prints that I did for my Brazilian client, agenciaclick. Click on image to enlarge etc.] 10. Probably the job I’m most proud of recently, is when I was hired by a Brazilian ad agency, agenciaclick to create a privately commissioned edition of cube grenades i.e. fine art prints. See photo above.
They didn’t want these prints for themselves; they wanted to give these out to their clients, as conversation starters. “All brands are open brands? Huh? What does that mean? Do you agree with it? Why? What does “open” actually mean? What does “brand” actually mean…?” You get the picture. The same idea that made The Blue Monster so successful. Again, it wasn’t about the message, the object. It was all about the social.
11. My long-term goal is to make more privately-commissioned “Cube Grenades” for more clients like agenciaclick. It was a wonderful working experience for me, and I want to spend more time in that business. If you find this idea interesting, please feel free to e-mail me at gapingvoid@gmail.com. Thanks.
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.
I’m happy to report, Seth left a very kind remark in the comments:
Ask us something hard, Hugh!
Your mission is clear. You are leading us where we want to go. You are pushing us to demand the possible, not to accept the status quo. In an extraordinarily direct and passionate way, you push yourself (and us) to look at what we do honestly and to remove the bullshit and get down to what matters.
That’s where I want to go, anyway.
When I was eighteen, just after I had finished my final exams at high school, I went out and got my first real job. Trainee bartender at Whigham’s Wine Bar, Edinburgh, Scotland. I loved that job; I kept it every summer for four years. The guy who hired me, Nick Henderson, was a great man. Since then I have been on the same, unending quest: To find “Meaningful Work”.
“Meaningful” is like “Creative”; its definition is a subjective call. I can’t tell you what’s meaningful to you. Nor can you do the same with me. All we can do is agree that somewhere deep within all of us, the hunger to find it is real.
My blog for the last eight years has been a mish-mash of all sorts of different things. Cartoons. Selling prints. Marketing 2.0. The Global Microbrand. “Creativity”.
Whatever. No matter what topic I was blethering on about that day, this blog has always been driven by the same thing that has always driven me. Finding meaningful work.
I’ve come close to finding it a couple of times. It’s never easy. It’s always elusive. I often wish that weren’t the case, but it is. Sorry. [P.S. The best way to support what I’m doing is to sign up to my “Crazy, Deranged Fools” Newsletter. Thanks!]
A few days ago, with the blessing of Seth Godin, I announced the Purple Cow Print. Here are some more of my thoughts, in no particular order:
1. I wanted to create an icon for the world I currently live in. The internet-enabled, Marketing 2.0 world. Seth’s 2003 book, “Purple Cow” seemed to sum up that world for me best. Turning into a print i.e. an iconic version of the world he spoke about, was a no-brainer. You walk into somebody’s office and see that print on their wall, you have no doubt whatsoever which worldview he’s aligned to.
2. I learned this while marketing wine: What’s interesting is not the liquid in the bottle, or what vineyard it came from, but the conversations that happen around it. Same with art. I wanted to make a print that HAD NO CHOICE but to start a conversation. A conversation about what? Not the work of art per se, but what the thing that the icon represents– the ideas in the book.
3. It’s the biggest print I have made so far: 39x28”. That’s BIG for a print. That’s a lot of purple.
4. Though I used “Web 2.0″ tech to market it, in many ways the print was a statement AGAINST what Web 2.0 seems to have been evolving into these last couple of years… a place where the shiny new tools seem to matter A LOT MORE to people than the objects people were building WITH the shiny new tools.
5. Though I’m really, really unbelievably happy with the number of pre-orders we have gotten so far, I believe the print will be A LOT MORE interesting to A LOT MORE people once they see it hanging on other people’s walls. Once they see the molecules with their own eyes. Once THE REAL conversations begin. The central thesis to Seth’s book is “Be Remarkable”. I went all meta and used his book design as a starting point to create something remarkable myself.
6. Somebody asked me recently if the way I marketed my prints [i.e. via Web 2.0] was part of the artwork itself? Well, I believe that all art is informed by its social dimension, including the commercial bit. The fact that you bought the print off a blog, rather than from a traditional art gallery, does indeed inform the story behind it. But you can just as easily take that theory so far. In the end, it’s made of paper and hangs on a wall. Theory can be a distraction. sometimes.
7. One of my great cartoonist heroes, Charles Schultz, once said, “If I were better at drawing, I’d make paintings. If I were better at writing, I’d write books. So instead I draw cartoons”. That’s exactly how I feel about my own work. I don’t see my work hanging in the Louvre any time soon. What I do see, however, and what gets far more interesting to me with time, is how people use my work fro their own ends, for helping them find their own sense of purpose. Seth’s book, or this print, won’t change your life. ONLY YOU will change your life. It’s only the job of the artist or writer to maybe give you a nudge in the right direction.
8. I am insanely grateful to Seth Godin for allowing me to run with this idea. He rules. Thank you, Seth! [Check out The Purple Cow print over at gapingvoidgallery.com.]
[The original design. Click on Image to Enlarge etc]
A couple of weeks ago I posted a new cartoon, basically a re-working of the front cover of my friend and mentor, Seth Godin’s seminal 2003 marketing book, “Purple Cow”. Like I told Seth in an e-mail:
It has occurred me many times recently, that one reason MANY, MANY people in the world are currently suffering during this current recession/crisis/whatever, is simply because they didn’t follow the advice in Purple Cow.
That’s a bit simplistic, I know, but it still has a ring of truth too it.
ALL your books are great, but Jeeze, Purple Cow is the one that really got under my skin, which is really what inspired the big drawing I did. To me the book, as a totem, as an icon, represents a huge shift in thinking that came along, almost uninvited, back in the early 2000’s. The drawing represents [to me] my own ability to internalize it.
You and I both somehow managed to find a way to currently live in this Purple Cow/Hughtrain world now, that we wrote about 5+ years ago. But now I see that same world suddenly arriving for millions of people… and it’s cold & scary for a great many of them.
Which is why I now think people now need to read Purple Cow more than ever…
I read Seth’s book right about the same time I really started to “get” this whole blogging and Web 2.0 thing. Purple Cow was almost iconic to me.
Which is why it was easy for me to envisage it as an icon.
So with Seth’s blessing, I turned this icon into literally ANOTHER icon– a very large, purple, iconic, fine art print. A “Totem”, as it were. Like Seth said on his blog, when he first announced the print earlier today:
Totem poles have been around for a long time, because they work. We need a place to tell our stories, and a reminder of what to talk about.
On a professional level, the stuff Seth talks about in Purple Cow is still very relevant. Be remarkable, Everyone is a marketer etc.- is what to me, Web 2.0 was all about. It WASN’T about yakking on endlessly about the latest shiny object or the latest crazy web-celeb stunt. It was about getting interesting ideas, products and services out to market a lot more cheaply, quickly and easily than it ever was before before. THAT’S WHAT EXCITED ME.
And that’s what this “Totem” is ALSO all about.
The print will be co-signed by both me and Seth. A limited edition of 380. You can a pre-order one below for $495.00 below by making $150 PayPal deposit. This offer is open only to the first 100 people who respond. Once they’re in production, you can purchase one at the retail price of $1,100.00 over at The gapingvoid Gallery, my new e-commerce website that launched officially today.
Seth and I are planning on having some sort of “Signing Party” in mid-June up in New York City, to sign the prints live. If you’re in town, I hope you can make it. Thanks, Seth, this is going to be insanely great! [The Small Print:] 1. The pre-order price is $495.00 for the first one hundred people who order. Once the prints have been co-signed by both me and Seth, the price reverts back to retail i.e. $1,100.00
2. It will be a limited edition of 380 serigraphs, plus artist’s proofs. All prints will be co-signed and dated by both me and Seth. 3. The prints will be shipped out circa July 1st, 2009, soon after the NY print party.
[Click on PayPal $150 Deposit] 4. To secure your pre-order, please use the PayPal button above to make a $150 deposit. The PayPal form will ask you for all your details [including your preferred shipping address], which of course we’ll have for our records. Why are we asking for a deposit? To weed out the spammers, flakes and trolls out there [This is the Internet, after all], leaving only committed buyers in the mix. No other reason. 5. When asked for your details, please include your real name, not just your business name. The shipper won’t deliver it otherwise. 6. We’ll email you a PayPal form for the outstanding invoice once the artwork is printed, packed and ready for shipping. 7. We’ll be printing these to the same high standards as always i.e. top-of-the-line inks and paper, approx 39″ x 28″ in dimension. Please note this print is quite larger than the earlier editions, so make sure you free up plenty of wall space! 8. Shipping & handling [approx $45 USA, $65 abroad] is not included in the price. The buyer is also responsible for any Customs & Excise outside the USA. We ship them rolled, protected in tissue paper, in extra sturdy, 5-inch mailing tubes. If you insist on having it shipped flat, we can certainly do that for you, but it costs extra and the risk of shipping damage is far higher. 9. If you have any questions, please feel free to drop me an email at gapingvoidprints@gmail.com, and either Laura or me will happily answer them.
