The Shelf Life of Revolutions: Part 3

So having looked at the post-war Price Era and the turn-of-the-millenium Selection Era, we now turn our attention to the current, social media-enabled Service Era.

The birth of the Service Era can now be seen to be more or less inevitable, as both service and retail businesses rushed to bring their wares online once the Selection Era was underway, creating the Long Tail effect (or not) along with a fairly level playing field. By the mid-2000s, a vast selection had become the price of entry for any new business, and so the time was right for a new way for companies to set themselves apart.

Service, which had long been neglected in favor of price and/or selection, was the obvious answer. It was made all the more obvious by the increased attention paid to the pronounced lack of service consumers received in industries ranging from airlines to health care to department stores.

Service, in this era, is defined as much by the overall customer experience, as it is by gracious and accommodating salespeople. So a chain like Starbucks, with its rich aroma of coffee, stylish furniture, soothing music and knowledgeable employees (at least in the early days) was providing a level of service that customers couldn’t get from their local coffee shop. Ditto Whole Foods, where theater-set food displays with seven different varieties of organic salt and full-on gourmet cheese bars introduced consumers to a new level of food buying. Customers felt pampered. They felt valued. They felt like spending way more than they were used to for parity products like apples because they so enjoyed the experience.

It’s important to note here that the dominant new media vehicle of this era, social media, is an adjunct to the Service Era, not the cause of it. Social media fit in nicely with the ethos of the Service Era because, like the pretty music in Starbucks, it makes people feel special. When they can comment on a blog and see their name up there in lights, it makes them feel heard. When a brand representative responds to them on Twitter, they feel even more special. And I’m not saying this to mock people: it’s human nature. If someone in a position of power responds to you in a one to one fashion, you feel important. And in the Service Era, feeling important is important.

Look at Zappos, certainly one of the great success stories of the era (and, full disclosure, an occasional client.) Zappos has a corporate culture based on the ethos that the customer is king. Their ten core values revolve around that simple notion and it’s paid off for them in spades. Like Starbucks and Apple and Whole Foods, Zappos is far from the cheapest option. But in the Service Era, price is no longer the driving factor for purchase decisions and people add a “psychic discount” if you will, to the value of quality service.

Traditional advertising messages (as opposed to traditional advertising mediums) are at their lowest ebb in a Service Era, as their role here is less about delivering news (e.g. Just $49.95!!!) and more about reinforcing what people know from word-of-mouth (both digital and actual) and confirming the value of a superior brand experience.

In plain English that means that when Whole Foods runs a TV commercial, Whole Foods fans are reminded of why they love the store so much and what a special place it is, while those who have yet to experience the legend that is Whole Foods see validation that the misty-eyed ramblings of their friends and family members might actually be on the money. And while I’ve used a TV commercial in this example, a similar scenario plays out when Facebook friends read that “Chris has become a fan of Whole Foods” on their feeds. Marketing in the Service Era is about selling the experience; details are not what's important.

So how does this brand nirvana finally play out? Well, in time, a majority of brands will figure out that offering a superior customer service experience will increase their profit margins. Which means that their superior customer experience won’t be all that superior any more. Because it's only superior if it's better than what their competitors are offering. If everyone's customer service is the same, then that becomes the new floor and no one is special.

That means brands will once again have to figure out a way to set themselves apart. And since higher prices are a by-product of the Service Era, lower prices will be the key to differentiation. Customers, having become inured to the value of good service, will see low price as a an attractive alternative and start flocking to businesses that offer lower prices. This ushering in yet another Price Era and starting the cycle all over again.

The Shelf Life of Revolutions, Part 1
The Shelf Life of Revolutions, Part 2

Must Read: Clay Shirky's "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable"

I had the pleasure of seeing Clay Shirky speak at SXSW and he's just as sharp in person as he is on the page. (He's the author of Here Comes Everybody, the much-discussed book about the effects of web 2.0 on the social order.)

This blog post, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable has been getting a tsunami of buzz and once you read it, you'll understand why.

Once you're finished reading it, I'd ask you to substitute the word "advertising" for "newspapers" and/or "journalism" and see if you don't come to the same conclusion.

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.

One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.

