March 4, 2019 · 11:53 am

Timed Out

I’m exhausted and I bet you are too. It seems as if there is just too many things screaming for my attention and it makes my brain hurt. More importantly, I and many others have maxed out on our ability to spend time with various things. This is important and has ramifications across many businesses, including maybe yours.

There are only 24 hours in a day. While many of us would like to follow the old Warren Zevon line about “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” (he is, by the way), we do need sleep and that cuts into those 24 hours. But the rest of the day is one demand for our attention after another. In fact, many businesses are built entirely around their ability to grab and hold our attention. Any advertising-based business certainly is. So are many subscription businesses such as Netflix or HBO. Video game studios need to hold us to justify the $50 price tag.

So what happens when we all are maxed out and have no more attention to give? It then becomes a land grab for share. We can’t make more “attention hours” during the day. This is from a media research firm called Midia:

Engagement has declined throughout the sector, suggesting that the attention economy has peaked. Consumers simply do not have any more free time to allocate to new attention seeking digital entertainment propositions, which means they have to start prioritizing between them.

They’re writing specifically about video games but it really applies across the spectrum of attention-based businesses. Attention does not scale. There is only so much time in the day and only so many ads one can see much less pay attention to. Yet ads are everywhere and that’s why they’re becoming less and less effective. We’re ad blind because it’s all noise. 99.5%+ of people don’t respond to banner ads and I’m willing to bet that some of those who do click do so by mistake.

So let’s start the week by asking ourselves how we get beyond the attention economy. Better service does. Better products too. Fortnight has by being a great experience that’s free. It’s not just a game – it’s become like the old virtual worlds we thought would be big back in the 1990s. E-sports are taking away from real sports, maybe because anyone can dunk in virtual basketball. We often see more fans watching people play videogames in person than we do attending real games. How are they winning the time-suck game?

Thanks for giving me some of your attention today. Who else is earning it and why? More importantly, how can your business do the same?

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March 1, 2019 · 1:38 pm

The Mysteries Of Food

It’s Foodie Friday and today I’d like us to consider some of the things about food that I, for one, find mysterious. As usual, there’s a business point we can take away from these questions as well.

Let’s start with an easy one. What are the different flavors of Froot Loops? Purple in food tends to imply grape and yellow, at least in cereal, makes me think banana. Well, as it turns out, there is exactly ONE flavor and it’s neither strawberry red or blueberry blue. Why do the loops taste different to some folks? It’s a mystery.

Why are French Fries called that? No one knows, exactly, although there are a few theories. They’re “frites” in France and “chips” in Britain. The History Channel attempted to get to the bottom of the question but came up without a definitive answer, just theories.

Why are deviled eggs called that? I know that “devilling” originally meant making it spicy or searing it over high heat. What changed in the interim? Why is steer meat “beef” and pig meat “pork” but chicken is…well…chicken? Why are the holes in Swiss Cheese disappearing?

I could go on but I’m trying to show you that even the most basic things that we take for granted can raise questions, and those questions often don’t have definite answers. We find that all the time on business but we have to be willing to ask the questions first. One of the most formidable business weapons is an inquiring mind. A mind of that sort which is open to having their assumptions rebutted is an even greater tool. This happens in science all the time and that’s where many great discoveries are made as knowledge grows based on questioning the world around us.

You might not know what’s in surimi (it’s fish, not crab) but you can enjoy it just the same. Still, you might ask why “Krab” or “Froot Loops” or “Cheeze Whiz” are spelled that way. That first question leads to many others (not the least of which is do I really want to eat this). We need to constantly question thing in business too, don’t you think?

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February 27, 2019 · 1:14 pm

The Root Of The Problem

I bought tickets to see Bob Seger last week. The concert is still a few months away but I’m a fan of his music and this might be the last time he tours. One of my favorite Bob Seger songs is “Feel Like A Number.” It was written in 1978 and yet it is incredibly prescient about how things are today.

What prompted that thought is this statement from a piece of research issued by the CMO Council:

One issue plaguing many organizations is a sense that in the race to master data and harness the power of the marketing technology stack, the customer, and perhaps an understanding of human relationships, has been lost. In fact, 41 percent of respondents admit that focusing on the relationship being built instead of the campaign being deployed, has been a key challenge. Nearly one-third admit that they sometimes forget that their “targets” are human beings.

It’s part of a study called Bringing a Human Voice to Customer Choice. It really should be called “The Root Of The Problem” since it strikes me that forgetting we’re dealing with humans is really the primary cause of so many issues businesses have. They’re customers, not accounts. They’re not phone calls to be cleared as quickly as possible but consumers with a problem that needs to be solved. They’re not employees, they’re co-workers and humans who go home to their families each night just as you do.

Business is all about data today but when was the last time you had a relationship with a database? It’s easy to be seduced by data but it’s also easy to miss the nuances that focusing on individuals can yield. Do you really understand what problem people are trying to solve by using your product or service or are you relying on “the numbers” to show you something that number can’t really show?

Sing Seger’s couplet to yourself every once in a while:

I’m not a number
Dammit I’m a man

It’s an important reminder and gets to the root of the problem, don’t you think?

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