10. Thanks, as always, for your love and support!
[Click on Image to Enlarge etc]
This drawing was inspired, of course, by my friend, Seth Godin’s seminal book, “Purple Cow”..
I always loved both the words and the design of the book. This is my tribute to it.
The book came out in 2003. Since then it’s changed a lot of lives for the better, including mine. Since then its DNA has buried itself deep inside Marketing Theory everywhere. Long may it continue to do so…
As a marketing blogger, I get asked a lot, “What is the future of marketing?“
I always answer the same: “The Blue Monster”.
What’s The Blue Monster?
A Blue Monster is a Social Object that articulates a Purpose-Idea.
What’s a Social Object? What’s a Purpose-Idea?
Sit yourself down, pour yourself another glass of whisky. This might take a while to explain… 1. THE BLUE MONSTER BACKSTORY
In the late 1990’s I was living in New York, working as a mid-level copywriter at a mid-size advertising agency, when for whatever reason I started drawing cartoons exclusively on the back of business cards, just to give me something to do while sitting at the bar. Like I wrote on my blog:
All I had when I first got to Manhattan were 2 suitcases, a couple of cardboard boxes full of stuff, a reservation at the YMCA, and a 10-day freelance copywriting gig at a Midtown advertising agency.
My life for the next couple of weeks was going to work, walking around the city, and staggering back to the YMCA once the bars closed. Lots of alcohol and coffee shops. Lot of weird people. Being hit five times a day by this strange desire to laugh, sing and cry simultaneously. At times like these, there’s a lot to be said for an art form that fits easily inside your coat pocket.
The freelance gig turned into a permanent job. I stayed. The first month in New York for a newcomer has this certain amazing magic about it that is indescribable. Incandescent lucidity. However long you stay in New York, you pretty much spend the rest of your time there trying to recapture that feeling. Chasing Manhattan Dragon. I suppose the whole point of the cards initially was to somehow get that buzz onto paper.
I started my blog, gapingvoid.com in 2001. I was back living in the United Kingdom, where I grew up and where my mother and sister still lived.
By this time I had accumulated a couple of thousand business-card cartoons, and just started posting them on a semi-daily basis.
Fast Forward to 2006. By this time my blog is pretty well known– one of the largest in Europe-getting over a million unique visitors a month. My cartoons are all over the internet, it seems, especially around the tech blogger scene.
It’s around this time that I meet Steve Clayton, at one of the many “Geek Dinners” that have begun sprouting around the London tech scene.
Steve works for Microsoft, at the time he was running the UK Partner Group [I could tell you what that actually means, but that would take too long. Suffice to say, he’s one very clever and talented chappie].
Steve’s not the first “Microsoftie” I’d met before, but he was the first one I got on really well with. Over the next few months, we start seeing each other around a lot. He’s a really super nice guy, highly intelligent, and fun to hang out with. Good times all round.
Early on, he tells me something that really struck with me: “I could be making a lot more money, and taking a lot less social grief if I worked somewhere else. But I choose not to, simply because at Microsoft, you get to work on some REALLY cool stuff, sooner than anywhere else.”
Why was that so interesting to me? Because I had heard that very same reason cited to me by EVERY single Microsoft employee I had ever met up until that time. Secondly, like every other Microsoft employee I had ever met before, Steve was a really nice, open, fun guy. He did not typify the stereotype “Evil Borg Hive Member” that Microsoftees were often accused of being.
I pondered this for a while. Why did these folk work at Microsoft? It wasn’t the money, it wasn’t the social kudos. Something else was motivating them
So in October, 2006 I posted a cartoon on my blog that tried to express this drive, at least to myself. It went on to be called “The Blue Monster”: [“The Blue Monster”. First blogged in October, 2006.]
I posted it in high-resolution, the idea being that people at Microsoft who liked the idea, could download it and print it out poster-style, if they wanted. Like I said on my blog:
I just designed this poster for my buddies over at Microsoft [you know who you are]. Feel free to download the high-res version by clicking on the image, and print it out onto — posters, t-shirts etc.
The headline works on a lot of different levels:
Microsoft telling its potential customers to change the world or go home.
Microsoft telling its employees to change the world or go home.
Microsoft employees telling their colleagues to change the world or go home.
Everybody else telling Microsoft to change the world or go home.
Everyone else telling their colleagues to change the world or go home.
And so forth.
Microsoft has seventy thousand-odd employees, a huge percentage them very determined to change the world, and often succeeding. And millions of customers with the same idea. Basically, Microsoft is in the world-changing business. If they ever lose that, they might as well all go home.
I chose the monster image simply because I always thought there is something wonderfully demonic about wanting to change the world. It can be a force for the good, of course, if used wisely. It’s certainly a very loaded part of the human condition, but I suppose that’s what makes it compelling.
What happened next was quite extraordinary. Steve saw the cartoon, and really liked it. He immediately started using the image in his e-mail signature. He stared talking about the cartoon on his blog. Next thing you know, other folk inside Microsoft start doing the same. The “idea-virus” is unleashed.
Today, if you’re ever invited onto the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, if you walk around the offices, chances are you’ll see the Blue Monster poster, hanging on somebody’s wall. Or you might very well see someone with a Blue Monster sticker on their laptop, wearing a Blue Monster t-shirt, or handing you their business card with the Blue Monster on the back. Though the Blue Monster wasn’t created by Microsoft, for many people working there, it seems to articulate why they work there. It’s also been written about in the UK National Media, as well as countless tech blogs.
It’s not that everybody inside Microsoft “gets” The Blue Monster. It’s never been officially endorsed by them. But the ones who do get ito, REALLY get it. For them, it’s a cult object. It represents the conversation they INDIVIDUALLY wish to be having with the world about their company and technology in general, not what the corporate “Brand Police” upstairs want to be having with the world. They may be loyal employees of Microsoft, but they’re also individuals. Somehow The Blue Monster allows them to express both roles at the same time, allows them to navigate the blurry lines that separate the two.
I was just playing around with a cartoon idea at the time, not really expecting too much to come from it. I never expected the idea to get as big and well-known as it did. Life is full of surprises. As the months went by and I started to see The Blue Monster story growing and growing, I had another insight: The Blue Monster wasn’t a one-off. The Blue Monster represented a fundamental shift in how marketing will be conducted in the future. [One of the drawings I did for Seth Godin’s latest book, “The Dip”.] [UPDATE:] In order to help me order my thoughts, I decided to put all my favorite social object posts onto a single blog page below. Enjoy.] [From “KULA”: June 15th, 2007]
The Guardian’s Kevin Anderson [who also attended last night’s screening] has a nice synopsis of Jaiku Founder, Jyri Engstrom’s “Social Objects” idea.
Something about sites like Flickr that you will be using these sites for years to come.
The sites that work are built around social objects.
[…] MySpace. What is the real focal object? Music. Once they lose that focus, it is in trouble.
How does one build a useful service around social objects? Five key principles.
1. You should be able to define the social object your service is built around.
2. Define your verbs that your users perform on the objects. For instance, eBay has buy and sell buttons. It’s clear what the site is for.
3. How can people share the objects?
4. Turn invitations into gifts.
5. Charge the publishers, not the spectators. He learned this from Joi Ito. There will be a day when people don’t pay to download or consume music but the opportunity to publish their playlists online.
Besides being a web 2.0 entrepreneur, Jyri is an anthropologist. So at the London Jaiku geek dinner last Tuesday, I asked him about the connection between Social Objects and its correlation with Malinowski’s “Kula” [Malinowski was the father of modern Anthropology, by the way]. Jyri repsonded that this was very much the case. So much so, in fact, that one of his great friends and mentors, the aforementioned Joi Ito bought an island in Second Life and named it “Kula”.
Kula. Social Ojects. Objects of Sociability. Call it what you will, I think so much of what we’re trying to understand about the web, the future, and yes, MARKETING, stems from this very profound insight from Malinowski in the early 20th Century, that good folk like Jyri and Joi are now helping to shed new light on.
[Bonus Link:] Video of Jyri’s talk on Social Objects at the geek dinner. One of the best talks I’ve heard for a while. [Starbuck’s Coffee Cup: June, 2007]
Somewhere along the line I figured out the easiest products to market are objects with “Sociability” baked-in. Products that allow people to have “conversations” with other folk. Seth Godin calls this quality “remarkablilty”.
For example: A street beggar holding out an ordinary paper cup cup won’t start a conversation. A street beggar holding out a Starbucks cup will. I know this to be true, because it happened to me and a friend the other day, as we were walking down the street and a guy asked us for some spare change. Afterwards, as we were commenting about the rather sad paradox of a homeless guy plying his trade with a “luxury” coffee cup, my friend said, “Starbucks should be paying that guy.“
Actually, my friend is wrong. Starbuck’s doesn’t need to be paying the homeless guy. Because Starbucks created a social object out of a paper cup, the homeless guy does their marketing for free, whether he knows it or not.
