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Marketing and Movies: Moneyball

I am a sucker for shows or documentaries that detail how a business started from nothing and became a success. I’m also a big fan of sports movies. Moneyball is both, so of course it’s one of my favorite movies.

Moneyball follows the 2001 offseason and 2002 season that saw the Oakland Athletics overcome massive budget constraints and the loss of its star players to set the American League record for consecutive wins, and make the postseason. I think the story of Moneyball will resonate with a lot of business owners who are having to take a long, hard look at its direction given the economic and business uncertainty we are all facing heading into 2021.

In the 2001 offseason, Oakland lost its two ‘star’ players, Johnny Damon and Jason Giambi to rivals who could afford to pay far richer salaries than the Athletics could. General Manager Bill Beane went to the Athletics owner and told him he needed more money to make the Athletics competitive. The owner said there was no more money for Beane and that he should do the best he can. Beane then went to his scouts who were focused on trying to replace Giambi and Damon. Beane became frustrated with this mentality because he knew that the Athletics couldn’t afford players that could hit the same number of HRs and who had the same batting average as Giambi and Damon. And even if they could find a couple of players that could put up similar stats to Giambi and Damon, the Athletics would lose them in a year or two when a richer ballclub offered them a higher salary that the Athletics couldn’t match.

Beane knew that the Athletics needed to change the way they viewed acquiring players. At first he tried to get the best players the Athletics could afford. He visited the Indians, and proposed several trades or player acquisitions, but Beane noticed that these offers were all rejected after advisor Peter Brand spoke to management. Beane left the meeting frustrated, and decided to speak to Brand directly to find out what he told Indians management to get them to kill his player offers.

Brand then explained to Beane that many baseball teams were making a grave mistake in evaluating players. Most teams at the time were focusing on stats like home runs, runs batted in and batting average. Brand explained “your goal shouldn’t be to buy players, it should be to buy wins. And in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs.” Beane was impressed by Brand’s new approach to player evaluation and hired him from the Indians to help him rebuild the Athletics team.

In part of doing that, Beane and Brand began evaluating offensive players based not on HRs, RBIs or BA, but instead on whether or not they got on base. In this scene, Beane meets with the Athletics’ scouts and explains the change in philosophy when it comes to evaluating players:

As you can see, the scouts were confused by this approach as soon as they heard it. As Beane and Brand continued to acquire players who didn’t have flashy stats (but who did get on base), the fans and rest of the league scratched their heads at what the Athletics were doing. Then, the team began to struggle mightily, resulting in huge pressure being put on Beane to change his ‘moneyball’ approach to building his team in order to save his job. Beane decided to see the season through, even trading Carlos Pena, who was projected as a future All-Star, simply because he wasn’t the best fit for his new ‘moneyball’ system. That decision led to Brand asking him to please reconsider, and Beane told him that if they believed in their ‘moneyball’ approach, that they needed to commit to it:

Over time, Beane and Brand worked with the players to help educate them on how to get on base more often and how to play smart once they did. In one scene, Beane explains to a player that he wants him to focus on getting on base, not on stealing bases.  The player replies “but you pay me to steal bases, that’s what I do”, to which Beane replies “I pay you to get on first, not get thrown out at second.”

They worked with the players to stress to them the importance of waiting for their perfect pitch. Brand used analytics to show the players when to take pitches and when to swing, based on their hitting history. The play of the team improved dramatically, as the Athletics went from one of the worst teams in baseball to one of the best. Along the way, the Athletics won 20-straight games, setting an American League record that would stand for 15 years.

Now there’s several themes from Moneyball that I think tie nicely to successful marketing and business. First, there’s having the courage to try something new if your current strategy has proven not to work. Beane faced a ton of resistance to his Moneyball approach both within the Athletics organization, and in the sport of baseball. He was trying something new, and quite honestly a lot of people wanted to see him fail. That leads to the second key lesson, to commit to your strategy and give it a chance. When the Athletics actually did start losing, that just increased the pressure on Beane to drop the ‘moneyball’ approach. But Beane trusted in the strategy that he and Brand had developed, and committed to seeing it through.

