Who wouldn’t want to be awesome? 09/29/2009
Posted by Paul Daigle in Uncategorized.Tags: Awesomeness, branding, Business Models, Marketing, Strategy
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Umair Haque, Director of the Havas Media Lab, recently challenged the world’s markets with what he calls The Awesomeness Manifesto. In it he asks “What makes some stuff awesome and other stuff merely innovative?” His point? If innovation is the act of doing something a little bit differently, then are markets driven by innovation all that, well… awesome? He goes even further in asking if the cost of innovation can exceed the benefits.
Innovation often isn’t. Innovation means, naively, what is commercially novel.
Yet, as the financial crisis proves, what is “innovative” is often value destructive and socially harmful. Financial “innovation” destroyed trillions in value.
A better concept, one built for a radically interdependent 21st century, is awesomeness. -Umair Haque
Though our culture is built on, driven by, and even a bit obsessed with innovation, is the enhanced value, meaning and quality of life produced always proportionate to the energies expended to realize those fruits? And, more importantly, can innovation be a double-edged sword?
He goes on to identify, what he calls, the four pillars of awesomeness. Each of which sound like an appeal to leave business for the sake of business behind to pursue the higher calling of true value creation.
Awesomeness happens when thick value is created by people who love what they do, added to insanely great stuff, and multiplied by communities who are delighted and inspired because they are authentically better off. That’s a better kind of innovation, built for 21st century economics. -Umair Haque
Umair’s observations are quite similar to my own (see Gravity vs. Electricity).
He concludes by turning his manifesto into a collaborative exercise by inviting readers to contribute their ideas to the cause of awesomeness.
Here are my thoughts on awesomeness.
Capitalism, which is a reasonably good economic and social model, asks most of us to make a significant personal contribution in order to sustain our quality of life. We call this contribution “work.” Regardless of how much we like what we do, most of us see our careers as a means to an end. We often keep professional and personal separate. We qualify our contributions through their financial rewards. We make our work, what is often our single greatest contribution to society, about making money and living well. Too few of us qualify our participation through our careers much further.
Does the disconnect between our day-to-day getting by and the net value of our output contribute to the kind of markets we see today? Markets where too many indistinguishable goods and services compete for our business. Where fierce competition for existing markets creates a cacophony of voices in the media working to distinguish themselves… creating secondary markets around consumer attention and mind share. If we consider the time, energy and resources that all this competitive activity expends, the environmental impact, the noise we have to filter through, and the time and energy we waste knee-deep in messaging, offers and hype… we have to ask: does this innovative marketplace, with all the heat and friction it generates, really produce net gains for society?
I’m not saying that Capitalism, free markets or innovation are the problem. I believe that we are the problem. Do we recognize how our careers, our products and our companies affect the world we live in… really. Perhaps the pursuit of personal awesomeness can begin by reconnecting the value of our sweat to the net-value we produce in the market.
Innovation, the act of bringing incremental improvements to existing ideas, keeps us locked in an endless front-line battle for market share. Awesomeness transcends the value found in existing markets to create new markets. The pursuit of awesomeness is the pursuit of game changing ideas, unrealized value, and truly original ways of thinking. Because we are so accustomed to imagining new ideas and value propositions within the context of existing markets, we have a difficult time trusting or embracing the promises unleashed by awesome thinking. This insecurity prevents awesome thinking from becoming an embraceable model.
Instead, we view awesomeness as a phenomenon produced by a few gifted geniuses. Steve Jobs, Howard Schultz and Oprah Winfrey have the magic touch for creating markets. A Pixar or Nintendo’s succession of successes are accidental or otherworldly. The rapid ascent of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are too singular to teach us anything that we too can employ. By exalting our real world examples of awesomeness, we don’t allow our best case studies to reveal the fundamentals of awesome thinking.
Our biggest challenge is to demystify awesomeness, to help it become a more understood and attainable pursuit. Only by working together to define, recognize, uncover and support awesomeness can we unleash awesome new companies, and create jobs that impart the personal benefits of delivering awesomeness to the marketplace.
