The Organ Grinder’s Monkey

The Creative “FAIL Your Way to a Win” Business Model:

Sell Crippled Hardware and Shut Down Anyone Who Tries to Make It Work Right

Profit!!!

Well, I’m sure it sounded like a good idea at the time…

Don’t know how many non-geeks are aware of the flaming ball of suck that has become hardware producer Creative’s response to a user-created hack, but it’s worth paying attention to.

To make a long story short, Creative produces the popular Sound Blaster soundcard. Which is great, except that there are some functionality issues in Vista and just in general that the users aren’t thrilled with. To be blunt, the sound cards are crippleware, meaning that their functionality is intentionally dehanced (lovely neologism, that) by the company in order to…well, I have no idea why, personally, since I’m not a hardware geek. But I’m guessing it’s either to sell more of a different hardware or upgrade, or as a butt-kiss to someone like Microsoft or the RIAA, as such companies have an unsettling tendency to get hardware makers to hobble their goods so as not to give the end user Too Much Freedom To Do With Their Purchased Goods As They Wish. (Can’t have the peasants getting it all their way, now can we?)

It’s like buying a car that won’t make left turns, because the car manufacturer has a deal with a soft drink company who’s slogan is “The ‘Right Way’ to Refresh,” or they have another line selling GPS units and want you to buy them in order to generate right-turn-only paths to your destinations. I.e. your car has the capacity to make left turns, but the company has interfered with the steering so that it won’t. But it’s your car…surely once you own it, you should be able to go in and remove that “fix” or have it removed for you. Right? Wrong…

Along comes Daniel_K, a modder (geek speak for someone who creates “mods,” or modifications). Daniel_K mods custom drivers for people who have bought the crippled hardware. These drivers give you the ability to actually use your Creative soundcard to do essential soundcardy things, functionality that the soundcard is already capable of but that has been hobbled in-store. In short, he makes downloadable “left-turn-enabling” patches.

Yay!!! The customers are thrilled. Now they can buy these really nice soundcards and still get the functionality they require for whatever applications they’re doing. So they buy more soundcards. The customers get functionality, the company gets sales, everybody’s happy, right? Wrong…

Here is Creative’s response to Daniel_K, basically a cease and desist letter whose content boils down to, “Quit making our stuff work, dammit. We farked it for a reason, and now you’re stealing from us by giving our customers the right to do what they want with the stuff they bought.”

This was posted in Creative’s own support/user forums. It was the equivalent of dumping flaming gasoline on a beehive. Welcome to the world of the Internet swarm. Enraged geeks from all over the place have been breaking their soundboards and posting pics, calling for boycotts, including setting up a site named BoycottCreative.com, spreading the word through top-listed sites like Digg and Reddit and just basically rampaging around loudly in forums and other outlets ‘net-wide. The Creative forum itself is full of thread titles like, “Recommend me a NON Creative sound card”, “Creative Boycott,” “FAIL” and just plain old “Bye.” (Or, at least, these posts are there right now, and haven’t been removed as of this writing.) There’s even a rather ominous thread titled “Class Action Filing.” That can’t be good.

To sum up, Creative got greedy and stupid. They decided it was better to sell crippled hardware to geeks whose sole purpose in life is to tweak their stuff for maximum power and functionality, and then attempt to tightly control what users could do with it (and thereby make more money through some corporate sleight of hand). And when someone came along and gave their customers what they actually wanted (i.e. the ability to use their soundcards to their fullest capacity), instead of saying, “Hey, great, thanks for fixing that - now our customers will be thrilled to buy even more of our stuff,” Creative shut them down, publicly and with clear statements to the effect that their priority was making money, not providing functional sound cards.

End result? It’s a reasonable possibility that Creative will suffer enough of a financial and PR setback to deal them a critical, or even possibly fatal, blow. The original cease-and-desist only went public two days ago, and already some retailers are suspending sales of Creative products due to the high rate of returns. Geeks around the world are boycotting, breaking and busting on Creative loudly and publicly.

In just a few days, Creative went from merely a clueless company producing good quality products that required some tweaking to really work well, to pure, unadulterated, kitten-punching evil bastards who have been caught publicly monologuing their evil plans at the battle-bloodied and bound-and-gagged hero (Daniel_K) who was trying to free the princess and save the day.