But what really resonated for me personally was the idea of evaluating players based on whether or not they get on base versus if they have flashy stats. Getting on base can be done in some very unsexy ways, like taking 12 pitches and a walk, or getting hit by a pitch. Beane just wanted to see his players get on base, he didn’t care how they did it. At the time, many teams wanted a player that would hit 40 HRs, and didn’t really care if his on-base percentage was .250.

For years, I approached blogging and content creation as if I was constantly chasing home runs. Or in terms of blogging, a home run would be an ‘awesome post’. So every post was supposed to be a home run, or ‘awesome’. And we constantly hear this, don’t we?  ‘It’s about quality, not quantity!’ or ‘If you can’t write a great post, wait till you can!’

The reality is, no blogger writes a great post every time. But for years, that was my goal, write a great post every time. And write a lot of them.

I used to love Kathy Sierra’s blog Creating Passionate Users. Kathy was a very infrequent blogger. She would typically blog once, maybe twice a month at most. But almost every post she wrote, was incredible. Whenever a new Kathy Sierra post was published, it would create an immediate ripple throughout the blogging and tech community.

Kathy hit a home run every time she posted. I thought that was the standard. That’s what I wanted to do.

So every time I would start out to blog, I wanted to make every post be an awesome one. By the 3rd or 4th day, I had typically run out of ‘awesome’ ideas for posts. So I would tell myself ‘if you can’t write an awesome blog post today, then don’t write anything’. So I wouldn’t. Then the next day I would try again. Before I knew it, I was blogging once a week, then once every other week.

This process repeated itself over the years. This year, I decided to try something different. Before, I told myself “Your job is to write an awesome blog post today”.  Now, I tell myself “Your job is to write a blog post today”.

See the difference? Before I was shooting to hit a ‘home run’ at every at bat, which is completely unrealistic.  Now, I focus on getting on base.  Just writing a blog post.

Because the reality is, the more you write, the better you become at writing.  The more often you blog, the better you become at blogging, the better you become at writing awesome posts.

So that’s my ‘moneyball’ approach to blogging; Don’t worry about hitting a home run, just get on base.

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The Value of Showing Up

Recently I saw a speaker announce on Twitter that event organizers shouldn’t expect her to stay at an event past her speaking slot. Years ago I saw a speaker bragging and posting a selfie from his seat on a plane. He said he flew in this morning, an hour ago he was on stage, now he’s flying home.

Is that really something to brag about?

Sure, you were paid to speak, and unless it’s worked out beforehand, you weren’t paid to stick around and participate any further in the event. But why wouldn’t you? I’ve always felt my job as a speaker is to make the event a smashing success. It seems like common sense; The more successful the event is, the better it looks that I spoke there. And it leads to speaking referrals for future events, which any professional speaker will tell you is the lifeblood of their profession.

Years ago I was asked to speak at a tourism event. I’d never spoken at a tourism industry event at the time, and I will admit my plan was to leave as soon as I was finished. But the organizer asked me to please stay if I could, and I really liked her, so I decided to do so. I’m so glad I did, the event was incredibly interesting, the organizer was kind enough to make it known to attendees that I would be staying and she invited me to participate in Q&A sessions at the end of the event, which I happily did. All this led to a better event for the organizers, and several speaking referrals for me. I’ve gone on to speak at several tourism events since, and they are honestly my favorite industry events to present at.

The reality is, it will be a while before in-person conferences are a regular occurrence again. I’m hopeful we will start to see some industry events return in late Spring/Early Summer of 2021, with many more coming back by Fall of 2021. Speakers need to think about how they can add as much value as possible to every event they present for. I always tell organizers when I agree to present at their event that I have just become their promotional partner. That it’s my job to help the event become as successful as possible. I’ve even worked with many events to help bring on additional speakers that I trust to help make the event even better.

We all know to focus on the value we can create for our clients in 2020 and beyond. We need to show up, and we need to stay until the job is done. Leaving early and cutting corners is nothing to brag about.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Tik Tok Partners with Oracle, Digital Body Language, How Gen Zers View Brands

Hey y’all! Let’s get cracking with another week of business and marketing goodness!

 

Tik Tok rejected Microsoft’s offer to buy the company then an hour or so later turned around and agreed to partner with Oracle as a ‘trusted tech partner’. This is not a sale (at least not yet), and it appears Oracle will help manage US operations for Tik Tok, likely lending its cloud computing technology.