Being awesome, especially in this economy, is incredibly difficult. Awesomeness almost always requires monumental amounts of self discipline, courage and persistence, along with a willingness to risk what we have to get to something better. Awesomeness demands that we stand against well established ideas, and openly challenge entrenched paradigms. The pursuit of awesomeness can cause friends, family members, and even our most trusted advisers to question our sanity. Because awesomeness can be disruptive to existing markets, there may also be some who don’t wish us well. The barriers to awesome are high.
Today the web gives us access to a wide and rich stream of information, ideas and communication. We can leverage this new channel to help the models behind awesome thinking become more understandable and embraceable, and help awesome success become more attainable. My question is this: How can we work together to explore and convey the principles of awesome thinking?
What can Google teach us about effective homepage design? 09/23/2009
Posted by Paul Daigle in Uncategorized.Tags: Design, Experience, Google, Marketing
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Last week, when I came across news of Google’s new patent award for the company’s ultra-slim, famously utilitarian homepage interface, I must admit, I chuckled a bit. It’s hard to imagine a more superfluous use of our patent laws. Even Amazon’s much mocked one-click shopping award from 2000 had more meat on the bone. Trying to turn simplicity into a defendable IP seems… well, kinda evil. For its role here, I hope the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office gets a sleigh full of Internet interface design patent applications for Christmas this year. If Google’s design is defendable, then aren’t they all?
But then the thought occurred to me that this simple, little design may provide some important lessons? Sounds like a joke… I know. But the fact is, this interface is the Internet’s most successful homepage. Sure, Google’s superior search technology fuels its success. But a homepage plays an important role in supporting that kind of success. What makes it work?
In bringing a more critical eye to this, an interface that I’ve relied on thousands of times over the years, I found I was able to recognize some important design strengths. I boiled those strengths down to three essential elements. Later in the week I visited several other highly successful web properties to see if the same elements were similarly present and easily recognizable. And they were. Hmmm.
This exercise helped me uncover a model for approaching homepage and other product interfaces. What I like most about this model is its simplicity. By forcing attention on communicating these three value drivers it thwarts many of the excesses that undermine most homepages.
So here they are: The 3 key elements that are communicated in a successful homepage design.
Confidence
Communicating confidence is crucial for winning an audience or attracting a customer base. Successful homepages make their companies look credible, stable, capable and ready to serve.
How does the Google design communicate confidence? By allowing the homepage to stand on its name, thus allowing its name to become synonymous with the site’s value proposition, web search, the design exudes confidence.
The take away:
Gratuitous design and blustering copy do nothing to project credibility. Confidence is best communicated by a lack of defense. The more space and attention expended on explaining who we are and why we’re great, the less credible we become. Credibility is a quiet art. The less we say the stronger we look. Say who you are. Be who you are. And call it a day. Let satisfied users and customers create your hype.
Utility
Most websites have several jobs to do. How websites accomplish those tasks define their utilities. In simple terms, the job of an effective homepage is to effectively communicate the job of the site.
For Google, the utility is web search. The value is finding what we are looking for online. Google’s design doesn’t allow anything to distract from its utility message. In doing so it ensures that the site is able to do its job.
The take away:
The homepage should promote the site’s value propositions while communicating the utilities that drive them. Don’t force the homepage to do more than that crucial job. Why let your news, promotions, product information or events distract attention from the page’s purpose, when uncovering that valuable content is a part of the utility of the site? Let the homepage deliver a clear understanding of what value propositions the site holds in store, and a sense of how those value propositions are delivered. In other words, the homepage should focus only on helping the site do its job, which is delivering users to the value that they seeks.
Functionality
The homepage isn’t a storefront, a doorway, or a billboard. When a user hits the homepage they should feel like they’ve come inside. The actions and options available on the homepage should establish a basis for the site’s overall navigation and functionality. Users should get an immediate sense of how things works.
The Google homepage prompts users to enter their search term and hit the search button. How we use the site to drive the utility and experience the value proposition is made clear, and that functionality is carried over to every other page, as the Google search box stays with us.