As they used to say back in the day, “Smooth move, Ex-lax.”

Moral of the story: DO NOT PISS IN YOUR OWN WELL.

Don’t try to sucker your core customers by selling them junk and pretending it’s a business model. Give them what they want, not what you want to give them. Don’t try to cripple what you sell in the hopes of selling more stuff to make up for what isn’t working (or by bowing to outside commercial influences) and then get mad when someone creates a work-around to your craptastic fail. You should be hiring those people, not trying to bury them.

And if you do fail to heed this warning, you’d better hope like hell you have a really good Plan B, such as a hefty retirement fund. Because you can’t unkill the Golden Goose, and your customers will be winging those golden eggs right back at your head with a vengeance when they find out what you’ve done.

Tags: Bad Monkey! Business and Marketing Craptacularity, Customers, Ethics and Business, Society and Culture by Soni Pitts
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My current favorite author, John Scalzi (of whom I am an obsessive fan, if not yet financially a True Fan), has a thoughtful and well-reasoned argument against Kevin Kelly’s 1000 True Fans concept that I wrote about last week.

The Problem With 1,000 True Fans

…it’s not impossible to get 1,000 “true fans.” It can be done. The problem is that Kevin Kelly, in his enthusiasm, wants to make it seem that getting 1,000 people to give you $100 is no great trick. What I am telling you is that it actually is — it’s a pretty damn neat trick, in point of fact. Even if you manage it, the financial reward is not likely to be anything close to what you had hoped for, nor will it likely be as permanent as Kelly seems to imply.

John’s an exceptionally smart and well-educated man with a very popular blog (30,000-40,000 hits a day), several earned-out novels (meaning, they’ve sold well enough to pay out the advance and earn him royalties, which is the novelists’ holy grail), several current and past paying gigs for media corps like AOL and the Chicago Sun-Times and has a backlist of fiction, non-fiction and commercial work that takes up a respectable chunk of a webpage to list. In short, he knows whereof he speaks, and I always find it instructive and entertaining to pay attention when he does.

If you read 1000 True Fans and are considering that approach to making a living, it’s only smart to give the Devil’s Advocate at least as much attention - if only to make sure you’re armed with all the enemy intelligence you need to plan your ambushes. And John’s a smart a DA as you’re likely to find out there.

Oh, and don’t skip the comments section. John’s readership is every bit as whip-smart and well-spoken as he is, so at least half the shiny of any post he puts up sits below the comments cut (which is saying a lot, considering his posts are usually quite shiny enough all by themselves).

Tags: Business, Conversation Economy, Customers, Society and Culture by Soni Pitts
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Since a not-insignificant portion of my peeps and potential clients are organ grinders of the artistic sort, I thought I’s pass along Kevin Kelly’s thought-provoking article on making a living as an artist in the 21st century, 1000 True Fans.

According to Kelly,

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

[snip]

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

Kelly’s formula is at once breathtakingly simple and yet compellingly feasible:

First, create 1000 True Fans. According to Kelly, this involves finding and converting 1000 regular fans to True Fans by connecting with them personally and directly, which is an imminently rational goal and one that any artist worth their salt should be able to do, given access to such basic resources as an Internet connection, some basic marketing smarts and a salable product or service.

Second, Kelly estimates that a True Fan will spend an average of one day’s income per year on a favorite artist, although of course some will spend more and others less. For easy math, he rounds this sum out to $100 per True Fan. At this rate (which is, you have to admit, an entirely realistic reflection of what many of us spend on our own favorite artists in a year’s time) 1000 True Fans + $100/year = $100,000.00 per year gross, a nifty living by any artist’s standards.

The key, he points out, rests on that personal contact. You’ll need to nurture, connect with and personally involve these True Fans. Of course, for the average artist, this isn’t a problem. You want to reach out and touch people personally and profoundly. You want to enter into a conversation with them and hear their responses to your work. You want to learn about them and geek out over mutual interests and so on. That connection is a vital part of what makes your art worth doing. It’s fun. And it’s one of the reasons why you sing/paint/play/film/photograph in the first place. (For those who don’t, however, he suggests that an intermediary or manager can handle this task perfectly well.)