 

Digital body language is a wonderful topic that too few marketers think about.  My dear friend Kelly shared this fabulous article that breaks down what can be happening on your site and how you can convince the visitor to become a buyer:

 

 

Now this graph in this tweet immediately caught my attention:

First, it’s ridiculous to combine Gen Xers with our Boomer parents as we are completely different groups, but whatevs. But what really caught my attention was note the percentage that choose brands based on friend/family recommendations falls with every age group. Now I checked the fine print and the results are coming from a survey of Snapchat users, so that will likely skew the results some.

But I found this quote from the article about how Gen Zers view recommendations from friends and family to be fascinating:

“Part of that, of course, is that such recommendations are now much easier to come by, as you can see what people like and advocate for via social media. Past generations didn’t always have this as a reference point, so it makes sense that they’re less instinctively reliant on the same.

But Gen Z has adapted to the modern communications environment, which underlines the importance of facilitating advocacy through influencers and regular customers on social networks.”

This tends to suggest that who Gen Zers consider to be ‘friends’ could be much broader than their older counterparts. In fact, could this even be suggesting that Gen Zers view influencers they like as their ‘friends’? I think this is a very interesting area to explore and research further. Perhaps the definition of who a ‘friend’ is more abstract for the youngest digital natives, and becomes more literal as we age? Again, I find this fascinating and worthy of further research.

 

Oh Twitter…you just can’t help yourself, can you? It appears that Twitter is now positioning itself to be in a position to censor any election day tweets that discuss who has won or lost any of the races on Election Day in November:

This is so scary for so many reasons. Here’s a hypothetical; Let’s say a group of hardcore Trump supporters were put in charge of monitoring tweets on election day. And let’s say these Trump supporters are ACTIVIST supporters, who are put in charge of monitoring. In theory, they could delete any tweet that contains phrases like ‘Biden will win’ or ‘I think Biden will win’ and claim it is ‘unverified election results’. That would result in there appearing to be almost no excitement for the Biden campaign, which could easily influence undecided independent voters. Moves like this are why we are likely headed toward a day when big social media sites are regulated by the government as publishers, not platforms.

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Red Bull Creates Better Content Than You Do, Here’s How They Do It

Red Bull’s marketing is one of my favorite case studies from Think Like a Rock Star.  In the book I call them this generation’s Nike, and they really are.  What separates Red Bull from most brands is its customer-centric marketing.  Everything about the brand’s content, marketing and communication efforts is about its customers and what’s important to them.  The product itself is secondary to the activities that the customer engages in, and cherishes. Red Bull’s content marketing follows a simple formula; Don’t sell the product, sell what the product allows you to do.

First. watch this Red Bull video:

There’s a couple of things you need to know about that video:

1 – It’s a 30-second broadcast commercial.

2 – It currently has over 2 million views on YouTube.

 

But notice something else; the product (Red Bull energy drinks) is barely shown. Instead, the majority of the commercial focuses on the athletes and the amazing activities they are engaged in.

The product has become secondary to the activities that Red Bull’s customers enjoy.  

Red Bull understands that its customers are young and active.  The brand is targeting the younger end of the highly desirable 18-34 demographic, and they understand that customers in this age range are extremely savvy when it comes to advertising.  So instead of trying to market its product to these customers (which would be a turnoff to them), Red Bull focuses its content on the activities they love.

Red Bull is a Giant on YouTube

In fact, Red Bull does a fabulous job of re-purposing (or as my friend Ann would say ‘re-imaging’) its content.  Red Bull creates long-form content and videos chronicling how these amazing athletes prepare to engage in their activities.  This is for the hardcore extreme sports fans that want to learn more about these athletes and how they train for and perform these amazing jumps, stunts and tricks.

Then Red Bull takes the actual footage from the event and shows it by itself, and also works it into its commercials as well.  Red Bull got a ton of publicity from Felix Baumgartner’s ‘freefall from space’.  The brand divided footage from that amazing event into a highlight video that currently has over 40 MILLION views.  Additionally it posted videos from test jumps Baumgartner made, and of course his successful space freefall closes out the broadcast commercial above.

 Red Bull's YouTube engagement

We’ve got your Facebook engagement right here!