READ THE REST AT CLAY SHIRKY'S BLOG

Experimenting in Public

One of the things I love most about the brave new digital world is the capacity to embrace experiment and failure. It stands in stark contrast to the world of traditional advertising, where any sort of experimentation is anathema and the slightest hint of failure brings out the long knives. (Witness the AIG-esque scorn and anger heaped upon any agency that fails to toe the party line.)

So I was pleased to see Fallon, the Minneapolis ad agency best known for it’s clever early 1990s advertising for small local clients try something new and different. Even if it was more or less a complete failure.

Fallon built something called Skimmer, a “lifestreaming” Adobe Air app that pulls in feeds from various social media sources (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Blogger) and displays them in a single standalone interface.

The idea, as Chris Wiggins, the ex-Zeus Jones CD behind the effort explained to me on Adfreak was “an experiment to see if people would appreciate the type of experience that a creative agency, not a development agency would come up with. I think people tolerate the web 2.0 designed-by-developers experience because there aren't (yet) many alternatives.”

Fair enough, but I felt the lack of developer influence on Skimmer far more than I felt the lack of designer influence on Twhirl or Tweetdeck. Pretty is not the first thing I look for in an app. (Though a combination of the two would be nice.)

And to Wiggins’ and Fallon’s credit, they took on an exceptionally difficult project: FriendFeed (which Skimmer essentially apes) is a tough sell, no matter how much Robert Scoble and Steve Isaacs flog it. Most people are overwhelmed by having that much information. And, as I’ve noted here to much approbation, people tend to have vastly different groups of friends on Facebook and Twitter and many have given up on trying to have them overlap. (e.g. they’ve stopped having Twitter automatically update their Facebook status.) That’s lead to a behavior I’ll refer to as “double-dipping” where significant articles, photos, blog posts and the like are posted in both places, with a different spin for each audience. Skimmer's attempt to recombine everything in one app is swimming against the tide.

But the point I wanted to make here isn’t “nyah, nyah, you failed.” (Even if Skimmer was down most of today.) It’s to salute them for trying. For being open to learning from their mistakes and looking to do better next time out of the gate.

This stuff is all new. And there’s only so much you can learn from reading and listening.

Comes a point, you’ve got to start doing. And Fallon did.

The Value of Friends

Robert Scoble has a much-debated take on the new Facebook where he imagines a shiny, happy world full of people eager to get ads from merchants based on life events they’ve posted (e.g. getting a new puppy? Prepare for an onslaught of ads from pet supply vendors.)

But I’m not sure I agree.

Scoble argues vociferously that most people like being marketed to and like receiving information on something they’re interested in buying. That’s true to a point, especially if it’s unobtrusive, like a catalog. But one of the great things about The Real Digital Revolution is that it’s enabled us to stop relying on marketing messages and rely on peer reviews instead. Advertising is still necessary—we need a way to create an image for the brand, so that when we go to Google, “the safe car” is the one at the top of our list. But once we’re googling, marketing messages are moot: our fellow consumers will tell us everything we need to know.

So while a situation such as the one Scoble describes (he announces, via Facebook, that he is having a baby, he gets deluged by Facebook ads from car companies) is likely, I’m not sure it’s exactly welcome, particularly if the messages are just basic “our brand is great” messages. That’s the sort of advertising people are likely to regard as spam.

On the other hand, a very targeted message that offers Scoble a unique and tangible benefit, should be very well received. Something along the lines of “Congratulations on the new baby Mr. and Mrs. Scoble. Palo Alto Volvo would like to offer you a special Facebook offer of 20% off a lease on the new Volvo XC90.”

An offer like that serves two purposes: if the Scobles were on the fence about Volvo, that 20% off just might just push them over. And, if they’d never considered Volvo, a sweet offer might just get them to google it. Either way, Volvo comes out ahead.

If Zuckerberg et al can figure out a way to get very specific targeted offers to Facebook users-- and marketers uphold their end of the bargain by sending offers consumers might actually want and not just more spam-- he just might have figured out a way to make some money from his database. For while coupons and discount offer may seem unsexy, they do have the distinct advantage of being the sort of marketing communication most people welcome getting, especially for products they currently use. (And if I knew I’d get a $2 off coupon just for writing “washing my clothes with Tide tonight” in my status update– I’d probably do so. Especially if I really like Tide.)