Obviously, as Kelly himself points out, the requirement of 1000 True Fans applies best to the solo artist. Bands, comedy troupes, painter’s collectives and other groups would have to increase their effort to achieve enough True Fans per member to scale the formula. But nonetheless, it does scale relatively easily. Also, the number of fans varies depending on the type of media, price of the work, costs and so on, although not by so much that it upsets the formula in very many cases. Finally, Kelly notes that this formula only applies when the fan support is direct (people go to your site and buy a download) rather than indirect (people buy your book or click on a blog ad, which spreads the money out over a wide variety of middlemen). Indirect income means you’ll need far more True Fans to support you in a reasonable manner.

There are several interesting case studies mentioned in the article, including an author that funded his novel through direction donations and a musician who is paying for the production costs of her next CD through a truly creative, tiered level of direct support ranging from…

…$10 “unpolished rock,” which earns them a free digital download of her disc when it’s made, to the $10,000 “weapons-grade plutonium level,” where she promises “you get to come and sing on my CD. Don’t worry if you can’t sing - we can fix that on our end.

Wrapping up, Kelly has this to say:

The usual alternative to making a living based on True Fans is poverty…I am suggesting there is a home for creatives in between poverty and stardom. Somewhere lower than stratospheric bestsellerdom, but higher than the obscurity of the long tail. I don’t know the actual true number, but I think a dedicated artist could cultivate 1,000 True Fans, and by their direct support using new technology, make an honest living.

Sounds like a plan to me.

Tags: Advertising and Marketing, Business, Conversation Economy, Customers, Social Media by Soni Pitts
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In the comments section of yesterday’s post on making love, not war, with your customers, reader Dina writes:

I think this is a complete misinterpretation of the old cliche. I’m pretty sure that whoever out there is calling business “war” is referring to the competition and not the customer.

In my reply, I said:

A decade or so ago, I would have agreed with you. These days, though….well, apparently you haven’t seen some of the marketing training literature I have. A lot of it does act as if the customer (or prospect) is, if not the enemy, then something akin to prey.

Based on this exchange, I thought I’d expand on this a little today to illustrate what I mean. (Yes, I do have lots of work to do - I’m using this as a brain warm-up)

Although there was, and undoubtedly still is, a blood-tinged atmosphere of war between competitors in the world of business, these days that war is spilling over from the competition front and on to the customer front. But it didn’t used to be that way.

The main reason for this is that back when we (the customers) were all behaving like good sheeple and tuning in to watch tv or listen to the radio like we were told to, there was no need for warlike tactics. We were a captive audience; if we wanted to be entertained or informed, there was nowhere for us to go. We had to watch their commercials and listen to their spin, or go without.

Things have changed.

These days, it’s every man, woman and child quite literally for themselves. You can build personalized, eternal music playlists, rent all your movies, watch entertaining video shows and read up on the news all day long and never see or hear one single ad or commercial, if you so choose. Oh, sure, a few businesses are still trying, putting up banner ads and inserting text-link hovers like commercial landmines in a field of information. But a few simple ad-blocking plugins usually suffices to render all that expensive advertising completely invisible. At the same time, the field of competition has gone from just those who can afford the cover charge of big business to anyone who can set up a point-and-click website. And these changes are creating an unsustainable starvation ecosystem for those on the business end of things.

The end result is that these days, the customer isn’t a sheep to be led, they’re prey to be hunted. As such, tactics have changed.

And the language of the copywriting, advertising and marketing information I’ve seen reflects this change. I tend to avoid the worst of it, but it’s not unusual to see copy like, “how to manipulate customers” and “shooting fish in a barrel.” They talk about using holidays to “break down a customer’s barriers to sales,” and about hitting customers with up-sell promotions when they’re “vulnerable” to buying more. There’s even a software product called Marketing War Room, for crying out loud.

