kurtiss.org

This post was born out of an e-mail, then I realized I was gettin' all high and mighty about stuff, and I figure that's what blogs are for so, you know...

An Impractical Ideal is No Ideal

The following doesn't constitute a plan of action, but it informs an approach to developing a plan.  Any plan of action conceived in the real world requires give-and-take--that multiple parties contribute distinct requirements toward a common end.  

Having passion is necessary, but insufficient to develop a successful plan.  In fact, passionate, unyielding voices shouting at each other too often slow down the process of making concrete steps in a positive direction.  With the best of intentions then, a passionate actor contributes more to the delay of good than to the enactment of her ideal.

A rational actor, on the other hand, achieves a balance between her ideal and her perception of group consensus, such that the greatest concrete good is enacted on the least evil schedule.  This concept merits further exploration, but let's assume for now that an impractical ideal is the same as no ideal at all.  Also, a multi-billion dollar center for world peace on Alcatraz island is not a "concrete good." 

Marketing is a Mating Call

Marketing is at the fore of your relationship with a customer.  It's what you say on your first date.  It's the first impression you give.  Most of us have spent time investing in a relationship that didn't work out.  Maybe it was an young crush, a frustrating job, or scientology.

When we're young, we're able to justify the time spent in these dead-end roles: I was learning to love myself; or, I found out I work better in smaller teams; or, hey, at least I know what it's like to go through deprogramming.

But, as we grow more experienced in each of these types of relationships, we enter a wider market of competitors where relationships are more liquid.  This means we tolerate less of what we perceive to be "abnormal" behavior, because each time we make a choice to try something new, our average cost-per-switch goes down.

Website visitors are in a special kind of relationship market, where the natural switching cost is almost zero.  This is an issue for vendors, because we are unable to sustain ourselves without a devoted (read exponentially expanding) group of visitors.  The issue can be addressed by artificially raising the switching cost, a.k.a. vendor lock-in, or by a form of vigilant competition where marketing and product development are so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable.

Since I presume you agree that an artificially raised switching cost is as evil as it sounds, and that the collective wisdom of your audience will sniff that fact out in no time, let's focus on marketing's role in the kind of businesses that work on the web:

Successful Relationships

Since marketing is a mating call, the sum of your interactions with your visitors is a relationship.  The cycle of a successful relationship, given the characteristics of our beloved hyper-efficient market, is something like this: seek, speak, act, listen, and repeat.  

Marketing is traditionally concerned with the seeking and speaking, but my contention is that impotent marketing, which is not part of the product development cycle, can take down a franchise faster than you can say "hipsters dating hipsters."

Truth is the Grease

Marketing is a swagger.  It must be proud, confident, and bold, but it must not be deluded.  When the message you convey over-promises, it pipes efficiency straight out of the seek, speak, act, and listen process.  So your current feature set doesn't match up with the set of features about which you'd like to brag.  This is a difficulty, but it need not compromise the integrity of your message, because...

An honest message is enhanced by the promise of commitment.  That is, your message should communicate that your attitude toward your companion will be unfaltering in the face of an unknowable future.  When you absolutely need to make a promise that you can't yet make honestly, it's time to update the product.  Otherwise the promise is not worth making, as it drains too much long-term efficiency from your creation process.

Diligence is the Engine

So you can't promise everything to everyone without losing too much efficiency to the overhead of dishonesty.  In fact, the larger the potential market, the harder it is to make appealing promises.  The key to making honest, appealing promises then, is to narrow your audience into smaller affinity groups, prioritizing those groups who will bring the most value to an ongoing relationship.

As your target audience grows, so do the variety of promises you must make to remain interesting, but with smaller groups, a marketer may be confident that the nature of her input to the product development cycle remains manageable.  

Surprisingly, there are large groups of folks who feel their base needs are unmet.  If you meet them where they are at, they will be grateful and devoted.  And we all know that's the best kind of relationship for creating a long, prosperous future.

Postscript: Evil is in the DNA

Because of the history of business, the history of humanity, and a bunch of other hand-wavy factors, marketing is one of the first places for the deep-seated, hereditary evil of business to crown its ugly head.  Fortunately, as the market becomes more efficient, as it has on the web, evil becomes less profitable.  There's nothing magical at work here, it is simply that folks despise being disrespected.  When a new level of respect becomes a market option, morality becomes a differentiator.