With over 40 Million ‘fans’ on Facebook, Red Bull is one of the most popular brands on the world’s largest social networking site.  And consistent with the content it creates on other online channel, the product itself is almost never promoted or even mentioned.  Instead, the focus is on the athletes and the amazing feats they are engaging in.  Most of the content is delivered via stunning visuals with text to describe what’s happening.  But the brand is promoting the activities and athletes directly, and the brand itself very indirectly.

In 2012, Facebook did a study into how its most popular brands drive engagement via its Pages.  Specifically, Facebook found that brands create three types of content on its brand pages:

Messages about the product or service

  • Travel brand example: Our new resort just opened! Book your trip today.

Messages related to the brand

  • Travel brand example: I decided to go on my first cruise because______.

Messages unrelated to the brand

  • Travel brand example: Hang in there everybody. Monday will be over before we know it!

Of these three, updates related to the brand but not about the brand were the only type of updates that “were the sole universally significant predictor of all types of engagement.”  Those three types of engagement are Likes, Shares and Comments.

This is the exact type of content that Red Bull nails on all its social media channels, but especially on Facebook.  In fact Facebook clarified in the study that if a brand’s goal was to generate Shares that the brand should “Use photos, photos albums and videos”.

RedBullFB

Sponsor the Love

One of the ways that a brand can create passionate fans and brand advocates is to help facilitate and align itself with events, communities and functions that its customers are passionate about. You see this often at conferences and events, where a company will sponsor a ‘recharge’ area where attendees can recharge their smartphones and laptops, and refreshments might be present as well. Or another example could be a crafting company that builds an online community for crafters, the idea being that the brand is creating something of value for its customers and associating itself with events. functions and communities that the customer is already passionate about.

Red Bull does this with extreme sports.  The brand has long been heavily invested in extreme sports, helping to fund the events themselves, then later funding teams for major events such as ESPN’s X-Games.  Red Bull has even been a sponsor in NASCAR for several years.

These sponsorships communicate to its customers that Red Bull loves these events as much as they do.  Which gives its customers another reason to love the brand itself.

 

Telling a Compelling Story and Making the Customer the Hero  

Red Bull’s content marketing is all about telling a story.  It’s about personal achievement, about pushing the envelope and going farther than you thought you could.  These ideals speak to the heart of extreme sports and these special and fearless athletes.

Yet what makes this content marketing so compelling is that Red Bull is telling a story where the customer is the hero.  The content is positioned so that the customer sees these athletes performing these amazing activities yet feels inspired to push themselves to go farther.

Consider the final line of Red Bull’s broadcast commercials:

“If you believe in it, then anything is possible.”

“The only limit, is the one you set yourself.”

“You can dream about it, or you can go out and make it happen.”

The content inspires you to do more and to accomplish more than you thought you could.

Yet the secret is, Red Bull isn’t selling an energy drink, it’s selling what happens after you drink it.

Do you want to learn how Mack can create a world-class content strategy for your company like Red Bull has? Contact Mack with this form and he'll be in touch with you shortly!

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Toolbox Saturday: The Google Analytics Mobile App

Google Analytics has always been one of my go-to tools for maintaining and growing my blog. What I’ve always liked about it is that I can quickly easily get key information about what’s happening with my blog’s traffic at any moment.

And that level of convenience has been taken to the next level with the Google Analytics Mobile App. Thanks to this app, I’ve now got that information right with me on my phone. And these days, I have my phone with me almost every every waking moment, whereas I’m often away from my laptop for hours at a time. I also have the WordPress mobile app on my phone and with Jetpack enabled it also gives me some basic traffic information and between the two apps I can pretty much tell what’s happening with my blog traffic in a few seconds. Which is just what I need.

Here’s a couple of screenshots of the basic traffic information that’s available to me when I open the app:

This is the information I look at the most. I want to see how many people are online right now, and what traffic is looking like so far today. Whenever I track traffic, I always track it hourly, versus the same day a week ago. This gives me a useful way to see how traffic is doing today versus the same day a week ago. Basically, I’m looking for spikes up or down.  If traffic is way off, I want to know why.  If it’s way down, was there a connection issue or was the site down?  If it’s way up, was there a post that was getting shared a lot, or was I getting some spam traffic?

Here’s another graph found as soon as I open the app, a sort of ‘heat map’ of how traffic did throughout the day:

I like the way the traffic levels are represented as colors, that helps me easily understand what times of the day had the most traffic, and which ones had the least. This can help me adjust when I promote content and when I publish new content.