Although I suspect he does. I suspect somewhere along the line the poor chap figured out that holding out a Starbucks cup gets him more attention [and spare change] than an ordinary cup. And suddenly we’re seeing social reciprocity between a homeless person and a large corporation, without money ever changing hands.Whatever your views are on the plight of homeless people, this is “Indirect Marketing” at its finest. [October, 2007:]Anyone who has heard me speak publicly lately will know that I’m currently very focused on the “Social Object” idea, which I was turned onto by Jaiku’s Jyri Engestrom. Here’s some more thoughts on the subject, in no particular order.
1. The term, “Social Object” can be a bit heady for some people. So often I’ll use the term, “Sharing Device” instead.
2. Social Networks are built around Social Objects, not vice versa. The latter act as “nodes”. The nodes appear before the network does.
3. Granted, the network is more powerful than the node. But the network needs the node, like flowers need sunlight.
4. My overall marketing thesis invariably asks the question, “If your product is not a Social Object, why are you in business?“
5. Yesterday at the Darden talk I explained why geeks have become so important to marketing. My definition of a geek is, “Somebody who socializes via objects.” When you think about it, we’re all geeks. Because we’re all enthusiastic about something outside ourselves. For me, it’s marketing and cartooning. for others, it could be cellphones or Scotch Whisky or Apple computers or NASCAR or the Boston Red Sox or Buddhism. All these act as Social Objects within a social network of people who care passionately about the stuff. Whatever industry you are in, there’s somebody who is geeked out about your product category. They are using your product [or a competitor’s product] as a Social Object. If you don’t understand how the geeks are socializing– connecting to other people– via your product, then you don’t actually have a marketing plan. Heck, you probably don’t have a viable business plan.
6. The Apple iPhone is the best example of Social Object I can think of. At least, it is when I’m trying to explain it to somebody unfamiliar with the concept.
7. The Social Object idea is not rocket science.
8. How do you turn a product into a Social Object? Answer: Social Gestures. And lots of them.
9. Products, and the ideas that spawn them, go viral when people can share them like gifts. Example: gmail invites in the early days.
10. Social Object can be abstract, digital, molecular etc.
11. The interesting thing about the Social Object is the not the object itself, but the conversations that happen around them. The Blue Monster is a good example of this. It’s not the cartoon that’s interesting, it’s the conversatuons that happen around it that’s interesting.
12. Ditto with a bottle of wine.
13. Once I get talking about marketing, it’s hard for me to go more than 3 minutes without saying the words, “Social Object”.
14. The most important word on the internet is not “Search”. The most important word on the internet is “Share”. Sharing is the driver. Sharing is the DNA. We use Social Objects to share ourselves with other people. We’re primates. we like to groom each other. It’s in our nature.
15. I believe Social Objects are the future of marketing. [“Social Gestures beget Social Objects”: Novemeber, 2007]
Chris Schroeder riffs on my whole “Social Object” marketing schtick with this very salient thought:
If your company wants to succeed, it needs to have a social object marketing plan.
Amen to that. But note what Chris also says:
I don’t know about you, but when somebody walks by with an iPhone, I notice. If I see a kid stroll by me in some limited edition Nikes, that registers with me too.
Therein lies the rub. The Social Object idea is easy to get if your product is highly remarkable, highly sociable. An iPhone or the latest pair of Nike’s are both fine examples of this.
But I can already hear your inner MBA saying, “Yeah, but what if you don’t work for Nike or Apple? What if your product is boring home loans, auto insurance or… [the list of boring products is pretty long].
My standard answer to that is, “Social Gestures beget Social Objects.“
Which is another way of saying, maybe the way you relate to somebody as a human being plays a part in all this. Maybe describing the product as “boring” is just one more bullshit lie we tell ourselves in order to make the world seem less complicated and scary. Hey, my product is inherently dull and boring, therefore I get to be inherently dull and boring, too. Hooray!
Nowadays, thanks to folk like Nike, we think of sneakers as “non-boring” brands. This wasn’t true when I was a kid. Back then sneakers were those bloody awful $3 plimsolls we wore in Phys Ed. But it took companies like Nike and Adidas to come along and by shear force of will, raise the level of conversation in the sneaker department, before sneakers became bona fide global social objects, bona fide global powerhouse brands.
The decision to raise the level of conversation isn’t economic. Nor is it an intellectual decision. It’s a moral decision. But whether you have the stomach for it is up to you.
Like I told Thomas almost 3 years ago re. English bespoke tailoring, “Own the conversation by improving the conversation.” And hey, it worked. His sales went up 300% in 6 months.
It wasn’t the change in product that made Thomas’ suits Social Objects. It was changing the way he talked to people. The same applies to Stormhoek, which 3 years ago was an $8 bottle of South African wine nobody had ever heard of. Conversation. Matters.
So all you corporate MBAs out there, here’s a little tip. When you planning on how to embrace the brave new world of Web 2.0, the first question you ask yourself should not be “What tools do I use?“
Blogs, RSS, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook– it doesn’t matter.
The first question you should REALLY ask yourself is: “How do I want to change the way I talk to people?“
And hopefully the rest should follow.
Think about it. [Bonus Link: For a more academic take on social objects, check out this post from Anthropologist, Jyri Engestrom.]
[From “So What’s All This New Marketing Stuff, Anyway?”: December, 2007] Some people call it “The New Marketing”. Some people call it “Marketing 2.0″. Whatever name you care to give it, I get asked about it a lot. Here are some random thoughts, in no particular order.
1. “The New Marketing” came about because of two unstoppable forces: [A] The invention of the internet and [B] the beginning of the demise of what Seth Godin calls the “TV-Industrial Complex”. Thanks to the internet, as Clay Shirky famously stated in 2004, “the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.” While this was going on, large companies found out that people were starting to ignore their ads. We have too many choices, too many good choices, and we’ve gotten too good at ignoring messages.
2. Seth Godin is quite rightly the world’s most respected writer on marketing. That being said, a lot of people haven’t heard of Mark Earls yet. They’re both friends of mine, so I don’t want to compare them too much. Seth is a master of taking complicated ideas and presenting them in a way that any Average Joe can understand. Mark is more of a Marketing Geek’s geek. His stuff makes uncomfortable reading for anyone in marketing who hasn’t been stretching himself lately.
3. The most important asset in The New Marketing is “having something worth talking about”. This makes certain marketing people squeamish. A lot of us grew up in an era of flashy commercials for rather uninspiring products, and something in our DNA makes us believe that’s the proper way to go about things.
4. If I had one big insight from the last year, is how The New Marketing has everything to do with how your product or service acts as a “Social Object”. Kudos to Jyri Engestrom for turning me on to it.
5. My second big insight from this year was learning that, even with a fairly everyday product, you can create social objects simply by using your products to make social gestures. That’s what we did with Stormhoek. The message wasn’t, “Here’s why you should buy our wine”. The message was, “We think you’re kinda cool, and we like what you’re doing. We’d like to be part of it, somehow.” And much to everyone’s surprise, it worked rather well.
6. Blogs were the big story for 2005. YouTube for 2006. Facebook for 2007. What’s the big story for 2008? I have no idea. Nor do I think it matters. For the big story, really, is always going to be the same. Websites comes and go, but “Cheap, Easy, Global, Hyperlinked Media” will be with us forever, save for Nuclear Holocaust.
7. A lot of what fuels The New Marketing is quite simply, the most important word in the English Language: “Love”. It’s hard to get someone to read your website if you’re not passionate about your subject matter.
8. I’m trying to train myself to avoid “Microsmosis” i.e. mistaking of a microcosm for the entire cosmos. If you got all your news from blogs, you’d be forgiven for thinking that there are just two phone companies– Apple and Nokia. But Sony, Motorola, LG and Samsung sell a lot of phones, too. Just not to our friends.
9. My Definition of “Web 3.0″: Learning how to use the web properly without it taking over your life. I’m not holding my breath.
10. Why is it so hard to explain The New Marketing to large companies? Because the people who work there are simply not prepared to relinquish the idea of control. Live by metrics, die by metrics etc.
11. I find all this more interesting when I don’t take it too seriously. Like all things internet, it’s far too easy to get carried away.
