I've posted previously about how great Patrick Watson songs and shows are (I've seen at least 14 of 'em!). It's been fun watching this band improve and earn the acclaim they are now almost universally receiving. Their latest album, Wooden Arms, dropped last month and is start-to-finish wonderful. If you like pop-piano-acoustic-percussive type tunes, take a listen. And watch this beautifully shot takeaway show by Vincent Moon.

 


Banksy at the Bristol City Museum. Brilliant, yet again.

 

For all your New Yorker-style cartoon needs (for birthday cards, books, presentations...). Gigundo Industries Inc.

 
The word "publicacy" was coined by Scott Cleland, author of the insightful web policy The Precursor Blog, as a needed antonym to "privacy". In the age of Web 2.0 social networks, mobile phone GPS, cload computing, and a growing variety of "wisdom of crowds" data analysis, the "publicacy ethos" - that "if technology innovation can make information public, it should be public and that there should be no permission or payment required to access, use or remix this new 'public' information" - becomes an increasingly important subject for discussion and debate. As this NY Times article explains, you're leaving a digital trail and tracking that trail is valuable learning - both commercially and societally.

 
If you haven't done so yet, set aside 80 minutes and watch the preview that Google delivered last week of its forthcoming Wave communication platform. You'll be hearing a lot about it soon, I'm sure. Wave may very well replace email and will certainly play some key role in consolidating the oodles of social media services competing for our attention.



Impressive in its scope and ambition, obviously, but also a very good sign that Google has created Wave to be open source and "federation" friendly.

 
It's the industrial design equivalent of science fiction: 100 completely unreal inventions.

(Thanks Clay)

 

Recently I re-read Geoffrey Moore's classic “Crossing the Chasm”, a great technology marketing book that came out in the 90s. It’s about marketing and selling disruptive technology products to mainstream customers. Although some of the case studies naturally date the book, it remains just as instructive now in 2009 as it did over a decade ago.

There are a few key sections worth highlighting (excerpts below): identifying the chasm, moving from early market to mainstream, niche segmenting, and creating a whole product. Food for thought...

What is the Chasm?...

“We have enough high-tech marketing history now to see where our model has gone wrong and how to fix it. To be specific, the point of greatest peril in the development of a high-tech market lies in making the transition from an early market dominated by a few visionary customers to a mainstream market dominated by a large block of customers who are predominantly pragmatists in orientation. The gap between these two markets, heretofore ignored, is in fact so significant as to warrant being called a chasm, and crossing this chasm must be the primary focus of any long-term high-tech marketing plan. A successful crossing is how high-tech fortunes are made...” [p.5]



“Every truly innovative high-tech product starts out as a fad – something with no known market value or purpose but with “great properties” that generate a lot of enthusiasm within an “in crowd.” That’s the early market. Then comes a period during which the rest of the world watches to see if anything can be made of this; that is the chasm. If in fact something does come out of it – if a value proposition is discovered that can predictably be delivered to a targetable set of customers at a reasonable price – then a new mainstream market forms, typically with a rapidity that allows its initial leaders to become very, very successful.” [p.6]

“One of the most important lessons about crossing the chasm is that the task ultimately requires achieving an unusual degree of company unity during the crossing period.” [p.7]

On the Early Market...

Technology enthusiasts “are the ones who first appreciate the architecture of your product and why it therefore has a competitive advantage over the current crop of products established in the marketplace. They are the ones who will spend hours trying to get products to work that, in all conscience, never should have shipped in the first place. They will forgive ghastly documentation, horrendously slow performance, ludicrous omissions in functionality, and bizarrely obtuse methods of invoking some needed function – all in the name of moving technology forward. They make great critics because they truly care. ... They pose fewer requirements than any other group in the adoption profile.” [p.31]

Visionaries “are not looking for an improvement; they are looking for a fundamental breakthrough. Technology is important only insomuch as it promises to deliver this dream... From the strategic leap forward it enables.” ... “Visionaries are easy to sell but very hard to please.” [p.34]

“Crossing the chasm requires moving from an environment of support among the visionaries back into one of skepticism among pragmatists. It means moving from familiar ground of product-oriented issues to the unfamiliar ground of market-oriented ones, and from the familiar audience of like-minded specialists to the unfamiliar audience of essentially uninterested generalists.” [p.137]



On segment-targeting...