Overall, I really like having this information available to me at a glance and right as soon as I open the app. Now the one thing I wish was available as soon as I open the app would be a list of the most viewed posts for that day. I get that with the WordPress app, but it would be nice to have that with the Google Analytics app all in the same place. There’s probably a very easy way to add that report that I simply can’t figure out.

You’re probably already using Google Analytics to track your blog’s traffic, so why not grab the mobile app as well?

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The Blank Space on the Calendar

I talked last week about how I’m enjoying using the Editorial Calendar plugin to help organize and plan my content here. It’s helped me plan out my content this week and last as I rededicated to blogging 6 times a week.

Well all last week and all this week, there’s been a blank spot on Friday, Sept 11th. I simply couldn’t decide on a topic for today’s post. Now in the past, my blogging philosophy has always been if I can’t write something awesome, don’t write anything at all. Which sounds like a good idea. The problem I would often run into was, if I missed one day, it seemed to increase the pressure to make sure I got a post out the next day. But it also had to be an ‘awesome’ post. So if I couldn’t come up with an idea for an ‘awesome’ post on that 2nd day, just wait till the 3rd.  After I had gone 2-3 days without blogging, it was very easy to justify not blogging again till I had that ‘awesome’ idea.

As you can imagine, that often led to gaps of a week or two between posts.  Sometimes longer.

When I was planning out the ‘relaunch’ of my blog over the last few weeks, it came after I saw this wonderful interview given by Kobe Bryant. What really struck me was this portion here Kobe talked about how he had to show up every day:

Kobe’s comments about showing up every day and being faithful to the people who were paying to see him resonated with me.  I was thinking of two separate stories that relate to the value of showing up, and what happens when you don’t.

When I first started blogging in 2005, I had no idea what I was doing, and I wanted to study how other people were blogging in order to improve my craft. I would use Technorati’s blog search (remember them?) to find new blogs, and I wanted to find great blogs that weren’t yet ‘known’, but I also wanted to see how other new bloggers were growing their blogs. I found this one blog, and I started with the first post on the blog. For the first couple of weeks, the blogger had a new post every day like clockwork. Then starting on the third week, the posts came every other day. Then one post the fourth week.  Then a couple of weeks later, the title was the post “Why isn’t anyone commenting on this blog???”

That was the last post on the blog. I knew at that point I’d just seen this blog die. Anyone that’s started a new blog knows that it typically takes months if not years to build a decent and engaged readership. Especially in 2020.

Here’s the second story that Kobe’s comments reminded me of. I talked yesterday about how Twitch content creator Nickmercs is using YouTube to create new content. Nick regularly gets over 100,000 viewers for his Twitch streams. That’s in 2020, so keep that in mind when you see this tweet from 2014:

Here’s Nick in 2014, 6 years ago, happy that he had 170 viewers for that day’s stream. From 170 to 100,000 in 6 years. Not bad.

So I think there’s value in creating the best possible content you can, but it’s also important to show up as often as you can.

Or as Seth Godin likes to say “Done is better than perfect.”

Well today’s post is Done. The blank space on the calendar is filled. On to tomorrow.

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Case Study: Creating Different Video Content For Different Audiences

I’ve talked before about how you can create different types of content based on the Buyer’s Journey, or where they are in the purchase process.

There are four different stages in general:

1 – Unaware and I don’t care.  This person doesn’t know who you are or why they should care about you. So in order to connect with this person, you don’t talk about your company AT ALL. You talk about the potential customer.  That will get their attention and give you a chance to move to the next stages.

2 – Slightly Aware. At this stage the customer has some idea of who your company is and what it does. At this stage you want to create content that helps the customer understand how your products or services fit into their lives, or relate to them. This will help them understand how your company’s products and services can help them, and will grow their interest in your company.

3 – Interested. At this stage the customer knows who you are, knows why your products or services are valuable to them, and is considering making a purchase. At this stage you want to focus almost completely on the product or service you are selling. You have to keep in mind that at this stage, the customer is doing research in anticipation of making a purchase. So give them detailed information on what you have to offer.

4 – Ready to buy, take my money! Pretty self-explanatory, the customer is ready to make a purchase. At this stage you simply complete the transaction, no need to continue to sell to them, they are ready to buy.