Also, it’s no secret that corporations have big, expensive lobbies to make sure legislation stays on their side. But what most people know (but don’t really think about) is how much of that is spent battling offenses by the very customers these companies “serve.” Whether they’re protecting themselves from being legislated out of using tainted or sub-quality meat, false advertising or deceptive business practices (has anyone ever signed up for a cell phone service and actually gotten the price on the poster, or been able to cancel a subscription service without being sent on a months-long runaround?), businesses are making it clear that while they are indeed still fighting a war with competitors, their opposites aren’t the only enemies on the playing field. Anyone who can negatively impact the bottom line is on their shit list. And that includes their own customers.

And then there’s the ubiquitous phrase, “targeting prospective buyers/customers/the market.” I don’t know about you, but I have never “targeted” someone I loved for any reason. I may focus on them, pay attention to them, look at them, listen to them, think about them and try to figure out ways to make them happy. But I don’t target them. That’s what you do to prey, or other stuff you intend to shoot.

This change is also the origin of web tricks like using onLoad and setTimeout calls that prevent a user from leaving your page by hitting the back button (hitting the back button just reloads the page they’re on). I know I’ve fallen afoul of this annoying practice, and no doubt so have you. It’s also the reason for the innumerable popups, popovers, popunders, floating pop-windows and many other pops designed to make your life hell if you don’t pay attention to what I, the site owner, want you to pay attention to. No deluded site owner is saying to himself, “I bet my customers just loooove popups. Let’s add a few!” No, the conversation is more like, “How can I force them to see this ad?” and, “How can I hold them hostage long enough to squeeze an email address out of them?” And sites that sell these devises or tricks don’t promote the positive reaction of customers. They tout their “unblockable” code and “unavoidable” visibility.

And if you think the “attacks” on customers are solely relegated to web hacks, legislation and annoying advertising, you’re sadly mistaken. They don’t just want control of your wallet, they want control of your mind. Marketing and advertising firms pour millions (it’s probably billions, by now) into psychological and neurobiological research (called neuromarketing) in a quest to track down the marketer’s Holy Grail - the Buy Button. This so-far theoretical “buy button” is a response in the brain so strong and so deeply embedded that we won’t be physically able to resist saying “yes” (most neuromarketing research in this arena is now focusing on the science of addiction, a potent and promising field). The hope is that if the scientists can find it, all advertisers will have to do is poke the button and we’ll buy whatever they put in front of us. It’s a serious enough subject that in 2003, a watchdog group called Commercial Alert actually sent a letter to Emory University pleading with it to halt neuromarketing research, calling it unethical and claiming that it promotes human misery and suffering.

So far, though, researchers haven’t been able to find a specific buy button, although they have found a “don’t buy” button, at least for impulse purchases. This is useful knowledge as well, since it tells advertisers what to avoid. But they are uncovering more and more about how our brain works and the results they have uncovered are continually being tailored for and used by advertisers and marketers, not to gain insight into the human mind so they can better serve customers or create better products, but so they can develop better and better ways of manipulating our responses and thoughts, with or without our awareness or permission.

And I don’t know about you, but that sounds a lot more like psyops (military psychological operations) than love to me.

Tags: Advertising and Marketing, Business, Copywriting, Customers, Ethics and Business by Soni Pitts
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Came across this quote in one of my newsletters today:

Many marketing experts like to compare business to war.

I don’t like the martial metaphor, because it views the customer as the enemy – as someone to be tricked or bullied into submission. As a short-term strategy, this can sometimes seem to make sense. And the direct-response universe abounds in promotional copy that badgers, beats, or bullshits the customer into making a purchase. Smart marketers and copywriters avoid this sort of approach, because they know that, in the long run, it is destructive and self-defeating.

Business should not be like war. It should be like love. And not a steamy, one-night-stand kind of love, but a mutually beneficial, steadily improving romance that lasts a lifetime.

- Michael Masterson

Yes, exactly. Get this, and a lot of other things will suddenly become a lot easier and clearer in your business life.

From AWAI’s The Golden Thread Newsletter, Issue 315

Tags: Advertising and Marketing, Copywriting, Customers, Ethics and Business by Soni Pitts
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“Don’t be a dick” is the tagline for Wil Wheaton’s blog, which I read fanatically (that is, I am a rabid fan of Wil’s and pay attention to his stuff accordingly). I love the simplicity of that statement. It’s clear, it’s concise and it’s straightforward.