“A market is: a set of actual or potential customers; for a given set of products or services; who have a common set of needs or wants; and who reference each other when making a buying decision.” [p.28]

“...The claim is made that, although niche strategy is generally best, we do not have time – or we cannot afford – to implement it now. This is a ruse, of course, the true answer being much simpler: We do not have, nor are we willing to adopt, any discipline that would ever require us to stop pursuing any sale at any time for any reason. We are, in other words, not a market-driven company; we are a sales-driven company. Now, how bad can this really be? I mean, sales are good, right? Surely things can just work themselves out, and we will discover our market, albeit retroactively, led to it by our customers, yes? The true answers to the previous questions are: (1) disastrous, (2) not always, and (3) never in a million years.
The consequences of being sales-driven during the chasm period are, to put it simply, fatal. Here’s why: The sole goal of the company during this stage of market development must be to secure a beachhead in a mainstream market – that is, to create a pragmatist customer base that is referenceable, people who can, in turn, provide us access to other mainstream prospects. To capture this reference base, we must ensure that our first set of customers completely satisfy their buying objectives. [p.68]

“The segment-targeting company can expect word-of-mouth leverage early in its crossing-the-chasm marketing effort, whereas the sales-driven company will get it much later, if at all. This lack of word of mouth, in turn, makes selling the product that much harder, thereby adding to the cost and unpredictability of sales. ... So, if we want market leadership early on – and we do, since we know pragmatists tend to buy from market leaders, and our number one marketing goal is to achieve a pragmatist installed base that can be referenced – the only right strategy is to take a “big fish, small pond” approach. Segment. Segment. Segment.” ... “Make a total commitment to the niche, and then do your best to meet everyone else’s needs with whatever resources you have left over.” [p.69]

“Winning the beachhead, knocking over the head pin, creates a dynamic of follow-on adoption, opening up new opportunities, in part from leveraging a solution from one niche to another, in part from word of mouth interaction between customers in adjacent niches.” ... “The fundamental principle for crossing the chasm is to target a specific niche market as your point of attack and focus all your resources on achieving the dominant leadership position in that segment.” [p.77]

“Can’t we go after more than one target? The simple answer is no... You cannot cross the chasm in two places.” Move into adjacent niches after you’ve conquered the first one. [p.99]

Direct sales is the best channel for crossing the chasm in high-tech. ... “It gives us maximum control over our own destiny.” ... “The retail system works optimally when its job is to fulfill demand rather than create it. ... Because it does not create demand, and because it does not help develop whole products, retail distribution is structurally unsuited to solving the chasm problem.” [p.169]

On the Whole Product Concept...

Generic product – what is shipped in the box
Expected product – what the consumer thinks they are buying
Augmented product – accessories, plug-ins, extras, technical support, etc.
Potential product – the product’s room for growth and enhancement

“At the introduction of any new type of product, the marketing battle takes place at the level of the generic product – the product itself. The hero in the battle for the early market. But as marketplaces develop, as we enter the mainstream market, products in the center (1) become more and more alike, and the battle shifts increasingly to the outer circles (4).” [p.110]

The single most important difference between early markets and mainstream markets is that the former are willing to take responsibility for piecing together the whole product (in return for getting the jump on their competition), whereas the latter are not. Failure to recognize this principle has been the downfall of many a high-tech enterprise. Too often companies throw their products into the market as if they were tossing bales of hay off the back of a truck. There is no planning for the whole product – just the hope that their product will be so wonderful that customers will rise up in legions to demand that third parties rally about it.” [p.112]

Lots of other good stuff - and interesting how one of the pivotal challenges in all of marketing ultimately boils down to transitioning from specialist to generalist appeal, and doing so with niche segmenting and a whole product. Again, a great book, well worth dusting off and scanning through again.

 
Recycling: Each year, Americans throw out enough soda pop cans bottles to reach to the moon and back—twenty times.

Kissing: The science of kissing is called philematology.

Nutrition: A person will usually swallow around 250 times during dinner.

Dolphins: Just a tablespoon of water in a dolphin’s lung could drown it.

Volcanoes: Japan has 10% of the world’s active volcanoes.

One should learn something - at least one thing - new every day. That being the goal, this site of Random Facts, will overload your daily diet.

(Thanks Rose)

 
It's clear reading The Audacity of Hope that Barack Obama isn't just a good speaker but he's also a very good writer, exceptionally talented at conveying thoughts and ideas articulately, intelligently, and with flow. It's a book that so obviously framed his whole presidential campaign, which as we all know now has thankfully turned the page on the redacted scribbles of the Bush-Cheney years. It's a book about his background, experience, approach, beliefs, and aspirations.

Besides the obligatory pre-campaign introduction that most political personality books share, there are a couple things that really stand out about Obama in The Audacity of Hope.