The take away:
Users shouldn’t have to leave the homepage to start comprehending how they’ll use the site. By instilling function and navigation early we give users the confidence and the understanding to navigate successfully among the site’s utilities.
So, there you have it.
Because websites are so complex, and every homepage comes with its own set of challenges, it’s not at all surprising that most homepages fail to successfully communicate all three of these elements. I’ve gone back to apply this model to my own homepage designs, only to find that I’ve often fallen short.
But what is striking is how well sites that have become essential to online life have done at communicating these elements around their value propositions within the homepage. Amazon. Ebay. Craigslist. Blogger. Twitter. YouTube.
I wonder if anyone has a patent pending on confidence, utility and functionality?
Gravity vs. Electricity 09/18/2009
Posted by Paul Daigle in Uncategorized.Tags: branding, Business Models, Electricity, Gravity Well, Marketing, Social Reputation
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I think we can all agree that the world’s markets have changed dramatically over the last couple of decades. It’s a bigger world, in that more of us are out there competing for market share. It’s also a smaller world, as more of us are now competing globally. The ubiquity of the Internet has substantially lowered the barrier of entry by providing an inexpensive and direct distribution channel between any company and the world’s markets.
Yesterday’s markets, which were characterized by scarcity and exclusivity, have been replaced by new markets that are characterized by abundance and egalitarianism. It wasn’t all that long ago that everything we consumed came to us through a market of limitations. We were accustomed to limits in our choices, resources, knowledge, access and providers. Today we have almost unlimited resources and options to choose from in satisfying our needs, with new providers emerging to serve us every day.
These new forces are shifting power and attention away from the mass media and big business towards consumers and their networks, giving consumers more power and control than ever before.
Since we are all now forced to compete on a more level playing field, and one in which consumers can call the shots, what changes need to occur within our organizations, and within ourselves, to ensure we are able to remain competitive?
To answer this questions, I’d like to introduce and define gravity and electricity as marketing concepts.
Gravity, a naturally occurring energy, helps to determine every object’s place and position within the environment. Using an object’s relationship to everything else in that environment, gravity helps objects move or stay in place. Gravity is a constant. It’s self sustaining. We can position objects to suit our needs, but sooner or later gravity will win out and relocate the objects, re-determining their relationships and roles.
As consumers and as people we are guided by internal gravitational forces which stem from our value systems, desires, tastes, aspirations, identities and relationships. We are motivated to action, or non-action, by these inherent forces. Our gravitational will is always at work, helping to keep us safe, grounded, balanced, and satisfied.
Electricity, on the other hand, is a force that is generated through the expenditure of energy and resources, and wielded to fulfill a task. Like gravity, electricity can be used to move objects, or to keep them in place.
When we work to elicit actions in people which aren’t directly aligned with, and fully powered by their gravitational will, we are using electricity. Anytime we work to motivate others to take actions that they wouldn’t have taken by themselves, we need a degree of electricity to accomplish it.
When someone successfully talks us into something that we didn’t necessarily want, and through our acquiescence we find ourselves in a position that’s less satisfying, we can be sure that electricity was used to win us over. When this happens most of us will take some action to reposition ourselves back into place, or into a new place of comfort. That’s our gravitational will at work.
In markets characterized by abundance and driven by the will of the consumer, gravity will always trump electricity.
Electric marketing was a best practice back when markets were characterized by scarcity. In those days a large share of voice and wide distribution allowed companies to create markets for their products. Though many brands continue to rely on costly electric marketing and advertising, electricity is losing its potency, and the long-held advantages of electric brands are slipping away. In today’s market the flagrant use of electricity can diminish a brand’s reputation and position. The belief that electricity can still create markets keeps many brands from recognizing and serving the will of their markets and using their considerable resources to appeal to that will.
By recognizing and appealing to a market’s gravitational will, gravity brands tap the natural energies that exist within the market. When a new gravity brand uncovers and serves the pent up will of a market, the market’s networks can do most of the heavy lifting in moving its membership toward the new value proposition. For consumers, the process of being lulled towards a gravity brand is powerful and seductive. Gravity brands allow markets to feel that the brand belongs to them, and not the other way around, tapping into the market’s desire to remain in control. Consumer relationships with gravity brands create bonds that are impossible for electric brands to break.