And most of us agree - we don’t want to be dicks and we don’t like dealing with dicks. We get it. And in our day-to-day lives, most of us manage to follow this advice most of the time. Until, that is, we step through our office doors.

Then, for whatever reason, we tend to turn into dicks whether we realize it or not. We send out sales pitches to our customers that under the pretense of touching base from one friend to another. We try to figure out how we can squeeze an extra buck or two out of a sales interaction without pausing to think whether or not we’re actually giving value for that extra money. We blatantly pimp affiliate products not because we believe in them or because we think they work, but because we went shopping on an affiliate source site for stuff in our niche with the highest payout per sale. We offer tele-seminars that are 95% pitch and 5% not-quite-useful information. And so on.

Why do we do this? Because we believe that that’s what works. We’ve been told by marketing and business specialists that every conversation with a customer or prospect has to include a “call to action,” that we must use upsells and cross-sales at every sales point, and that we should couch our sales pitches in the form of friendly emails (and that sounds like good advice - it’s telling us not to be sales drones when we contact people - until we stop to think of it from the other end, which is that maybe a real email from a real friend wouldn’t include any pitch at all). We’ve read business books that teach us how to maximize our profits and minimize our effort. We’ve listened to seminars, enlisted in programs and so on that fill our minds with high-powered business boosting techniques and strategies.

And for the most part, this is good info. But when we get out into the real world, we do it wrong.

We forget that this raw information has to be adapted to our situation. We forget that our clients are people, just like us, and not merely ambulatory wallets upon which to exercise our new-found skills. And we keep score by tallying the income we earned, rather than the number of people we helped.

The trigger for this post was an article by Clayton Makepeace called The Triumph of Hope Over Experience. In it, he writes:

Companies that are experiencing declining results in the mail now appear to be eager to repeat those failures online.

They attract new subscribers by offering a “free report” in paid ads and PPC (pay-per-click) efforts. Then, once they’ve captured their prospects’ e-mail addresses, they direct them to a high-hype landing page.

At their very first contact with a new subscriber, these companies prove that they’re not to be trusted.

RESULT: Conversion rates stink.

But what if, instead, they offered a free report and then actually delivered a report and not a pitch?

I agree with Clayton. Conversion matters, but in the end aiming at conversion at the expense of humanity fails on both accounts. Conversion goes into a fatal downward spiral, and takes our humanity (and our view of our customer’s humanity) with it.

My advice is simple: Listen to Wil and don’t be a dick. Everything else follows from that.

Tags: Customers, Ethics and Business by Soni Pitts
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Ah, the forgotten customer. You know, the folks on your list you haven’t connected with in so long it makes you cringe when you think about emailing them now - that is, if you’ve ever spoke to them at all, after they bought your product or service.

You were an idiot. Maybe you didn’t have a good system in place to stay in touch when they bought your product. Maybe you don’t even have one now. Maybe you just got caught up in the day to day rush of doing business and making sales and forgot. So all these perfectly nice customers wound up getting shoved off into a dark corner somewhere, where you would occasionally stumble over them and remind yourself that you really do need to do something about that, before hurrying back off to whatever it was you were doing.

Now you’re embarrassed. You’re ashamed. You don’t know how to even begin reconnecting after all this time. And yet, these people are your customers. They deserve your attention. And you really should, you know, do something about that.

Sean D’Souza recently sent out a brilliant how-to piece about reconnecting with people on your list who you may have lost touch with - or never even touched base with in the first place - without going crazy. He even includes a helpful contact letter template you can use, if you can’t think of what to say on you’re own. (And no, you can’t use, “It’s not you, it’s me.” That is sooooo 1990s.)

I worked with a bed company that had 3500 customers that they hadn’t contacted in over 10 years (talk about a loooooooooooong time). All we did was put the customer database together. We sent out letters to each and every customer with a discount voucher.

And guess what?

In the next month, customers who hadn’t been to the store for nearly a decade, walked in and bought products from sheets to beds. Needless to say, the bed company was hitting themselves on the wall, for not doing this mail out earlier.

Tags: Customers by Soni Pitts
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