 

To give you an idea of how you can create different types of video content, I wanted to go back to the example of how Twitch content creator @nickmercs is creating content for his YouTube channel. I talked about Nick’s video content before, he will stream several hours a day on Twitch, then condense this gameplay down to 15-20 minutes of his ‘best’ content, and post that to YouTube. Nick monetizes his YouTube channel so he gets paid by views, but if we were thinking about where this content would typically fall in the above categories, it would go under the Aware stage. People that watch Nick’s videos are typically aware of who he is, and want to see his content.

But a few weeks ago, Nick did something a bit different with his content on his YouTube channel. He and two teammates won a $100,000 Call of Duty: Warzone tournament. He then created a video where he walks the audience through exactly what he and his team did in the final game that led to them winning the tournament. He breaks down every movement, why they did what they did (or what the ‘strat’ was, as the kids say), and talks about how viewers can replicate his success as they are playing the game. This type of content is much more in depth than a simple highlight video, and as such is aimed at a slightly different audience:

Now, Nick is monetizing his YouTube channel so the content he creates is all about maximizing views. This particular video was done as a bit of an experiment, it seems, just to see how the audience would react. This video currently has over 600,000 views, which is huge, but many of Nick’s Warzone videos have more views. It makes sense that this video would have fewer views, because it would appeal to a smaller audience than his typical ‘highlight’ video. If you were to place this video into one of the above four categories, it would fall under the Interested category for customers who are in the research phase. Now Nick is making money off his YouTube channel via monetization, but if he wanted to sell personal coaching services where he mentored players to perform well in eSports tournaments like Warzone, a video such as this would be a perfect way to sell such services.

Just keep in mind that the type of content you create at each stage of the Buyer’s Journey transcends the content channel. If they are Unaware and just entering your sales or marketing funnel, you create content focused solely on the customer. When they are near the bottom of the funnel in the Interested stage, you talk about what it is that you are selling. Doesn’t matter if you are creating blog posts, videos, podcasts, whatever.

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Marketing and Movies: Memento

The customer is always right and always ‘remembers’ things from their POV.

Christopher Nolan’s resume as a director is spectacular. Interstellar, Inception, Dunkirk, The Prestige, and The Dark Knight, which in my opinion includes the finest performance by an actor ever; Heath Ledger’s portrayal of The Joker.

But I think Nolan’s masterwork as a director and storyteller is a movie you may have never heard of; Memento.  Memento follows a man named Leonard Shelby with a very unique condition; He cannot make new memories. Throughout the course of the movie, Leonard tells us of the an attacker who broke into his home, attacked him and his wife. The attacker killed Leonard’s wife and in the process of fighting with Leonard, Leonard was knocked unconscious resulting in Leonard’s ‘condition’. Leonard has this scene where he recalls that night to Natalie:

 

Natalie: “What’s the last thing that you do remember?”

Leonard: “My wife…”

Natalie: “That’s sweet.”

Leonard: “…dying.”

 

Leonard’s life since that point has been focused on finding his wife’s killer and extracting vengeance. This quest is obviously made much more difficult by the fact that Leonard cannot form new memories.  In general, he can remember the last 5 minutes or so, but if something startles him, such as a loud noise like a car backfiring, his short-term memory will ‘reset’ and he will forget even the last few minutes. He could be talking to someone and know who that person is, and suddenly forget who that person is or why he’s talking to him. Here’s an example where Leonard is running and trying to figure out why he is running. He then sees a man running too, and mistakenly assumes he is chasing the man:

 

To help put the audience in Leonard’s shoes, Nolan brilliantly organizes the story into 5-minute or so segments. The segments then alternate so that you actually see the ‘end’ of the story at the first of the movie. Then the following segment shows you the first few minutes of the story, then the following segment shows you the next to last segment of the story, so on and so forth until the movie ends in the actual ‘middle’ of the story. Nolan does this purposely to help the audience understand what Leonard’s life is like with his condition. A life lived in 5-minute increments.

Since Leonard cannot make new memories, he created an elaborate system of note-taking to help him make up for not being able to create new memories. He takes Polaroid pictures of important people and places he encounters, and then writes notes on the pictures so he knows why they are relevant to his quest to find his wife’s killer. Leonard even went so far as to cover his body with tattoos which are a list of the most basic ‘facts’ of the case, such as the name of the man he is looking for, his description, and other important information that Leonard needed to have with him at all times.