Microsoft has long been one of the world’s most successful electric brands. One of Microsoft’s most successful electric marketing tactics was to leverage the ubiquity of the Windows operating system. By force-bundling the Explorer browser, Media Player, Office Suite and other Microsoft products onto personal computers, the company was able to quickly dominate those markets. Microsoft was successful using electricity because the software market was characterized by scarcity, and consumers weren’t yet acclimated to exercising there will within that market.
Over the years successful gravity brands like Apple, Firefox and Google have neutralized Microsoft’s electric tactics. Though Microsoft continues to produce high quality products, its reliance on electricity has often hampered the brand’s ability to appeal to the will of the market.
Last year Microsoft launched a promotion to pay web users for using its Live.com search site. In many ways the ultimate electric marketing tactic, this promotion failed to diminish Google’s gravitational pull on the search market. Today Microsoft is again leaning hard on bundling to promote and position its new search site, Bing. If Bing’s value proposition appeals to the gravitational will of the market, will wielding electricity help or hurt that appeal? Could Microsoft find better success by simply allowing its product to speak to the needs of users?
As a gravity marketer, it’s important to recognize that no market is ever truly satisfied. Today’s brands show us where the lowest center of gravity rests based on today’s offerings. As gravity marketers our job is to work to recognize where the gravitational will of a market leans, and to build offerings that can move some or all of the market into a more comfortable and advantageous position. Gravity brands must remain in lock step with the will of their market in order to continue recognizing and serving the market’s lowest center of gravity. Because the gravitational will of consumers and their networks is stronger than brand loyalty; any brand, whether they use gravity or electricity, can lose their market position when a competitor uncovers and serves the pent-up will of customers.
When a gravity brand allows consumers to leverage community, tribal or network benefits, it can produce a gravity-well. What makes gravity-well brands especially powerful is the gravitational force they exert on their markets can over-power the gravitational will of consumers. How many Facebook users report that they dislike the site, but use it because all their friends are there? How many consumers buy Apple computers, when a PCs could satisfy their needs at half the cost, because of their strong tribal connection to the Apple brand?
Understanding why gravity trumps electricity is a paradigm, a way of thinking, and a means of operating. We can recognize and leverage gravity in everything we do, from product development, to marketing, to managing our personal and business relationships. Appealing to, respecting and leveraging the gravitational will of a person or a market can produce exponential returns. In a world characterized by abundance, gravity breeds security, stability, loyalty and satisfaction while electricity often produces doubt, anxiety, immobility, waste and resentment. As you go through your day, and you find yourself engaged by people, influenced by media and distracted by the many messages working to get your attention, ask yourself…
- Am I being engaged by gravity or with electricity?
- How does my answer affect the way I feel about the message and the messenger?
- How does my answer affect the likely success of the message and the messenger?
- What are the gravity brands and gravity wells in my life?
- How do my favorite gravity brands appeal to my gravitational will?
- Can I recognize the gravity brands and electricity brands in different markets?
Net Neutrality: What are we fighting for? 09/10/2009
Posted by Paul Daigle in Uncategorized.Tags: Business Models, Net Neutrality
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Most Internet users know enough about Net Neutrality to know they support it. But if we take a detailed look into this debate, the battles being waged, and language being propagated, precisely what it is we’re working to protect can seem a little fuzzy. Has the Net Neutrality movement identified a position and agenda that can ensure we protect the Internet’s most basic and essential value propositions?
For the sake of exploring this issue, lets begin by recognizing the Internet as an on-demand network for distributed data, media and communication. Within this network our data and activities all compete for bandwidth. The ISP, Cable and Phone Companies that make up the Broadband industry are charged with managing the flow of this data. The issue of Net Neutrality arose when broadband companies became interested in managing the flow of Internet traffic more “fairly” and deliberately.