[From “Social Objects For Beginners”: December, 2007] As y’all will know, I’m fond of talking about “Social Objects” and how they pertain to “Marketing 2.0″. Even so, some people still get confused by what a Social Object actually is. So I wrote the following to clarify some more:
The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else. Human beings are social animals. We like to socialize. But if think about it, there needs to be a reason for it to happen in the first place. That reason, that “node” in the social network, is what we call the Social Object. Example A. You and your friend, Joe like to go bowling every Tuesday. The bowling is the Social Object. Example B. You and your friend, Lee are huge Star Wars fans. Even though you never plan to do so, you two tend to geek out about Darth Vader and X-Wing fighters every time you meet. Star Wars is the Social Object. Example C. You’ve popped into your local bar for a drink after work. At the bar there’s some random dude, sending a text on this neat-looking cellphone you’ve never seen before. So you go up to him and ask him about the phone. The random dude just LOVES his new phone, so has no trouble with telling a stranger about his new phone for hours on end. Next thing you know, you two are hitting it off and you offer to buy him a beer. You spend the rest of the next hour geeking out about the new phone, till it’s time for you to leave and go dine with your wife. The cellphone was the social object. Example D. You’re a horny young guy at a party, in search of a mate. You see a hot young woman across the room. You go up and introduce yourself. You do not start the conversation by saying, “Here’s a list of all the girls I’ve gone to bed with, and some recent bank statements showing you how much money I make. Would you like to go to bed with me?” No, something more subtle happens. Basically, like all single men with an agenda, you ramble on like a yutz for ten minutes, making small talk. Until she mentions the name of her favorite author, Saul Bellow. Halleluiah! As it turns out, Saul Bellow happens to be YOUR FAVORITE AUTHOR as well [No, seriously. He really is. You’re not making it up just to look good.]. Next thing you know, you two are totally enveloped in this deep and meaningful conversation about Saul Bellow. “Seize The Day”, “Herzog”, “Him With His Foot In His Mouth” and “Humbolt’s Gift”, eat your heart out. And as you two share a late-night cab back to her place, you’re thinking about how Saul Bellow is the Social Object here. Example E. You’re an attractive young woman, married to a very successful Hedge Fund Manager in New York’s Upper East Side. Because your husband does so well, you don’t actually have to hold down a job for a living. But you still earned a Cum Laude from Dartmouth, so you need to keep your brain occupied. So you and your other Hedge Fund Wife friends get together and organise this very swish Charity Ball at the Ritz Carleton. You’ve guessed it; the Charity Ball is the Social Object. Example F. After a year of personal trauma, you decide that yes, indeed, Jesus Christ is your Personal Saviour. You’ve already joined a Bible reading class and started attending church every Sunday. Next thing you know, you’ve made a lot of new friends in your new congregation. Suddenly you are awash with a whole new pile of Social Objects. Jesus, Church, The Bible, the Church Picnics, the choir rehearsals, the Christmas fund drive, the cookies and coffee after the 11 o’clock service, yes, all of them are Social Objects for you and new friends to share. Example G. You’ve been married for less than a year, and already your first child is born. In the last year, you and your spouse have acquired three beautiful new Social Objects: The marriage, the firstborn, and your own new family. It’s what life’s all about.
There. I’ve given you seven examples. But I could give THOUSANDS more. But there’s no need to. The thing to remember is, Human beings do not socialize in a completely random way. There’s a tangible reason for us being together, that ties us together. Again, that reason is called the Social Object. Social Networks form around Social Objects, not the other way around.
Another thing to remember is the world of Social Objects can have many layers. As with any complex creature, there can be more than one reason for us to be together. So anybody currently dating a cute girl who’s into not just Saul Bellow, but also into bowling and cellphones and Star Wars and swish Charity Balls as well, will know what I mean.
The final thing to remember is that, Social Objects by themselves don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Sure, it’s nice hanging out with Lee talking about Star Wars. But if Star Wars had never existed, you’d probably still enjoy each other’s company for other reasons, if they happened to present themselves. Human beings matter. Being with other human beings matter. And since the dawn of time until the end of time, we use whatever tools we have at hand to make it happen.
[Afterthought:] As I’m fond of saying, nothing about Social Objects is rocket science. Then again, there’s nothing about “Love” that is rocket science, either. That doesn’t mean it can’t mess with your head. Rock on.
[Link:] Mark Earls has some nice thoughts on this, as well. “Things change because of people interacting with other people, rather than technology or design really doing things to people.“ [N.B. “Social Objects” is a term I did not coin myself, but was turned onto by the anthropolgist and Jaiku founder, Jyri Engestrom.]
[From “Why The Social Object Is The Future Of Marketing”: January, 2008]From my previous post:
The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else. Human beings are social animals. We like to socialize. But if think about it, there needs to be a reason for it to happen in the first place. That reason, that “node” in the social network, is what we call the Social Object.
I’ve often gone on record with the statement, “Social Objects are the future of marketing”. This post will attempt to explain further why i believe that. THE BAD OLD DAYS: MARKETING IN THE AGE OF HYPER-CLUTTER.
We have just come through a hundred-year long era, called the “Mass Era”.
Mass Media and Mass Production came of age at the same time. We try to separate the two, and we cannot.
A few decades ago, the local car dealers in town gave you a choice of four or five models. Now your choice is in the many dozens. There are well over a dozen varieties of Coca Cola. And thousands of different drink combos you can buy at any Starbucks on any given day.
I can sing you jingles for Nestle chocolate bars, from commercials I haven’t seen in over twenty years. That’s how cluttered my mind is. And yours is probably not that different.
Why would any sane person think that swimming in a polluted sea of commercial messages was fun for people? Messages are not information.
In this hyper-cluttered landscape the mediocre marketer will say, “I know! Let’s add another item of clutter to the cultural landfill! Lets increase the noise-to-signal ratio!!!”
And then he wonders why it doesn’t work.
It doesn’t work because we’re ignoring you now. You had our attention for a while, but as you know, it was more a cultural accident than anything you really had any true control over.
The world has moved on, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. Your boss also suspects this may be the case, but thankfully for your career, he hasn’t brought it up in a meeting. Yet. THEN ALONG CAME THE INTERNET…
I can’t help wondering if the internet coming along at the same time as the Hyper-Clutter Era reaching critical mass was a historical accident, or did the internet evolve as fast as it did in order to circumvent the Hyper-Clutter? I’m guessing the latter. If the purveyors of one-way conversations had offered something more sustainable and satisfying, maybe our need to “talk to real human beings” again would not have been so pronounced.
Now, when you buy something, you don’t phone up the company and order a brochure. You go onto Google and check out what other people– people like yourself– are saying about the product. In terms of communication, the company no longer has first-mover advantage. They don’t ask your company for the brochure until your product has already jumped through a series of hoops that SIMPLY WERE NOT there twenty years ago. YOU NO LONGER CONTROL THE CONVERSATION. THEN AGAIN, MAYBE YOU NEVER DID.
Human beings are much better at recognizing the linear, rather than recognizing the random and exponential.
1 Oh No! There’s a sabre-tooth tiger heading my way!
2. Run!
That is linear. Our caveman ancestors found it a most useful quality.
We run an ad. Sales go up. So taking the Caveman cue, we frame it in a linear fashion to explain to ourselves the cause and effect.
“People liked our ad so much, they dropped what they were doing, sped down to Wal-Mart and bought our product!”
If only.
What happened was probably more random. You saw an ad for Brand X. A few days later you’re having coffee over at your friend, Pam’s house. She has Brand X on her kitchen counter.
“I saw that ad for it the other day,” you say. “Is the stuff any good?”
“Yeah,” she says. “It’s not bad.”
So the next time you’re in the supermarket, you see the product, and buy it. Ker-chiing.
The ad didn’t make the sale. Your friend made the sale, not the ad. The ad merely started a conversation.
This is what they call “Word-Of-Mouth”. When it works, it works very, very well. The main problem is, it rarely does. The marketer has little control of the outcome.
But the marketer’s boss doesn’t want to hear it. The marketer wants to tell his boss this, even less. So we construct mythologies to disguise the fear. Disguise the unknown. Disguise the random, in the world where UNCERTAINTY AND RANDOMNESS MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO TAKE OVER THE MATRIX. EVER. YOU AND PAM, HAVING COFFEE.
Pam just sold you a box of Brand X. Pam doesn’t work for Brand X, Pam gets no commission from Brand X, so why did she make the sale, inadvertently, or otherwise?
Go back to what I said in my last post about Social Objects:
The final thing to remember is that, Social Objects by themselves don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Sure, it’s nice hanging out with Lee talking about Star Wars. But if Star Wars had never existed, you’d probably still enjoy each other’s company for other reasons, if they happened to present themselves. Human beings matter. Being with other human beings matter. And since the dawn of time until the end of time, we use whatever tools we have at hand to make it happen.
When you and Pam met for coffee, you interacted with each other in the context of what anthropologists call “Object-Centerd Sociality”. In other words, you did not socialize in a vacuum, you socialized around objects, you socialized around things. You talked about the Cubs game last week. You talked about how Billy was doing in Third Grade. You talked about this great movie you just saw. You talked about great Pam’s coffee was. And yes, you talked, however briefly, about Brand X. All these things you talked about, an anthropologist would call “Social Objects”. And the thing is, you came over just to chew the fat with Pam. Talking about Billy or the movie or the Cubs game was not part of any pre-agenda. You could’ve talked about other things– books, records, home furnishings, it doesn’t matter– and you would’ve enjoyed your coffee with Pam just as much.