But the one element of this story that I find absolutely fascinating is how Leonard’s world of truth and fiction, right and wrong, is recreated every five minutes due to his memory condition. In fact, multiple characters in the film use Leonard’s inability to keep his memory to their advantage. In one scene, Natalie tells Leonard that she is about to lie to him, but that it will be a few minutes in the future and Leonard won’t remember that she’s now telling him this. She walks outside and Leonard begins frantically searching for a pen and paper so he can write down what she just told him. As he is searching, Natalie walks back in the house and slams the front door.  The slamming of the front door jars Leonard and causes his short-term memory of Natalie’s previous conversation to disappear.

This creates an ongoing puzzle for the audience to solve when watching this movie.  Because at any time, any character, including Leonard, could be lying, or they could be telling the truth. And if what Natalie is saying now is the truth, that means what Teddy told Leonard in the previous scene was a lie or vice versa. And Nolan gives us at least one example of every character in the movie telling at least one lie. So we are constantly having to evaluate each scene based on who seems truthful and who doesn’t.

But throughout the course of the movie, we learn that Leonard’s version of what happened on and since the night he lost his ability to make new memories, may not be what actually happened. In other words, Leonard through the retelling of the story in his own mind, has likely altered events to make his actions more pure, and to give his quest to find his wife’s killer more meaning.

Now, how does all this relate to marketing?

Let’s go back to that first line in this post: The customer is always right and always ‘remembers’ things from their POV. If you think about it, we all do this. All human beings tend to remember things differently than they actually happened. Maybe by a tiny bit, maybe by a lottabit. For years I remembered my childhood home as being on this sprawling plot of land, with massive fields surrounding it where I played as a child. The entire area seemed to cover miles in my memory. A few years ago, I drove back to visit that area and was stunned at how small everything actually was. What I remembered as being a massive area of land was only a couple of acres at best.

So when it comes to marketing, you need to remember this lesson that we tend to ‘remember’ things more positively when it comes to our own actions.  This is especially relevant when you are working in customer service and dealing with angry customers. Often, these customers can clearly see the company’s fault, and be totally oblivious to what they may have done to contribute to their support issue. The lesson for the company is to not lose its temper and to have empathy for the customer.  Understand the customer’s POV and don’t take any criticism seriously. Studies have shown than when we become angry and upset, our ability to think rationally is diminished, and this increases as we become more upset.

If you can show the customer that you have empathy for them and their situation, that will go a long way toward putting them at ease and you can have a much more productive interaction. The customer as a group IS always right because if you don’t satisfy your customers, you will lose them. Now this doesn’t mean every INDIVIDUAL customer is ‘right’ and this is where some people are confused by the true meaning of the phrase ‘the customer is always right’.

Just understand that we all have a unique POV and we all tend to view ourselves in the best possible light. That’s just human nature. Accept that, show empathy to your customers, listen to them, and a productive interaction, whether as a support issue or as a purchase, will be the result.

PS: Hopefully this post has piqued your interest to check out Memento. Here’s the trailer for the movie:

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Why I’ve Decided to Blog More and Spend Less Time on Social Media

Adversity doesn’t create character, it reveals it.

Over the last few years, there’s been a growing sentiment that social media has become more and more toxic, especially in regards to the discussions happening around news and politics.  I’ve heard many people say they have left Facebook completely because they were overwhelmed by the constant arguing and finger-pointing.

Since 2020 is an election year, we all knew it was going to get bad on social media.  What none of us expected was for covid-19 to happen. The election, plus much of the country being on lockdown for most of the year has understandably put all of us under a huge amount of pressure.  We are worried about how to deal with a real or likely loss of income.  We are worried about the health of ourselves and our families. We are worried about the future.

What troubled me, and I especially saw this on Twitter, was how people reacted to the spread of covid. Many people became judgmental, shaming people for not reacting in a certain way or for not taking certain issues or developments in the way that they felt was appropriate. Instead of being understanding and compassionate. I saw too many people judging and attacking.

And what stunned me, was that many of these people were in my Twitter network. Some of these people were friends I had followed for years. On the one hand, I would tell myself that they are worried and scared and rightly so. On the other hand, we are ALL worried and scared, and rightly so.  Being scared and worried doesn’t excuse you from being an asshole.  And a lot of people I followed on Twitter were exhibiting this behavior.