Net Neutrality opposes giving broadband companies any degree of control over the management of the Internet’s flow of data. Net Neutrality also opposes any system used by broadband providers to prioritize online data, applications, websites or technologies. Net Neutrality is as much a way for naming the fear of losing the Internet we have today as it is an effort to prevent large companies from changing the rules for online distribution.
So what exactly is Net Neutrality working to protect? Here are a few perspectives:
Is Net Neutrality fighting to:
- Protect our right to go to whatever websites, use whichever web apps and download whatever content we choose?
- Ensure that every user experiences the same quality of service, speed and access?
- Ensure that every website, application and data file experiences the same quality of service, speed and access?
- Or all the above?
Are broadband (BB) companies trying to game the system to create market advantages for the few, or are they working to uncover the business models that can help them operate more competitively? Here’s an excerpt from a statement on the National Cable & Telecommunications Association’s website:
Is market failure a prerequisite for seeking regulations that can protect such a vital communications channel? And shouldn’t we understand the types of business models broadband companies are able to pursue to ensure stability and transparency?
The Net Neutrality movement seems to believe that the way data moves through the system is already fair and equitable. The BB industry, on the other hand, is stating quite openly that they, as system operators, are better equipped to manage, prioritize and price the Internet to keep it fair and equitable. These opposing views, rigid as they are, don’t lay ground for a constructive debate.
Al Gore was correct when he referred to the web as an information super highway. Like any large highway systems, or energy grid for that matter, the Internet will have to grow to accommodate the growing demands placed on the system. In the highway analogy we’re talking about more cars and more trucks carrying heavier loads. With the power grid analogy we’re talking about more consumers using more electricity for more and more activities. Online we have more users moving larger and larger qualities of data and consuming richer and richer streams of media. Each of these systems also contend with tricky peak usage periods: rush hour traffic for highways, hot summer days for power grids, peak usage hours and seasons for the Internet.
Is managing this growth using egalitarian principles to produce a consistent and uniform experience really feasible, sustainable or fair? The Wikipedia definition above states that “A neutral broadband network is one where communication is not unreasonably degraded by other communication streams.” Yet, when traffic is heavy and capacity is filled to the point of congestion, BB companies are forced to manage which packets take priority, in effect choosing whose communication is degraded. Demand and capacity are market forces that companies leverage to build more reliable and competitive offerings. If profits aren’t a driver behind addressing the skyrocketing demand for broadband capacity, then where do incentives to increase capacity come from? The “neutral network” is an ideal. It requires models to sustain it. Without those models it becomes nothing more than wishful thinking.
I think most of us can at least agree that we’ve uncovered a dangerous lack of standards for managing Internet data at the dawn of broadband’s ubiquity. We as consumers need to make sure that our best interests are served. We must also understand the challenges in meeting the increasing demand for capacity as we pursue important rules and regulations that govern how capacity is doled out. Most importantly, we must clearly communicate our priorities for establishing those rules. The Net Neutrality movement hasn’t accomplished this. Instead this movement has worked to protect the status quo: a market tied to idealistic constraints and disconnected from the market forces that can fund innovation.
If we want the industry to deliver an Internet where a single price of admission provides unfettered access to every app, page, file and silo, with the ability to stream as much content and download or share as much data as we’d like, with the assurance that everyone’s data will remain equal and uniform in both speed and accessibility, then perhaps we need to ask where we have seen this kind of market work?
To shed some light on the challenges that Broadband companies, let’s look at a single broadband provider, and how their fundamentals changed overnight with the launch of a single new streaming destination.
Just yesterday at BB World Forum Europe, broadband providers called for help in understanding what the rules and regulations will be in building and operating what they call the Next-Generation Network (NGN). Net Neutrality proponents need to answer this call with clarity of purpose and with a true understanding of the challenges these companies face in meeting tomorrow’s demand for broadband.
The good news is that broadband usage has finally come into its own. Peer-to-peer file sharing, streaming video, audio, gaming and other rich media experiences are now integrated into the way we use the medium. Tomorrow’s users will experience a far richer Internet than we have today. The question of what business models can enable broadband providers to continue scaling capacity to deliver tomorrow’s experiences is an important one. Our goal should be to define consumer rights, protect the Internet’s unique value propositions, and provide the BB industry with clear options for leveraging demand.