Yes, a lot of socializing is random. Ergo, yes, a lot of marketing is also random. SO WHERE DOES SOCIAL OBJECTS FIT IN, FROM NOW ON?
From now on you won’t have the TV Commercials to rely on to start your conversations. People are ignoring you. Mass media has simply gotten too expensive. The only way your product is going to spread is by word of mouth. The only way it’s going to get word of mouth is if there is something in it for the person talking about it.
The person you want talking about is not doing it for the money. She’ll only talk about it if it serves as a Social Object. A “hook” to move the conversation along. A hook she can use it as a way to relate to her fellow human beings. THE BAD NEWS IS, MOST PRODUCTS ARE BORING. THE GOOD NEWS IS, MOST WORD-OF-MOUTH IS BORING.
If you’re an average marketer, chances are that Alas! you don’t sell Mercedes’ or Apple iPods for a living. You probably sell some fairly prosaic, utilitarian product. Like Brand X.
Obviously, if your product is more conversation-worthy, like a Mercedes or an iPod, your job will be easier. Nice work if you can get it.
But let’s face it, average people are never going to sit down and have a deep and meaningful conversation about Brand X. But hey, maybe over coffee, a couple of little soon-forgotten sentences from somebody like Pam, is enough to make the sale.
I’m fond of saying, “If your product is not a Social Object, why are you in business?”
But of course, as Pam just proved, your product, Brand X, IS INDEED a social object. Just maybe your team needs to hone its thinking a little bit. [Bonus Link from Jyri Engestrom:] “Why some social network services work and others don’t — Or: the case for object-centered sociality.“
[From “The Social Marker– The Social Object on Steroids etc.” January, 2008] You all will be familiar with my writings on Social Objects by now.
The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else. Human beings are social animals. We like to socialize. But if think about it, there needs to be a reason for it to happen in the first place. That reason, that “node” in the social network, is what we call the Social Object.
Increasingly I’ve been using a term, “Social Marker” to describe a certain type of Social Object. I’ve found it especially useful for explaining certain ideas to marketing folk.
When two people meet, the first thing they try to do is place each other in context. A social context. So they insert some hints into the conversation:
“I used to know your Uncle Bob.“
“I work at Saatchi & Saatchi’s.
“I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell for years.“
“I’m a member of Soho House.“
“I was reading Doc Searls’ blog the other day.“
“I was college roommates with your ex-girlfriend.“
“I was sampling some fine Islay single malts the other evening.“
“I bought some Versace shirts from Barney’s last week.“
“You’re a Red Sox fan too?“
“I think Andy Warhol is overrated.“
“I think Led Zeppelin is underrated.“
“I was having dinner with some guys from Goldman Sachs.“
“My wife thinks the Upper West Side is really good for schools.“
“San Tropez is too expensive in February.”
Let’s say, for sake of argument, that you never heard of me before, but I knew all about you. And let’s say, for example, you were also the world’s greatest Boston Red Sox fan. And let’s say I saw you in a coffee shop. And let’s say I went over to your table, like a stalker [You don’t know me from Adam, remember].
And let’s say the first thing out of mouth was a short list of five names:
“Carl Yastrzemski. Carlton Fisk. Rico Petrocelli. Fred Lynn. Dwight Evans.“
Yes, granted, that would be pretty strange behavior. That being said, because you knew every single factoid about the 1975 World Series there was to know, you would know exactly who and what I was talking about. Right away, you would know that we shared a context, even though I had only given you five names and nothing else. Which would make you more likely to invite me to sit down at your table and start a conversation.
Every ecosystem has its own, unique set of social markers– nouns that serve as social shorthand, stuff you use to let other people know ASAP that you know what you’re talking about, that you are a fellow “citizen” in a certain space.
When I visit San Francisco I am always surprised how often the name of my friend, Robert Scoble comes up in random conversation, unprompted by myself. Why is that? Why is he so well known? Is his blog REALLY that good? Is he REALLY that smart and interesting?
Well, I could give a whole stack of reasons to explain why I think Robert’s success is well-deserved. But one major reason that his blog’s traffic is so high, and his name so well-known, is that his personal brand has somehow managed to become a Social Marker inside the Silicon Valley ecosystem. The same could also be said for Mike Arrington, Loic Le Meur or Mark Zuckerberg. Dropping their names into random conversations allows people to quickly and efficiently contextualize themselves.
Something similar happened to me a couple of years ago. A artist friend of mine was hitting on a girl, another artist, in a bar in New York’s Lower East Side. For whatever reason, the subject of “Art and the Internet” came up. So my friend started telling the girl about this other friend of his, this guy living over in England, who drew these weird little cartoons on the back of business cards…
“That is SO unoriginal,” the girl interrupts, rolling her eyeballs. “Who does he think he is, Hugh MacLeod?“
Heh. Small world. Yes. She was using me as a Social Marker. Social Markers are a prime form of social shorthand, that people use to STAKE OUT the ecosystem they’re occupying. So why do I find this such a useful term for marketers? Because obviously, if your product is a Social Marker in your industry ecosystem [the way the iPhone is in the mobile world, or Starbucks is in the coffee world, or Amazon is the book world, or Google is in the search world, or Whole Foods is in the supermarket world, or Virgin is in the airline world, or English Cut in the bespoke world etc etc] you will have an AMAZING competitive advantage to call your own. And if the product your company makes is not a Social Marker, I guess the first question would be, “Why the hell not?” Quit your job and start over.
[Update:] Neal makes a really good point in the comments: Really interesting thought, Hugh, but bad products could also be a social marker — “ah, yes, I was ripped off by that building company too” or “oh — you’ll be disappointed by that mobile phone as well”. I’d suggest there’s also a variable here about positive v negative that you should think about before quitting that job [Bonus Link] US News & World Report: “Selling in a Post-Meatball Era– The quest for ‘social objects’ that create their own Web buzz.” Seth Godin in a great interview to plug his new book, Meatball Sundae. “Social Object” given a small mention etc.
[From “Free Cartoons As Social Objects”: May, 2008] When I first started putting up cartoons onto gapingvoid in 2001, they were in a small, 400-pixel-wide format, just like the “Love Letter” cartoon you see above.
Then about 2 years ago, I started posting them in high-resolution, like the “Dinosaur” cartoon below [Click on the image and the high-res version will pop up].
This meant people could actually download the images and start using them for their own stuff. Like I said in my licensing terms,
Hey, if you want to put the work up on your website, blog, or stick it on paper, t-shirts, business cards, stickers, homemade greeting cards, Powerpoint slides, or whatever, as far as I’m concerned, as long as it’s just for your own personal use, as long as you’re not trying to make money off it directly, and you’re giving me due attribution, I’m totally cool with the idea.
As a “Social Object”, a cartoon that one can actually print out and hang on their cube wall, or put on a t-shirt, a business card etc is far more powerful and useful than say, YET ONE MORE IMAGE you can find on the internet and e-mail en masse to your friends.
i.e. The cartoon itself hasn’t changed, but the interaction between it and the “End User” is suddenly far more meaningful.
So of course, the next layman’s question is, “Yes, but… how do you monetize it?“
And of course, the answer is, “Indirectly”.
For example, in October, 2006 I post the Microsoft Blue Monster cartoon. Within a few months Microsoft is somehow paying me a lot of money to do other drawings for them. Without the former, the latter would never have happened. And without the latter, Sun Microsystems would never have approached me. Everything feeds into everything else. Exactly. In other words, I don’t create the online cartoons as “products” to be sold. I create the cartoons as “Social Objects”, i.e. “Sharing Devices” that help me to build relationships with.
As with all things, the REAL value comes from the human relationships that are built AROUND the social object, not the object in itself.
I’ll quote my friend, Mark Earls one more time. This is from his second book, “Herd”:
“Cova is surely right to suggest that much of modern consumer behaviour is social in nature. We do it not just in a social context (tangible and immediately present or over distances) but for social reasons — that is the object or activity is the means for a group or tribe to form or interact. This also echoes a lot of what Douglas Atkin describes in his study of cult brands — brands which have developed a cult status (like Apple, and Ford’s bestselling pickup) seem to serve an underlying social need within each individual (just as religious cults do): a need to belong. The real draw is probably not the brand but… other people.”
And I’ll also ask my favorite question, one more time: If your product is not a “Social Object”, how on earth do you manage to stay in business?
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.
Real drives, passions and beliefs. Exactly.
The Blue Monster line, “Change The World Or Go Home” is not rocket science or literary brilliance. It just articulates a simple belief, a simple passion, a simple drive THAT ALREADY EXISTED, long before The Blue Monster ever came on to the scene. That’s all it was ever meant to do. [The Microsoft Blue Monster etc.]
Whether you agree or disagree with it doesn’t matter, the important bit is that people within Microsoft believe it. Unlike a conventional ad campaign, it’s not about you. It’s about them.
