Gorillas, Guns, & Tumors, or Do You Need an Industry Expert?

Occasionally I meet the small business owner who wants to hire an industry expert, or someone who specializes in their industry, to do their marketing.   While I won’t go into all the strongly held positions on both sides here, I heard this program on NPR yesterday that seemed to make a good case for “fresh perspective.” 

The program is called Guns, Tumors And The Limits Of The Human Eye by Alix Spiegel. It is about how human ability to detect certain things (i.e., weapons in luggage and tumor in breast tissue) is decreased over time when the sought-after things are not found frequently.

One of the most eye-opening (pardon the pun) tidbits for me was from Kyle Cave, a cognitive researcher at Amherst University.  The program states “Cave says there's not yet a definitive answer [to whether well-trained, full-time experts in non-lab-environments will miss what they seek often], but he points to a famous research study from the 1970s. In that study, people were trained for weeks on end to look for certain letters in the alphabet among a garble of letters. Eventually, says Cave, they came to be incredibly good at it.”

The pr0gram goes on to explain that it even became hard for those subjects to ignore the letters they were trained to find when they were simply reading.  (Read the full article or listen to NPR’s program for the details.)  Lots of implications here for training and for diversification of work.  For me, if I don’t continuously seek out new interactions and possibilities, I risk providing the same solutions because I am prone to seeing the same problems. Essentially, any client would become Everyclient.  And I don’t want that!

Another consideration: If you’ve ever seen a video where you were told to count the number of times a basketball is passed, only to be asked at the end a strange question about what you saw, you know that focusing on one thing might result in missing something.  (That video was produced by the University of Illinois Visual Cognition Lab.) The same might be said for the industry expert. 

This is the reason I don’t specialize in an industry. I’d rather stay sharp by looking at small businesses individually.  Then, from working with small businesses’ varied challenges, I can leverage solutions from other disciplines to help my marketing clients differentiate and innovate. 

I’m interested in hearing others’ opinions on these matters. Please share your experiences and scientific knowledge or your take on the value of industry expertise.

Will Work for Free

Attention small business owners, entrepreneurs, and startup mavens! If you’re looking for someone to work for you for free, I’m going to tell you who will do it.

And by “work” I don’t mean respond to the occasional and casual marketing- or PR-related question. Nor do I mean provide the free resources for small business that are readily available from a marketing professional’s website (such as my marketing plan tool).

I’m talking WORK, as in bringing to bear their experience to help you solve a specific-to-your-business challenge or fulfill a specialized need. Work is the kind of thing professional marketers and public relations people usually get paid to do.

But, there are 3 types of people who will work for you for free, yet with the same commitment to your success as if backed by financial motivation. (Drumroll, please.) They are:

1. Business partners and co-owners who, like you, believe in the business and will put blood, sweat, savings, and tears into it. They will work the same crazy hours that you do, at the expense of all else, because they are investing in their own success. They can postpone the reaping of any benefits for longer than anyone else you’ll find because they have part ownership (officially, with a contract) in what will be very lucrative in the future. You don’t need to sell them on doing the work for free; they are right by your side. If you don’t have one of these, you are missing out on getting a lot of work done for free and should try to find one, particularly someone with complementary skills to yours. If you work in a larger office environment, perhaps without the authority to bring on a business partner, you’ll want to see #2 and #3 below. (Note: For the right opportunity with the right ownership split, I might leave my cushy, independent professional lifestyle as owner of my own marketing firm to be your business partner.)
2. Humanitarians and volunteers. When you serve the public and the greater good, you can find volunteers who, like you, believe in the cause and will put blood, sweat, donations, and tears into it. (This next part may sound familiar.) They will work the same crazy hours that you do, at the expense of all else, because they value the organization and believe they can make a difference. They can postpone the reaping of any benefits for longer than anyone else (and sometimes never require anything in return). This is because they have commitment, drive, hearts of gold, and sometimes, other jobs or independent wealth and lots of time. In some cases, when they don’t have other jobs or means of income, the community or family members may take care of them instead (as in on a kibbutz). If you simply change your business model, you will improve your chances of getting work done for free. (Exception: If you are a nonprofit, you can and should find companies like those small businesses being addressed herein to give you stuff and work for you for free instead. Here’s one opportunity to get you started.)
3. Suckers. There’s one born every minute so you do have a good chance of finding one. The downside is, with the time and energy you might waste trying to find a sucker and convince them to work for you for free, you could have paid for real results. Which might beg the question, Who’s the sucker now?
   
   I was a sucker before. I worked for free because I genuinely like helping people. Now I know that sometimes potential clients knowingly attempt to maneuver getting work for free and sometimes people do it unawares.
   
   I understand the need to get things done economically when you’re starting out. When that’s the case, small business owners and entrepreneurs really do need to have a budget that makes sense for the kind of results they expect to achieve. These are tough decisions but in many cases, a business only has one chance to make the first impression that will set the stage for their brand. It seems like an important investment to me.

P.S. This is probably the most irreverent post I’ve ever written, but I’m contemplating a brand shift to “the nicest rebel.” Did that come across? Did I go too far? Other comments and perspectives?

A Client's Pricing Issues

I just saw a very funny--or is it sad?--YouTube video on how client pricing issues would get played out in real-world scenarios. My apologies in advance to those clients who understand the difference between a taco-stand taco and a filet mignon vs. those who believe they are paying for beef.

It should be said, these issues are more likely to happen with large agencies and when clients are unfamiliar with pricing structures, have not been educated appropriately about the services they are buying, or in general lack the experience or humility to succinctly acknowledge differences in expectations. This can be exacerbated when a marketing firm is too busy to develop the relationship or believes the account is too small to act as a trusted advisor.

It would be interesting to see the client-side version of this video.

See for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2a8TRSgzZY