Where are we willing to allow market forces to exist? What are we absolutely committed to protecting?
When it comes to leveraging market forces, I believe users should have more responsibility for the capacity they use, and that broadband providers should be free to experiment with pricing models that leverage high speed and high capacity.
The Google statement above makes the point that “telephone companies are not permitted to tell consumers who they can call or what they can say.” True enough. But if I call Austria or China the phone company has every right to pass the higher cost of the call on to me. By reserving the right to do so they protect customers from added costs or lower quality of service because of my unusual demands on the system. You might think that our roads and highways are free, and the web is like a system of roads, so why can’t it operate in the same way. The fact is there are tolls for roads, bridges and highways all over the world that help ensure those assets are maintained for the people who use them.
Today some consumers already willingly pay extra for higher speed connections. The NGN will deliver an improved “ultra broadband”. The industry should charge a premium for NGN speeds while educating consumers on the cost/benefit equation of enhanced connections. We as consumers will receive more and more of our consumable entertainment, personal communication and 3rd party services from our broadband connections; and all of those offerings will continue to get richer and more dynamic.
The industry should also be allowed to place reasonable restraints on the bandwidth capacity user can access with basic service. Users involved in ultra-high capacity activities like peer-to-peer file sharing should pay for the increased demands they place on the system. We should encourage the Broadband Industry to experiment with pricing that leverages a range of reasonable connection speeds and capacity allowances to discover what the market will bear. We should also ensure that local and regional markets give the consumer a healthy amount of choices among BB service providers to spur competition.
Why should we do this? Because the costs associated with delivering data over the Internet continues to decrease year after year, even as usage skyrockets. Allowing BB companies to prioritize data by user contract will not drive up rates. In fact, it could lower rates for average users. And it can give the BB industry a framework for managing capacity and leveraging market forces, ensuring that the way data is managed online remains fare and transparent.
TV, radio, print, mobile communications, energy, you name it… just about every form of media, communication format and utility has succumb to some form of tiered pricing based on usage. This has helped communication, media and technology companies produce products for a wider variety of markets (Cable, Satellite Radio, Online Subscriptions). Tiered pricing is a proven model for keeping markets competitive, selection rich, and quality high.
My allowing the BB industry to pursue pricing models based on usage, the Net Neutrality movement can ensure that we protect the web’s most vital value proposition.
Not too long ago distribution channels were scarce. The enormous difficulties inherent in reaching out to mass audiences with communication, information or products was the single largest factor in determining what most of us bought, read, watched and, often times, thought. That world is gone because the Internet has created a marketplace where barriers are low and distribution is cheap. We must focus on ensuring that big business can never leverage market conditions to reclaim those old advantages around distribution. Prioritization, which will always be an important part of a transparent and fair Internet, should always be determined by our contracted relationships with our broadband providers. If I’m paying for a specified broadband speed and capacity, I should expect that my connection to the entire Internet universe, and all my online activities, will occur at that contracted rate. Broadband companies should never have the right to prioritize the speed or accessibility of a given website, technology, service or company based on their relationship, or lack thereof, with that company. The BB industry should be allowed to prioritize packets by the users within their networks, and not by the data, technology or content being consumed by those users.
At yesterday’s BBWF Europe summit industry executives struggled openly with the challenges of delivering broadband services over mobile platforms.
What if the YouTube stream I’m viewing is showing me how to help my friend, who’s gone into diabetic shock? Industry prioritization by content is dangerous for too many reasons. We as users should get the Internet that we choose, at the speed and capacity that we pay for. Net Neutrality should redefine or refine its position to allow the BB industry to explore new business models through direct relationships with its customers, and the marketplace. Net Neutrality advocates should refocus on protecting an equal playing field for content. This compromise can help ensure that we will all experience the same high value Internet on a higher performance Internet infrastructure in the years to come.