Why is something like this potentially valuable to a business? Simply put, if you believe something passionately enough, for long enough, articulate it well enough, and your actions are aligned, credible and consistent with your belief for long enough, it’s just a matter of time before other people start believing it, too. And next thing you know, you have an interesting conversation going on, both inside and outside the company. And as Doc Searls famously said, “Markets are conversations”. Ker-Chiing.
Again, none of this is rocket science. Talking to people never is. When people ask me what exactly is a Blue Monster, I tell them, it’s not necessarily a cartoon. It’s simply a social object that allows one to more easily articulate the Purpose-Idea. No more, no less.
I’ve been asking myself for years, what comes after conventional, Madison-Avenue-style advertising, now that we live in a post-TV, post-advertising, post-message world? “Creating Blue Monsters” is the closest I’ve ever come to finding an actual answer.
Besides drawing the cartoons, helping other companies create Blue Monsters is how I intend to spend the remainder of my career.
Cartoons and Blue Monsters. I really do have the world’s greatest job. Rock on. [To Be Continued.…]
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.]
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.
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.
[“Edges 1″. Part of “The Edges” series. Click on image to enlarge…]
Over the weekend while I was working on the above drawing, from out of nowhere the phrase, “Live on the edges or not at all” suddenly popped into my head. So I used that line for the drawing’s title etc.
Since then the line has stayed with me. I’ve been giving it a lot of thought. What exactly do I mean by it? Here are some notes, in no particular order. 1. There are lots of edges. The phrase, “Living on The Edge” often connotes something negative. Think of Jimi Hendrix, dying young from drug and alcohol abuse. Or William Blake, whose visionary art and poetry was never properly understood in his lifetime. Or William S. Burroughs, and his crazy years of lonely exile. All living on the edges of Society. All paying a heavy price for the privilege. You get the idea.
But there are other edges out there. Plenty of them. Apple obsessing about industrial design. Dell obsessing about their customers. Microsoft obsessing about software problems that may not even exist yet. Though their business models are all quite different, they’re quite edgy about what they do as individual companies. And this is PRECISELY what made them so successful– the edge part, not the middle part. 2. And we’re not just talking about computers. While most people are happy to sell business suits for a couple of hundred dollars, here’s Thomas selling them for $5000. He’s selling at the very extreme, high-end “edge” of the suit market. Or Max Brenner and his incredibly expensive chocolate. Price-wise, he’s also “on the edge”, and people can’t get enough. 3. “Edgelings”. This term was coined by a friend of mine, Stowe Boyd to describe people who gravitate towards the edges. So far I’ve heard nothing better. 4. The Herd. When sheep flock together, in order to protect the collective, the strong end up in the middle of the flock; the old, infirm and weak end up on the outside of the flock, leaving them easy pickin’s for any predators who may be nearby. If you read Mark Earl’s fabulous book, “Herd”, you soon realize that human beings aren’t that different. For all the heroic individualism Western society likes to idealize [almost to the point of fetishism], humans are surprisingly “Herd-like” in their behavior.
Just as sheep move to the center of the flock for purely survival reasons, so do human beings. It’s why we wear khakis and join tennis clubs. But some of us move to “the edges” for the exact same reason– Survival. “If we stay in the middle, we’re just going to get creamed like everybody else, once the market moves on.” I don’t think “Edgelings” consciously choose to be this way– like every other mammal out there, they just want to get on with their business without being eaten by wolves. Declarations like “Live on the edges or not at all” come after the fact– as Mark Earls would say, it’s more about justifying past behavior, rather than ensuring future behavior. 5. What’s true in life, is also true in marketing. The great advertising and marketing thinker, Russell Davies says that a brand’s Number One job is to be “Interesting”. I agree. And I also seriously, seriously believe that if you’re on the hunt for “Interesting”, you’re going to find it far more easily on the edges, not in the middle.
As my friend and mentor, Seth Godin told me over dinner a couple of years ago, while I was picking his brains for marketing advice, “The edges. Always keep pushing on the edges”.
Exactly.
I haven’t talked about The Blue Monster for a while.
The Blue Monster, as you will remember, is a cartoon-based “Social Object” that me and my Microsoft buddy, Steve Clayton, unleashed on the good but unsuspecting folk at Microsoft. For those unfamiliar with it, you can find the backstory here on Google.
One of the reasons I haven’t talked about it much lately, is simply because there is no longer the need. To paraphrase Steve, “It’s already out there, it’s already working its magic. It has a life of its own and it no longer needs us.“
Exactly. And as my friend, Tara Hunt so rightly pointed out, to push it too hard, especially with Microsoft management giving it a big thumbs-up, would somehow defeat the purpose. If overused, “Subversion as a marketing tool” can be counterproductive, especially if it comes from above. In 2007, the conversation was all about “THE” Blue Monster. But in 2008, a new conversation seems to be emerging: “A” Blue Monster.
Let me explain:
I’ve been talking to some companies recently, talking about doing some new business with them. Without any doubt, the question I get asked the most is, “Can you make a Blue Monster for us?“
Obviously, when they’re talking about “A” Blue Monster, they’re not talking about a wee blue cartoon character with pointy horns, that hails from Redmond, Washington.
What they’re talking about, of course, is a “Social Object”, not necessarily a cartoon, designed to create what I loosely describe as “Marketing Disruption”.
It’s not unlike when you’re talking about Seth Godin. When you say, “THE” Purple Cow, you’re talking about his wonderful and seminal marketing book from a few years ago. But when you talk about “A” Purple Cow, you’re just talking a about a product, any product, which from a marketing standpoint has been designed so well, it does not need any traditional marketing per se. It’s so “remarkable” for what it is, people can’t help but talk about it. And so the word spreads, almost by magic. Seth actually gives a really good example of exactly that here.
So what’s the difference between a Purple Cow and a Blue Monster? Well, we could split hairs on that one forever, but for me, the main difference is Purple Cows have their “remarkability” baked into the product. Blue Monsters are more about the “Social”, the interesting bit is the interactions that happen AROUND the product. That’s what gave our little wine company the edge when marketing Stormhoek. The VAST majority of our conversation was not about the wine in the bottle. The conversation WAS ALL ABOUT the people drinking it. As we were fond of saying, “Wine is the ultimate social object. It’s only interesting AFTER the cork is pulled.“
So in conclusion, yes, something has recently evolved in my thinking. Though my relationship with Microsoft remains as strong as ever, “Blue Monster” now means something far bigger to me than just cartoons, gapingvoid, Microsoft, Redmond etc. The Blue Monster is all about the Social Object.
I have often said, I believe Social Objects are the future of marketing. Let me modify that slightly: I believe the Blue Monster is the future of marketing.
[UPDATE:] Steve Clayton sent me the following message on Twitter: I replied back:
[Afterthought:] Understanding the Blue Monster means understanding the need to be “bigger than yourself”. Exactly.
[UPDATE: My first book, “Ignore Everybody”, will be coming out in hardback on June 11th, 2009. Read below to find out more, and you can also order from the book sellers listed below. Thanks!]
1. Exciting News etc.
Four years ago, I wrote a series of blog posts, which went on to become “How To Be Creative”. Since then, it’s been downloaded well over a million times. The PDF version alone has been downloaded over ninety thousand times, and is the number one most downloaded manifesto on ChangeThis.com.
I am happy to report that I have just signed a book contract with Portfolio Books [a Penguin imprint] to develop it into a book. Portfolio, by the way, is the same imprint that publishes Seth Godin’s books. We even have the same editor, and I’m told the book will have the same graphic designer that designed Seth’s “Purple Cow”.
Of course I’m excited and happy. Not only do I have a book deal, I have a book deal with a second-to-none, blue chip publisher. Big thanks and kudos to Seth for introducing me to them. 2. West Texas
This deal might help better explain why I recently ensconced myself in Alpine, Texas. The move was not completely random. I needed to write more. Needed to be somewhere with lots of peace and quiet. At least until the final manuscript is signed off. 3. Change Is Good.
Yeah, it’s a terrific opportunity. But like it says in HTBC, “Keep your day job”. The book may become a bestseller, it may only shift a few copies. I have no idea. Nobody does. Some people dream of one day becoming a full-time book author. I feel fortunate to have never been smitten with the bug. I’m going to continue doing exactly what I’ve been doing for these last four years– drawing cartoons, blogging, writing, consulting etc etc. 4. “The Title Is Ironic, Stupid”.
Telling people “how to be creative” is a bit silly, when you think about it. Generally, people either are or they aren’t. When I wrote HTBC, I certainly wasn’t trying to slip into some sort of New-Age, “Unleash-The-Fire-Within-You-Creativity-Guru” schtick. All I was thinking about was a short, practical, real-world list of advice that would come in handy to somebody say, 10 – 20 years younger than me, somebody with the same “creative bug” I had when I was just starting out in the world. I was just trying pass along some valuable, pain-saving lessons to the next generation that I had learned along the way. No more, no less. 5. “Damn, I’m Old.“
It’s been over ten years since I came up with the “back of business card” cartoon format. It’s been nearly twenty years since I came up with my “squiggly” drawing style. Damn, if I new it would take THIS LONG to get the work “out there”, would I have bothered in the first place? Actually, yeah, I probably would’ve. Plus ca change… 6. What have I learned about “Being Creative” since 2004?
