BizThoughts

The first rule of marketing: you do not talk about marketing… Oh wait, wrong club.

The first rule of marketing: you are not your customer.

It sounds obvious when you hear it. But violating it is as easy as jaywalking down a Manhattan street. You may do it sometimes without even thinking about it.

This past week, I've heard two colleagues argue endlessly about one of their product offerings - a series of content articles. They disagreed with the topics in a third colleague's articles. "Low brow", "poorly targeted", and "aimed at the wrong people" were criticisms they lobbied.

That's fine and all. But the third colleague's articles were the most popular offering they had. Their customers clearly loved these topics.

"These are the wrong customers," continued the first two. "The ones we want don't want content like this."

Cursory market research into the current customers indicated that… well… these are the customers they're targeting. They fall squarely within their target demographic.

"Well, we don't want those particular customers. They are the wrong people for us!"

Huh. Since when did a business not want it's current customers? It's hard enough to get customers, but once you have some, who in their right mind wouldn't want them anymore?

"Well, okay, then our customers just don't know what they want. They don't want these topics. They don't need these articles."

Ah. Since when do marketers know what their customers want better than the customers do? Remember the first rule of marketing: you are not your customer. You don't know exactly what they want.

How is such an impasse solved? By market research, talking to your customers, and getting to know them well. Marketing shouldn't be driven by your own opinions. It should be driven by objective research.

Use surveys, interviews, comment forms, something - anything - to get actual customer feedback. You may be surprised by what you hear. And you may learn something about your true customers too.

Speaking of marketing for men, I just finished the book Branded Male by Mark Tungate. This was another free book sent to me for review. I enjoyed this book way more than the last one too.

The Pros

Mark Tungate is a British journalist and author based in Paris. His style is entertaining and witty, making this book a pleasure to read. I breezed through it quickly.

The chapters are organized to reflect a day in the life of a typical modern male in the UK, though some of this behaviors can be seen in US men as well. They follow him as he:

• Grooms himself upon waking (cleaning, shaving, etc)
• Selects his clothes for the day
• Thinks about dieting
• Furnishes his home
• Drives his car
• Travels for work
• Reads magazines & newspapers
• Uses electronics
• Stays in a hotel
• Watches TV
• Works out at the gym
• Drinks alcohol
• Eats dinner
• And, of course, has sex

As you can see, this covers just about every common activity a typical modern man has to do, short of personal hobbies & interests.

After each chapter frames the day in the life vignette, Tungate goes into the market research behind each behavior and quotes from numerous sources. Loads of anecdotal evidence is provided with each. Then a short & succinct summary, called a Branding Toolkit, is provided that nicely closes each chapter.

If you're a marketer for any kind of product or service aimed at men, you'll find this book interesting and chock full of useful tidbits, like juicy raisins in bland oat bran. For me, who hasn't had to do marketing for men before, I learned a lot from Branded Male. I especially liked the brief history lesson of men's fashion and how the modern-day suit came to be—apparently a "dandy" by the name of George "Beau" Brummell set the template for what is now the business suit.

The Cons

I found the numerous quoted sources a bit tiresome after a while. There are sections in the book where every other chapter is a quote from another source. While I appreciate the exhaustive research he's done, the quotes became distracting after a while.

This isn't a complaint at all, but US readers will notice that Tungate uses lots of UK spellings and phrases throughout the book. Lots of "colour" instead of "color", "looking smart" instead of "looking handsome" (or maybe, "looking sharp"), and "11.30" o'clock time notation instead of "11:30" o'clock time notation. Not a surprise at all, since he's a British journalist.

I really didn't have any complaints about this book. Fun read, useful information, good organization… I think I may actually check out some of Tungate's other books too, if they're as good as this one.

You know what's cool about having a blog? Other than it being a exhibitionistic platform for vanity, public self-inflection, and personal branding, I mean.

It also means getting free stuff! A PR firm recently sent me the book Family Wars: Classic Conflicts in Family Business and How to Deal with Them by Grant Gordon & Nigel Nicholson, in the hopes that I'd mention it. So in the interest of full disclosure, let me get that out of the way first.

The Pros

Coincidentally, I've always thought it would be cool to have a family-run business. Not like a "operate from the back room of the Bada Bing" type family business. More like a business legacy that I can pass down to my children and children's children.

Having such a business can be fraught with backstabbing, cheating, lying, and betraying, so say the authors. In their book, they list countless case studies, from IBM & Ford to the Mondavi & Gallo wineries. There's also the rivalry of Adidas & Puma and the in-fighting at the LA Times, U-Haul, Gucchi, Guiness, Redstone, and many many more. Each example goes into detail about their family dynamics and individual personalities, making each sound more like a soap opera than a business case study.

The book is organized like a sandwich. The first chapter starts out with their psychological theories on family conflicts. Then there are six meaty chapters of back-to-back case studies. The last chapter follows up with a conclusion and reiteration of their theories.

My main takeaways from this book are:

• Learn how to be a good parent.
• Make sure you raise emotionally and socially intelligent children.
• Make sure you teach your children how to do the same for their children, and their children's children.
• And for goodness sake, don't spoil your kids!

There's actually a lot more to it than that. The authors prescribe a few formulas for dealing with various scenarios in the last chapter. These include pratical tips such as, "develop career plans for family members", "clarify roles of all working family members", and "agree to a policy for objective third-party oversight of the leadership selection process by independent directors, trustees and/or close advisors." That looks to be some very sound advice to me.