The first is that this is a man who has a very keen understanding of history, especially American history. I blogged previously about a post at Pop Philosophy called The Return of History which summed up nicely the great value of studied hindsight on matters of the present and future. It would appear that Obama's relative young age as president is more than offset by his professorial knowledge of past presidents and of his nation's founding and subsequent journey.

The second thing that resonated throughout the book was that Obama most certainly possesses a generalist mindset. I've posted before about how leaders need to be generalists - including a vision of the big picture, a talent for "hiring" and delegation, and an openness and empathy towards differing ideas and perspectives. He covers sports, faith, economy, politics, power, science, family, and a number of other topics with ease and in balance with each other. This trait will serve him well as leader of a country with so many diverse challenges and opportunities.

Here are a few excerpts that illustrate the above further:

...[A]cross America a constant cross-pollination is occurring, a not entirely orderly but generally peaceful collision among people and cultures. Identities are scrambling, and then cohering in new ways. Beliefs keep slipping through the noose of predictability. Facile expectations and simple explanations are being constantly upended. Spend time actually talking to Americans, and you discover that most evangelicals are more tolerant than the media would have us believe, most secularists more spiritual. Most rich people want the poor to succeed, and most of the poor are both more self-critical and hold higher aspirations than the popular culture allows. Most Republican strongholds are 40 percent Democrat, and vice versa. The political labels of liberal and conservative rarely track people's personal attributes. (p63)

It is to say that after all the trappings of office - the titles, the staff, the security details - are stripped away, I find the President and those who surround him to be pretty much like everybody else, possessed of the same mix of virtues and vices, insecurities and long-buried injuries, as the rest of us. No matter how wrongheaded I might consider their policies to be - and no matter how much I might insist that they be held accountable for the results of such policies - I still find it possible, in talking to these men and women, to understand their motives, and to recognize in them values I share. This is not an easy posture to maintain in Washington. ... (p59)

As a country, we seem to be suffering from an empathy deficit. We wouldn't tolerate schools that don't teach, that are chronically underfunded and understaffed and underinspired, if we thought that the children in them were like our children. It's hard to imagine the CEO of a company giving himself a multimillion-dollar bonus while cutting health-care coverage for his workers if he thought they were in some sense his equals. And it's safe to assume that those in power would think longer and harder about launching a war if they envisioned their own sons and daughters in harm's way. ... Black leaders need to appreciate the legitimate fears that may cause some whites to resist affirmative action. Union representatives can't afford not to understand the competitive pressures their employers may be under. I am obligated to try to see the world through George Bush's eyes, no matter how much I may disagree with him. That's what empathy does... We are all forced beyond our limited vision. (p82)

Most of all, she [Obama's mother] possessed an abiding sense of wonder, a reverence for life and its precious, transitory nature that could properly described as devotional. During the course of the day, she might come across a painting, read a line of poetry, or hear a piece of music, and I would see tears well up in her eyes. Sometimes, as I was growing up, she would wake me in the middle of the night to have me gaze at a particularly spectacular moon, or she would have me close my eyes as we walked together at twilight to listen to the rustle of leaves. She loved to take children - any child - and sit them in her lap and tickle them or play games with them or examine their hands, tracing out the miracle of bone and tendon and skin and delighting at the truths to be found there. She saw mysteries everywhere and took joy in the sheer strangeness of life. (p243)

 
Twitter has forced me to confront head-on something I so fervently rail against: close-mindedness. It's personal this time though. It was my own close-mindedness.

You see, I finally relented and joined Twitter last week - something I stubbornly refused to do for a few reasons, namely: I'm too busy, it's too shallow/banal/narcissistic, and what's the point really. Basically for the same short-sighted reasons that many railed against blogging waaaay back in the early naughts, I struggled to see the value of <140-character brain farts. Well, I was wrong.

Twitter (and its various apps) deliver a few valuable things. Firstly, it's effectively a faster search engine than Google. Nowhere near as comprehensive but pretty useful for breaking news and the very latest links. Secondly, it is a shining example of the wisdom of crowds, identifying trends on anything - a marketer's dream. Twitter's real value is in what it provides in aggregate. Thirdly, it is a great launching pad out to deeper blog posts, media articles, and video clips (see Guy Kawasaki). This is what especially bugs me about having ignored Twitter for so long; that it is simply a very useful generalist tool for scanning ideas.

Anyways, you can follow me here. Not sure yet what I'll post most about - probably a mix of personal, Creative Generalist, and WowWee. I'll definitely never be a power user - too reserved/private for that - but I'll certainly be following the brightest twitterers out there as I find them. Speaking of which, thanks to Pam and Mitch at Twist Image, leaders in the ___sphere, for the nudge.