Very little, if truth be told. The first round of HTBC had 26 chapters, 10,000 words and took 6 weeks to write. Since then, I’ve added another 10 chapters– about 3,000 extra words. I’ve not had a lot to add to the original list, it seems. The good news is, there’s nothing in the original 2004 version that I’ve had to take out completely or hugely modify. Most of the stuff seems to have stood the test of time pretty well, which I take as a favorable sign.
If I had to condense the entire work into a single line, it would read something like, “Work Hard. Keep at it. Live simply and quietly. Remain humble. Stay positive. Be nice. Be polite.“ 7. Early 2009.
I have to get the final manuscript finished by August. We’re guessing early 2009 for its release date. I can’t wait! 8. Thanks, Everybody! Loic Le Meur and I were having this conversation recently. The basic tenet of the conversation was, “The best thing about being a blogger is the people you get to meet.” I have found this to be true and self-evident. When I was younger, the people who inspired me the most professionally were famous, dead, or both. Since I become a blogger the people who inspired me the most became good friends of mine. We hung out. We drunk beer. We ate pizza. It wasn’t a big deal, it was just… lovely. Back in 2004, my blogging buddies and I knew we were onto a good thing. Something powerful and creative and earth-changing. But that’s not the main reason we liked it. We liked it because we enjoyed it, because it was interesting, because of the smart, passionate, fun people we were starting to hang out with.
A decade from now, maybe blogs as we know them won’t even exist. Maybe they’ll call them something else. Do I care? Not really. What matters, like Loic and I talked about, is the people you get to meet. That’s where the magic lies. Ten years from now, these people will still be around, geeking out on the internet at the latest WHATEVER that’s coming down the pike. They’re not going anywhere, and Thank God for that.
So Big Thanks to Everybody for reading gapingvoid over the years. I could not have done it without you, without a constant stream of bloggers and readers to make me think and to make me feel inspired. From the very bottom of my heart, Thanks Again. You guys rock.
Meatballs are commodity products, built in a factory, advertised all over. Stuff we need. All the same. Average products for average people. Unremarkable, but important. The backbone of our world so far.
The sundae is the new marketing. Blogs and Facebook and google and crowdsourcing and all the stuff that we get excited about. It works great if you’ve got a social object or a purple cow. But put the sundae on a meatball and…
There’s a passage in the book that really got me thinking, all to do with ice cream:
Willie Wonka isn’t dead, but he’s bald
In the heart of the newly hip Union Square neighborhood in New York City is a brand-new landmark: Max Brenner [Chocolate by the Bald Man]. Max (I’m told that’s not his real name) purportedly runs a chain of incredibly expensive chocolate cafés based in Australia. He’s got almost a dozen shops there, with other outlets in Israel, Singapore, and the Philippines. The chain is profitable and growing fast.
This is the place to come if you want to order the Warm Chocolate Soup, which comes with crunch chocolate waffle balls, strawberries, and marshmallows and costs ten dollars. Or, for the ambitious, The Chocolate Mess, which is a warm chocolate cake eaten with spatulas straight from the pan, with a mountain of whipped cream, ice cream scoops, chocolate chunks, toffee cream, warm chocolate sauce, and possibly, toffee bananas. It’s $12.75 for one person or $37 for four.
Max’s is packed, with lines of up to thirty minutes for a table. And most tables are filled with adults, not kids.
Just down the street from a Max’s, you’ll find the much more reasonably priced Sundaes and Cones ice cream shop, which is pretty much empty.
Why?
If I want something ordinary, then it better be cheap. I can get cheap and ordinary by the gallon at Costco. On the other hand, today’s spoiled consumer is willing to pay almost anything for the exclusive, the noteworthy, and the indulgent.
Sundaes and Cones isn’t cheap and it isn’t expensive. The ice cream is delicious, but not revolutionary. They sell a good ice cream cone at a fair price. And that’s no longer enough.
A couple of days ago I wrote Seth the following e-mail:
Suddenly the thought occurs to me, that perhaps there’d be fewer ‘Meatball Sundaes’ out there if the Web 2.0-consultant-guru types spent less time trying to sell lucrative, hot-fudge-and-whipped-cream consultancy gigs to the meatball factories.
[Ice Cream Metaphor:] The thing that made Thomas and English Cut work so well was, well, he’s not selling meatballs. He’s not even selling Baskin Robbins. Heck, he’s selling something that makes even Ben & Jerries look kinda downmarket. And the hot fudge I bring to the table ain’t too shabby, either. On a good day, at least
Your passage in the book about the two ice cream shops in Union Square was totally correct. The trouble is, too many people are locked into the mass-market, neither-cheap-nor-remarkable bracket, so they’re not ready to listen to you properly yet.
I love your ideas, you know that, but I’m guessing it may take twenty, thirty, even fifty years for “Society” to fully absorb the brunt of your message. Luckily you have loads of smart, book-buying people out there who do get it…
We live in interesting times.
Seth wrote back to me the following:
THAT is the entire point of the book.
Phew! Someone got it!
Twenty years? Fifty years? Which is why Seth says what he’s talking about is not evolutionary, but revolutionary. Make of it what you will…
You all will be familiar with my writings on Social Objects by now.
The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else. Human beings are social animals. We like to socialize. But if think about it, there needs to be a reason for it to happen in the first place. That reason, that “node” in the social network, is what we call the Social Object.
Increasingly I’ve been using a term, “Social Marker” to describe a certain type of Social Object. I’ve found it especially useful for explaining certain ideas to marketing folk.
When two people meet, the first thing they try to do is place each other in context. A social context. So they insert some hints into the conversation:
“I used to know your Uncle Bob.“
“I work at Saatchi & Saatchi’s.
“I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell for years.“
“I’m a member of Soho House.“
“I was reading Doc Searls’ blog the other day.“
“I was college roommates with your ex-girlfriend.“
“I was sampling some fine Islay single malts the other evening.“
“I bought some Versace shirts from Barney’s last week.“
“You’re a Red Sox fan too?“
“I think Andy Warhol is overrated.“
“I think Led Zeppelin is underrated.“
“I was having dinner with some guys from Goldman Sachs.“
“My wife thinks the Upper West Side is really good for schools.“
“San Tropez is too expensive in February.”
Let’s say, for sake of argument, that you never heard of me before, but I knew all about you. And let’s say, for example, you were also the world’s greatest Boston Red Sox fan. And let’s say I saw you in a coffee shop. And let’s say I went over to your table, like a stalker [You don’t know me from Adam, remember].
And let’s say the first thing out of mouth was a short list of five names:
“Carl Yastrzemski. Carlton Fisk. Rico Petrocelli. Fred Lynn. Dwight Evans.“
Yes, granted, that would be pretty strange behavior. That being said, because you knew every single factoid about the 1975 World Series there was to know, you would know exactly who and what I was talking about. Right away, you would know that we shared a context, even though I had only given you five names and nothing else. Which would make you more likely to invite me to sit down at your table and start a conversation.
Every ecosystem has its own, unique set of social markers– nouns that serve as social shorthand, stuff you use to let other people know ASAP that you know what you’re talking about, that you are a fellow “citizen” in a certain space.
When I visit San Francisco I am always surprised how often the name of my friend, Robert Scoble comes up in random conversation, unprompted by myself. Why is that? Why is he so well known? Is his blog REALLY that good? Is he REALLY that smart and interesting?
Well, I could give a whole stack of reasons to explain why I think Robert’s success is well-deserved. But one major reason that his blog’s traffic is so high, and his name so well-known, is that his personal brand has somehow managed to become a Social Marker inside the Silicon Valley ecosystem. The same could also be said for Mike Arrington, Loic Le Meur or Mark Zuckerberg. Dropping their names into random conversations allows people to quickly and efficiently contextualize themselves.
Something similar happened to me a couple of years ago. A artist friend of mine was hitting on a girl, another artist, in a bar in New York’s Lower East Side. For whatever reason, the subject of “Art and the Internet” came up. So my friend started telling the girl about this other friend of his, this guy living over in England, who drew these weird little cartoons on the back of business cards…
“That is SO unoriginal,” the girl interrupts, rolling her eyeballs. “Who does he think he is, Hugh MacLeod?“
Heh. Small world. Yes. She was using me as a Social Marker. Social Markers are a prime form of social shorthand, that people use to STAKE OUT the ecosystem they’re occupying. So why do I find this such a useful term for marketers? Because obviously, if your product is a Social Marker in your industry ecosystem [the way the iPhone is in the mobile world, or Starbucks is in the coffee world, or Amazon is the book world, or Google is in the search world, or Whole Foods is in the supermarket world, or Virgin is in the airline world, or English Cut in the bespoke world etc etc] you will have an AMAZING competitive advantage to call your own. And if the product your company makes is not a Social Marker, I guess the first question would be, “Why the hell not?” Quit your job and start over.