The Cons

For better or worse, contemporary authors of business & psychology books seem to have fallen into a particular writing style formula. Books like Freakonomics, The Tipping Point, The World is Flat, How Doctors Think, and Emotional Intelligence all do it. And for the mass market, I think it works. The formula is this:

Start each chapter with an anecdote. Make it fun and dramatic. Engage the reader with a real story about real people. Then go into the analysis, theory, and data of your point. In other words, start the chapter sounding like a story from a piece of fiction, then go into the relatively drier prose of your non-fiction.

Gordon & Nicholson don't follow that approach, making their book a slower read than its contemporary peers. So if you like that particular writing style, you're going to find Family Wars tougher to digest.

Perhaps it's the academic background of Nicholson (a professor of organizational behavior at London Business School), but I found the prose quite verbose as well. I would love to give the authors a copy of On Writing Well if I could. Hell, I wish I could give every writer in academia a copy of that book.

The analysis at the end of each case study seems a bit sparse too. To their credit, they unearthed an amazing amount of personal information about these companies. From all of that hard work, I expected a deeper analysis of each company and family. Sadly, this wasn't the case.

Still, the book is worth it just for the detailed case studies alone. Not only are they an entertaining read (especially if you like soap operas), but they'll give you insight into family-run businesses too.

You know this already. Most people don't read website text very closely. According to usability guru Jakob Nielsen, they just scan the text.

Well, Nielsen's team just provided further proof of this with an eyetracking study. They've also shown that web surfers only read about 20% of the text.

I'd say more, but you probably won't read it.

Here's something I used to tell my team:

If you ever go to sleep on Sunday night, dreading to wake up Monday morning to go to work, then something is very wrong with your job. You need to see me right away so we can sort it out.

I realize this is a luxury few in the working world have. The majority of employees out there probably dread every day except Friday and Saturday. In the dot-com industry, where our jobs are our hobbies, we get free coffee & snacks (and sometimes more) at the office, and there are perks galore, I find that most employees really love their jobs. Or at least don't despise them.

However, if you do despise your job, and dread waking up Monday morning to go to work, maybe you should talk to your manager. Or quit.

Every so often, I come across a quote that hits me smack in the forehead. Ouch!

I've been reading Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow by Chip Conley and when I hit Part Four, I went, "Ouch!"

In the introduction of Part Four, Conley includes this quote from Abraham Maslow:

The difference between the great and good societies and the regressing, deteriorating societies is largely in terms of the entrepreneurial opportunity and the number of such people in the society. I think everyone would agree that the most valuable 100 people to bring into a deteriorating society would be not 100 chemists, or politicians, or professors, or engineers, but rather 100 entrepreneurs.

If you're an entrepreneur, know that you have the grand opportunity to improve society and make a real impact on our everyday lives.

Can money buy you happiness? The short answer: YES.

Justin Wolfers, a frequent guest blogger on Freakonomics and an Assistant Professor of Business and Public Policy at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, recently wrote a series of posts on The Economics of Happiness:

UPDATED 5/1/2008: I've added parts 5 and 6 to the list.

1. Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox
2. Are Rich Countries Happier than Poor Countries?
3. Historical Evidence
4. Are Rich People Happier than Poor People?
5. Will Raising the Incomes of All Raise the Happiness of All?
6. Delving Into Subjective Well-Being

In these posts, he provides statistical evidence that:

• Rich people are happier than poor people.
• Richer countries are happier than poorer countries.
• As countries get richer, they tend to get happier.

In this CNBC video with Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson (also an Assistant Professor of Business and Public Policy at Wharton), Wolfers explains that the survey questions included, "Did you smile a lot yesterday?" and "Did you laugh a lot, yesterday?" - which can offer more absolute measures of happiness than simply asking, "How happy are you?"

As it turns out, richer people smile and laugh more often than poorer people.

This all comes in stark contrast to the Easterlin Paradox, which postulates that relative income - the amount you make compared with others around you - is more important than absolute income. In the CNBC video, Stevenson states that relative income is still important, but it may not be as important as the Easterlin Paradox suggests.

In the NY Times article, "Maybe Money Does Buy Happiness After All", Richard Easterlin (a Professor of Economics at University of Southern California) agrees that people in richer countries are more satisfied, but isn't sure that their wealth is causing their satisfaction—their survey answers may be reflecting cultural differences and offering skewed data.

Still, the data Wolfers and Stevenson have amassed is pretty compelling. They combed through reams and reams of post-war surveys and research to come up with their conclusions. Take this chart from the 2006 General Social Survey, for instance. The survey asked: "Taken all together, how would you say things are these days?"

Looks like money is sure buying happiness for the rich here.

Why are you still there? You know you want to quit, yet you're still hanging around. Is it for the money? The free snacks? Or perhaps you're a glutton for punishment.

Within the technology & Internet industries, it's become normal to jump around a bit. So when do you know it's time to jump? If most of this list applies to you… then jump!

1. Most of your coworkers don't wash their hands after using the bathroom (especially after a number 2)
2. The company cafeteria is skimping so much that you suddenly notice all the cats in the neighborhood are gone
3. Your company is doing so poorly that you're embarrassed to tell people where you work
4. You fantasize about a meteor striking your company headquarters, just so they'd have to shut down and give you a few days off
5. There's a personal stash of alcohol/pot/cocaine in your desk for those extra-hard days
6. You bring novels or magazines with you into the bathroom and read read read
7. You're so bored that you spend most of your day playing games on Facebook or watching free South Park episodes
8. You only attend the meetings with free food; every other meeting, you skip with the excuse, "I'm too busy"
9. You've gotten really, really good at foosball
10. You start posting Dilbert cartoons all over your cube

It's time to quit! You know it!