The problem with positive thinking

All the evidence I’ve seen shows that positive thinking and confidence improves performance. In anything.

Give someone an easy math problem, watch them get it right and then they’ll do better on the ensuing standardized test than someone who just failed a difficult practice test.

No, positive thinking doesn’t allow you to do anything, but it’s been shown over and over again that it improves performance over negative thinking.

Key question then: why do smart people engage in negative thinking? Are they actually stupid?

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Organizing customers

The local youth theatre troupe recently put on a performance of Grease. It was a high-spirited outing, with terrific performances and it was a great way for them to spend a month or two over the summer. I was amazed to discover, though, that the budget for the rights to the play were $3,000. That’s pretty steep for a high school production of an old, not particularly wonderful musical script that was only going to be seen by the local community. Should it really cost $7 for every person who watches the play?

The reason fees for licensing plays are so high is that almost all plays and musicals are licensed by just a few firms and the purchasers have no power whatsoever. The sellers have signalled each other and created an artificially high pricing floor. “Take it or leave it” is their motto.

Here’s the opportunity that the net provides (in this case and so many others): someone should organize the customers and negotiate on their behalf.

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Enormity

Enormity doesn’t mean really enormous. It means incredibly horrible.

The problem with enormity in marketing is that it doesn’t work. Enormity should pull at our heartstrings, but it usually shuts us down.

Show us too many sick kids, unfair imprisonments or burned bodies and you won’t get a bigger donation, you’ll just get averted eyes.

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Magic beans, TV and the web

New media isn’t the perfect marketing medium, and it won’t be until we find the magic beans.

TV had magic beans for forty years. For forty years, anyone, even a complete moron, could make a lot of money using TV ads. Buy enough ads, don’t screw up, you’re rich.

The hard part was buying enough ads, but once you did that, victory could be declared.

On the web, there are countless marketers just standing around waiting for someone to hand them the magic beans. And that’s the problem.

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Who gets to decide what you want?

When George Washington was a teenager, did he really, really, really want a car?

Unlikely.

In order to want something, you probably need to know it exists. But my guess is that it surely helps if you’ve been marketed to.

One definition of happiness is wanting the things you’re likely to get (or, conversely, not wanting the unattainable). One definition of marketing is persuading the world it wants what you have, regardless of whether they can afford it or not.

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The problem with doing it by heart

The following does not appear in the Star Spangled Banner:

“Babe Ruth through the night…”

When you do something by heart, it bypasses some of the common sense processing we use to navigate our day. Of course Babe Ruth wasn’t even a sparkle in Mrs. Ruth’s eye during the War of 1812, but if you’re singing by heart, you don’t think about it.

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Spare no expense!

The problem with customer service is not a new one. It’s about balancing between serving a lot of people a little, or dropping everything to serve a few people a lot.

Getting a lot of benefit for a lot of people for not so much money isn’t particularly difficult. In the chart on the right, for example, (a) represents the cost of good signage at the airport, or clearly written directions on the prescription bottle or a bit of training for your staff. It pays off. Pay a little bit and you help a lot of people to avoid hassles. The utility per person isn’t huge, but you can help a lot of people at once.

(b) is the higher cost of a bit of direct intervention. This is the cost of a call center or a toll free number or an information desk. You’re paying more, you’re helping fewer people, but you’re helping them a lot.

(c) is where it gets nuts. (c) is where we are expected to spare no expense, where the CEO has to get involved because it’s a journalist who’s upset, or where we’re busy airlifting a new unit out to a super angry customer. The cost is very high, the systems fall apart and only one person benefits.

Of course, if you’re that one person, you think it’s not only fair, but appropriate and right.

This “spare no expense” mantra is extremely difficult to avoid, because in any given situation, when the resources are available, your inclination is to say, “make the problem go away, spend the money!”

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“We don’t compare ourselves to other airport restaurants”

Atlanta brags about having the busiest airport in the world. Like most municipal facilities, they don’t brag about having the best, the most pleasant, the most engaging or the most remarkable airport in the world.

That’s a shame, because airports are great opportunities to create value. Lots of curious, alert people with money to spend and connections to make. Yet the lowest-common-denominator is served, relentlessly. If you like fried meat, plenty to choose from. You’d think that rather than cater to the center of the curve 100 times at 100 concessions, they’d pay attention to some of the outliers now and then…

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The massive attention surplus

There was an attention drought for the longest time. Marketers paid a fortune for TV ads (and in fact, network ads sold out months in advance) because it was so difficult to find enough attention. Ads worked, so the more ads you bought, the more money you made, thus marketers took all they could get.

This attention shortage drove our economy.

The internet has done something wacky to this situation. It has created a surplus of attention. Ads go unsold. People are spending hours on YouTube or Twitter or Facebook or other sites and not spending their attention on ads, because the ads are either absent or not worth watching.

When people talk about the problem with free online, they’re missing the point. Free is creating lots of attention, but marketers haven’t gotten smart enough to do something profitable with that attention.

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