[Update:] Neal makes a really good point in the comments: Really interesting thought, Hugh, but bad products could also be a social marker — “ah, yes, I was ripped off by that building company too” or “oh — you’ll be disappointed by that mobile phone as well”. I’d suggest there’s also a variable here about positive v negative that you should think about before quitting that job [Bonus Link] US News & World Report: “Selling in a Post-Meatball Era– The quest for ‘social objects’ that create their own Web buzz.” Seth Godin in a great interview to plug his new book, Meatball Sundae. “Social Object” given a small mention etc.
One thing you notice if you’ve been blogging a number of years– there are a lot of marketing bloggers out there. Tons of them. And they’re all very, very interested in the blogging medium.
Why is this the case? Blogs are cool, sure, but it’s not like they cure cancer or anything. It’s not like they’re going to soon replace Superbowl ads or anything.
I think Seth said it pretty well to me the other day:“The web is a giant compiler for marketers. You can experiment here for less money, in less time, than anywhere else. If Al Gore hadn’t invented it, I’d be seriously bummed out.“
Yesterday, while Johnnie Moore, Mark Earls and I were recording a podcast, Johnnie came up with a wonderful metaphor to describe this phenomenon.
He told Mark and me about being 12 years old in science class. To demonstrate that yes, indeed, a stick of celery is full of capillaries, even if you couldn’t see them with the naked eye, the science teacher dipped the end of a stick of celery into a beaker of blue ink. An lo and behold, the kids watched in amazement as the ink traveled up the celery capillaries, turning the rest of the green celery stalk into blue.
Suddenly that which could not be seen before, could now clearly be seen. Glaringly so.
I think that’s why we like blogs. We get to actually see stuff working, for real, here and now, on the “Live Web”. We get to watch the metaphorical marketing ink travel through the capillaries. Which is very unlike the murky, vague, advertising-centric marketing world a lot of us grew up with. So of course we’re excited. Kudos to Johnnie for explaining it so well. [Update: Johnnie posted the podcast here.]
I’ve just got done finishing my friend, Seth Godin’s new book, “Meatball Sundae”, which his publishers kindly sent me a complimentary copy. I loved it. It was just great. Seriously.
As is our usual custom, I sent him ten questions [shown in italics], which he answered. Rock on. 1. For the benefit of gapingvoid readers: What’s a Meatball Sundae?
Meatballs are commodity products, built in a factory, advertised all over. Stuff we need. All the same. Average products for average people. Unremarkable, but important. The backbone of our world so far.
The sundae is the new marketing. Blogs and Facebook and google and crowdsourcing and all the stuff that we get excited about. It works great if you’ve got a social object or a purple cow. But put the sundae on a meatball and…
But the book is not so much a negative rant about the combination that DOESN’T work as much as it is a realization that we are in the midst of a revolution, the new industrial revolution, one that changes the two basic rules of business of the 1900s: Factories and advertising. Now, neither one matters so much. That’s the biggest change any of us has ever seen. What you going to do about it? 2. I may be wrong, but this book kinda reminds me of another book of yours, “Free Prize Inside”, in that a big part of its schtick seems targeted to people already working in [large] organizations. Am I the only one who’s spotted that?
Here’s my challenge: I want to change things. Sometimes, the best way to do that is to reach out to committed individuals and give them some ideas to run with. On the other hand, big changes, sea changes… those happen in larger organizations with leverage. So, my books have sort of struck a balance, sometimes emphasizing one more than the other. In this case, it’s clear that the digerati ‘get’ what’s going on with the new marketing. But we’re frustrated. I wrote this book to help us out. The phrase, “meatball sundae” is designed as a rallying cry, something to sneer at in a big meeting.
The book, in other words, is a tool. 3. There is a myth that all a writer has to do is sit at his keyboard, crank out some chapters, send them over to his publishers, maybe do an edit or two, and then wait for the checks to arrive. But as we’ve talked about before, there’s so much more to being a book author than just the book. Would you care to elaborate?
I think it’s possible, and for some people, even desirable to write a book the way you said. That might be a nice break! I view the book as the souvenir, the appropriately priced artifact of the idea. But it represents just a piece of fruit on the whole tree. The blogging and speaking and most of all, the endless conversations are the real work, the real craft and the part that I love to do. Even if books didn’t exist, I’d still do the rest of it. 4. As “Brand Seth” keeps on growing, how do find dealing with the “public” side of things? “Seth as Social Object”? Is it getting harder?
Facebook is pretty much the only hassle right now. I joined to check it out, but I don’t use it, and I end up disappointing a lot of people I don’t ‘friend’. I should just turn it off, I guess. (Once you friend someone, I figure, you really owe them quite a bit of interaction). Other than that, the challenge for all of us (not just me) is to make appropriate promises. Permission marketing goes both ways. If you hold yourself out there, at some level you’re giving people permission to contact you, to ask for things, to converse. I try to have bright lines (no consulting, no boards, no investing) so I don’t mislead people.
The thing is, I really enjoy the interactions. I just worry about overpromising and undelivering. 5. The fact that blogging changed your book writing style over time is well documented. Has anything come down the pike recently that’s affected your blogging style?
I have to be careful that I don’t watch the trackbacks and stumbles too closely. If I did, I’d write nothing but short posts about blogging! 6. A lot of your books seem to be continuations of conversations you started with your seminal book, “Purple Cow”. Meatball Sundae I’d say would qualify, as would “Free Prize Inside” and “All Marketers Are Liars”. But then your last book, “The Dip”, was about something relatively unrelated. Do you find yourself, as an author, often feeling pulled in two different directions?
I worry about Neal Stephenson and I worry about Robert Parker.
Snowcrash and Diamond Age were brilliant books, seminal stuff that actually changed the world. That gave Neal the power to pretty much write what he wanted, but what he wants to write, it turns out I don’t want to read. I think he lost a great opportunity and I feel the loss.
Robert Parker hit it big with Spenser novels, but every one is so similar, I can’t remember which ones I’ve read and which ones I haven’t.
I don’t want to be in either camp. So, I write what’s important to me, I write what I think will reach an audience and I write what I think will cause change. I honestly don’t worry a bit about sales. The selling of the book is just a tool to spread the idea to people who like buying a book. 7. With your book writing, your speaking gigs, Squiddoo and the myriad of cool free stuff you like to put other there on the internet, you’re a very busy guy. Because you’ve got so much going on, do you ever find that sometimes you don’t have enough time to fully investigate all the cool stuff you like to write about? Seems to me an author, if he wants to be successful, has really got to learn how to multi-task. Discuss.
Actually, I’m a multi-tasker who discovered that he could get away with it by being an author!
The web is like crack for someone with ADD, I’ll tell you that.
Jim Collins is the guy to go to if you went serious research and depth. I’m the guy who notices things. 8. A common complaint I hear is, most business books say everything they need to say within the first two chapters, with the rest being filler. You seem to like fighting this trend tooth and nail. Has it been an easy fight?
It’s a lot easier now, I’ll tell you! I won’t take full credit for the great business book diet, but for anyone who ever slogged through Michael Porter, I think you owe me one.
The last vestige of this is some of the second-tier book publishers who insist on books being long, organized, boring, vetted by peer reviewers and tiresome. They won’t last so long, I think. 9. With the advent of certain Web 2.0 media coming along in 2007– Facebook, etc, suddenly the “Blogging is Dead” meme keeps popping up all over the place. I think they’re kind of missing the point. You?
Who the hell knows what ‘blogging’ means? People say, “that’s not a blog because” it doesn’t have comments or because it has three authors or because it’s got video or who knows what… What’s a book? a blog? a speech? Who knows?
I think it’s entirely possible that the ego-driven, comment-driven water-cooler blog is being replaced by Facebook and Twitter. I don’t think, not for one second, that the inherently closed communities of social networks are a replacement for the idea-driven blog designed to be read by surfers, strangers and the masses. 10. Besides the fact that you pretty much OWN the word, “Remarkable”, I think if there’s one big idea you’ve gotten across to me, it would have be the fact that yes, when you think about it, Marketing is one of the most powerful things we human beings have ever invented, and yes indeed, it can be a force for good. Is perhaps one of the reasons the web attracts you is, it’s a place that validates this idea more quickly than other parts of the business world?
If I had real talent, I’d probably be a computer programmer (what I studied, but failed to understand, in college). Programmers need computers and compilers because without them, they can’t see if the program works. The web is a giant compiler for marketers. You can experiment here for less money, in less time, than anywhere else. If Al Gore hadn’t invented it, I’d be seriously bummed out. [Seth’s Amazon.com page, for all his books can be found here.]
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