So I decided to ‘de-tox’ my Twitter network. I effectively unfollowed 60% of my network over about a month.  But I started thinking about this, and realized this isn’t a Twitter issue, it’s a social media issue.  People are being jerks on Facebook just like they are on Twitter.  Every community has its jerks.  If they are in the minority, it’s easy to ignore and overlook them. But when the jerks become the majority and start creating and dominating the conversations, I want to opt-out.

That brings me back to blogging.  Literally.

The one thing that I’ve always loved about blogging is the power it gives you to share your voice. It gives you the ability to have a say, to share your thoughts with the world. Today’s social media world is based around the soundbyte. 140-character missives designed to spark instant engagement. Often emotionally-charged attacks and insults that people are compelled to immediately respond to.

It’s the complete opposite of a conversation. It’s yelling in 140 characters, the person that yells the loudest gets the most Likes and RTs.

Blogs are different. Blogs are where you can have your say fully and completely.  You can use 140 characters, or you can use 140,000 if you want.

I’ve talked before about the 4-step process for creating advocacy; Interaction leads to Understanding leads to Trust leads to Advocacy.

On social media, we often never have those interactions. We yell at each other and talk at each other instead of to each other.

With a blog, you have a chance to have your say.  You have a chance to state your opinions and make your case with as many or as few words as you need. You can then respond in the comments, or via email or even on your own blog.

But more than anything, I’m tired of the yelling. We need less yelling and more listening. We need less judgment and more empathy.

We need to be better people. That’s what I think, and it’s a lot easier to say that here, than it is on social media.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: DOJ Targets Google, Twitch Thriving Under Lockdown, Burgers in the Sky

Happy Labor Day, y’all! Hope you had a great holiday weekend and are as ready for Fall as I am! The weather here has been about 10 degrees cooler than normal for the last couple weeks and looks to continue this for the rest of the month. Bring on Fall!

 

It’s been fascinating to watch how consumer behavior has changed during 2020 as we are all spending a lot more time at home. This is also altering how we consume content and the types of content we consume. This actually factored heavily into my decision to double-down on blogging, I think you will see more people spending more time reading and consuming blog content for the rest of this year and into 2021.

Another content source that’s thriving in 2020 is video-game streaming platform Twitch.

I’ve written about how content creators are leveraging Twitch in the past and will have more on this later in the week.

On a bit of a surprising note, the amount of time we are spending listening to podcasts is down slightly in 2020:

https://twitter.com/Claire_Harris82/status/1299678670622085121

This is actually quite revealing. At first blush, you would think podcast listening would go up as we are spending more time at home. But the fact that it will go down suggests that most of us listen to podcasts while driving to work.  The fact that eMarketer is projecting a rebound for podcast listening by 2022 helps support this thought.

What’s the key takeaway? If you are looking to start a podcast, 2021 could be the right to, as more of us return to offices for work, and the daily drive to and from work becomes a thing again.

 

One of the emerging stories I’ve been following the last couple of years is how the big tech/social media giants are increasingly making questionable moves from a censorship and free speech standpoint. I’ve talked before about how Twitter is confusing many of its users with inconsistent application of content policing, but sites like Facebook and YouTube have made similar moves. The reality is that as long as humans are policing content on social media sites, they need to be able to check their own internal biases toward that content, and apply rules evenly to all users. If they cannot, and a culture of bias is allowed to grow and fester at these companies, that can lead to an environment where users either leave, or worse.  I think we will see all big social media sites have few users in 5 years than they do now.

 

I love this. Burger King will be redesigning its restaurants to create more contactless options for food delivery, but also will be moving the kitchen and dining areas OVER the drive thru lanes! I think this is very innovative, Burger King is betting on the fact that people will continue to want contactless options for food payment and delivery after we move past covid, but they are also factoring in that when we do fully reopen, many will want to get out more, and putting the dining area over the drive thru lanes helps create a unique experience for dine-in customers. This will no doubt improve the mood of customers that dine in, which will also improve the mood of the BK workers.  I love this and I would be surprised if we didn’t see other fast food chains try to copy this design.

 

Hope everyone has a great Labor Day, see y’all tomorrow!