UPDATE: The more I think of this, the less benign it seems. The likelihood of this type of scenario remaining uncluttered is practically nil: all sorts of advertisers will deluge us with all sorts of vaguely related offers (the scattershot theory of advertising still lives) and the result will likely feel like spam. At which point, we'll probably resort to code words and euphemisms to describe our activities, precisely to avoid advertisers.

Different Audiences, Different Perspectives

The print edition of Creativity (Ad Age's sister publication, aimed at the creative end of the ad business, both traditional and digital) has a section called "Creative Briefing" that deals with breaking trends. (I can't find it online, otherwise I'd link to it.)

One of the trends they spot this month is Twitter, citing the increased use by members of Congress (McCain twitters.) "You might say the last month or so has been a big coming out party for Twitter" the story opens

But ask someone involved in digital media when Twitter had its big coming out party and they'll likely tell you that it was at SXSW in 2008.

Different audiences, different perspectives.

Search vs Serendipity: Some Proof

Nick Kristof has a great column in the Times today called "The Daily Me" that lays out much of the research showing how new media options allow people to only see news they agree with. He doesn't offer a solution but lays out the problem in nice detail as some of the commenters here seemed skeptical of the proposition.

Transmedia Critter

Leo Burnett was something of a revolutionary in his day for the way he introduced his “critters” –animated characters who became the personification of certain cereal brands. (e.g. Tony the Tiger for Frosted Flakes.) It was breakthrough for its day because until then most products were sold on their attributes alone: creating a character to represent the brand was something completely different.

I’ve been thinking about how that would likely play out today: Tony wouldn’t just be a commercial spokesman. He’d have his own cartoon show, either online or on a cash-starved network that didn’t mind the blurring of the lines between editorial and advertising. Also available on DVD. There would be toys galore. T-shirts, sheets, Halloween costumes, board games, online games, theme songs… the whole shebang that propels something like Dora the Explorer into a multi-zillion dollar business. All carefully orchestrated and rolled out at once, unlike the original version where toys and tchotchkes were part of random promotional efforts.

Like it or not, he’d be a transmedia critter.

Search vs. Serendipity

One of the more interesting themes I heard at SXSW was the battle between search and serendipity and the ramifications of that for everything from our intellectual curiosity to the ability of new ideas to find an audience.

The battle manifests itself in so much of what we do online. Take reading the newspaper. When we read a physical newspaper, we often find things we weren’t looking for: a picture or a headline catches our eye as we flip through the paper and we wind up learning something new and unexpected.

But the current structure of online newspapers makes that unlikely. We only click through to read those 4 or 5 top headlines our homepage widget deems important along with the articles some self-selected news reader filter has brought us.

And it’s that promise: that technology can ensure we read and find only those things that interest us, that’s at the crux of the problem. Because what that paradigm ultimately does is allow us to limit ourselves to merely reconfirming things we already know. It doesn’t expose us to anything new and more importantly, it doesn’t allow us the serendipity of discovering something we didn’t know we were looking for.

As technology becomes more ubiquitous, this dilemma does too. Amazon recommends books and movies based on what we’ve read or watched. The iTunes Genius feature shows us songs just like the ones we already own. Websites show us headlines from media outlets based on our current interests.

Even something as seemingly innocuous as Facebook Connect only serves to reinforce this dilemma. Countless studies have shown that people tend to hold similar views to their friends and so a stream of recommendations from friends is bound to only give us more of the same.

The solution to search vs. serendipity isn’t an obvious one. Throwing in a “now for something completely different” recommendation is more likely to annoy than to entice: a random outlier is not serendipity. Technology is not yet at a point where it can predict those unexpected items that will appeal to us. And the very act of suggestion takes away the joy of discovery.

Yet at the same time, we want and need the benefits of search. We want to find thing quickly and easily and it would be foolish to pretend that we don't have explicit preferences as to the types of music, books, films, news or even food we prefer or that learning more about these subjects was somehow intellectually lazy.

The solution appears to be in the ability of user experience and design professionals to produce an interface that more closely resembles the literal experience of browsing while allowing us to find what we want when we want it. A "serendipity enabler," if you will. It’s something that community is already hard at work on, and I’ve seen some interesting starts, such as this prototype for The New York Times.

Until then, however, serendipity will have to be the result of a proactive decision.

UPDATE (3/19) - Nicholas Kristof has a great column in the Times today that lays out much of the research behind the "search vs serendipity" claim.