by Chris Brogan
Now, earlier we talked about how Burger King failed miserably with its own expansion ideas, and one of these was table service, a bad idea because it adds time. McDonald’s knew that having a pure café experience with the kinds of drinks that involve drizzling caramel over frothed cream would add some time to an order. It worked its operational magic to reduce time delay as much as possible. Also, because buyers were quite aware of café time versus fast-food time based on their existing buying habits at a Starbucks, they didn’t blink at this context shift.
This is tricky. McDonald’s used Contrast to extrapolate its existing product line by building a café experience and selling premium drinks to the tune of a hundred million dollars in the first year of operation. And yet it used Echo (see chapter 7) to help customers realize that this wasn’t that different from other café experiences they’d had elsewhere.
CONTRAST: HOW TO IMPROVE
1. Judge the value proposition(s) of the space you are playing in. Consider the blogs you compete against or the products that are above and below you in sales or price. What are they doing for their clients? What offerings define the space?
2. Pan out. Is your value information or emotion? Is it entertainment or education? Pan out to ten thousand feet and ask yourself whether you’re really in the lug-nut business. But don’t go so high up that you begin to see yourself as a “business solutions” company, unless you’re IBM or something. At which point you may not need this book.
3. Where must you compete, and what is critical in this space in order to maintain position? If you lost an entire arm of your products, would you go bankrupt? Whatever offers are critical to your space must stay or, at the very minimum, must be identified.
4. What can be diminished? You panned out; now do the opposite. Focus on each value. What really matters to the audience you are targeting? Do they really care about a given product, or is it a vestigial part of your business? Has your business moved beyond it? What if it were forced to? What’s the worst that could happen? Consider this with each product you offer.
5. What can be eliminated? It’s time to make hard decisions. The values you serve up are not equal to all of your customers, and for some they don’t even matter. Is a circus without animals still a circus? Cirque du Soleil (and others) think so. In fact, they remove animals and more people want to attend. They can drive ticket prices up by closing in on what really matters to their clients.
Of course, none of this can happen unless you are serious about Contrast. Anyone can differentiate themselves through any offering they have or anything they refuse to offer that their competitors do without thinking.
In other words, what you are creating and what you are competing on is really up to you. You decide what business you’re in, how you’re going to make a living, and where your profits will come from. It’s a strange thought, but it’s true. You decide, and you can change anytime you want.
IMPACT EXAMPLE: SKYLANDERS FROM ACTIVISION
A video game where each player can assume the role of one of several mythical characters, each with different powers and abilities, isn’t really all that new. Collectible toy figures aren’t a new experience. Collectible toy figures that have some kind of online component aren’t all that new either.
Blending them together is evidently magical.
Skylanders, from Activision, is at once a multiplayer video-game experience and a real-world toy-collecting game. The toys become your character in the game. Each toy represents a certain character but contains all kinds of onboard information that makes the player’s instance of that toy unique. Thus, if Julien takes his Chop Chop character from his house to Chris’s house to play a game, Julien’s Chop Chop will have different levels and attributes and special powers than Chris’s, due to choices made in the game.
Kids and adults alike are calling stores, waiting in long lines, and generally going nuts looking for unique and rare toys for the game system. Retailer Toys “R” Us says that it hasn’t seen this kind of passion for a collectible since the 1990s craze around Tamagotchi characters (those little pets in virtual eggs, if you don’t recall).
But does Skylanders have the traits required to prove the Impact Equation?
Contrast: Skylanders stands out because the online component of the game is very robust and the toys are very special. In most cases, one of those two items is just the backdrop for the main attraction. This lets the game stand out, as does the fact that your character’s experiences are stored in the actual toy, so you can port your play skills and tools to another person’s game platform, which is a new paradigm.
Reach: Because this is a video game plus a physical toy, it’s difficult to get distribution, and yet it most definitely has a lot of play. Target, Walmart, Toys “R” Us, and many other retailers carry the toys, so they’re certainly seeing a lot of attention. Though there’s no media property yet, we can envision a cartoon based on the characters cropping up quickly.
Exposure: Frito-Lay signed a deal to feature Skylanders characters on specially marked versions of its products. This kind of Exposure will most certainly push the product out beyond the boundaries of its existing audience and will earn it more attention. Obviously, it benefits Frito-Lay to have this association as well, and the branding match of a snack with a video-game system seems made in heaven.
Articulation: Skylanders is a collaborative fantasy video-game world where your characters are also physical real-world toys that stand as representations of the figures. It’s a fairly simple story, and it’s not that hard to explain to someone else.
Trust: There’s not much with regard to Trust here. Perhaps if Skylanders finds itself in some kind of “hoarding the characters” scandal, or if it makes future versions less compatible with the existing system, there might be some issues, but at the time of this writing, it is at least Trust neutral.
Echo: Players of the game identify with their characters because of the effort they put into improving their skills, tools, and abilities. Chris’s daughter, Violette, prefers to use her “Stealth Elf” character above all others, even if another character might be the better fit for a certain challenge. This feels like a powerful Echo.
Skylanders is interesting because the video-game world is a very high-money industry, and creating something truly unique is rare. With Skylanders, it feels like Activision chose to go after a non-video-gamer core market and instead went after collectors and the kinds of people who like Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. Early signs indicate that this is a very successful experience, and we suspect Skylanders has a few more iterative tricks to keep it alive for three more years at the very least.
3 Articulation
Years ago, Chris was sitting in a very uncomfortable kid’s desk chair at a satellite location of a small New England college. A man with meticulously combed hair and a nice suit walked in, put his briefcase down, put his feet up on the desk, laced his hands behind his head, and went into a speech, the details of which Chris can remember almost entirely, verbatim, over a decade later.
Kenneth Hadge taught more solid and actionable ideas about business than Chris had ever learned before. Honestly, the only person who rivals Hadge in the usefulness of his ideas is Sir Richard Branson with his masterful book Business Stripped Bare. This instructor, underpaid and representing a very small college with a roomful of not-so-obvious future business leaders, had many great ideas. All of them were simple to remember, useful, and actionable. Here is why Chris remembers this so many years later. Here’s a Ken Hadge lesson.
“When someone comes into my office and starts telling me about paradigm-shifting, world-class whatever, I hold up one hand, wait for them to stop talking, and I say, ‘Tell it to me like I’m six years old.’”
This is the Ken Hadge method, forever named in this book in tribute. “Tell it to me like I’m six years old.”
In the quest for impact, one area that baffles people is thinking that big words equal being understood. Quite often, the opposite is true.
If someone trips over your incredible vocabulary, they are not thinking about the idea you’ve put forth. Instead, they’re worried that they don’t know the word you used, and they’re worried you’ll think they’re stupid for not knowing it. Even if you yourself had to double-check the word in the dictionary before using it, it’s going to sit there like an obvious adornment on an otherwise simple effort.
Use small words. Use many if you have to (though fewer is better). This is the method. This is how people connect with your ideas and learn to make them their own. To have impact, a simple phrase, especially one that contrasts against people’s expectations, is better.
Nike said, “Just do it.” It didn’t say, “Execute and energize your peak performance.” Can you imagine that as their slogan? And yet many a corporation uses such words.
Does Simplicity Play to the Lowest Common Denominator?
If I talk to the stupidest person in the room, am I risking the rest of the audience? Using small words doesn’t attract small minds. Small words are a way to seed ideas in anyone’s mind without creating unnecessary barriers.
The truth is this: Your choice of words and your choice of description aren’t the secret sauce of the idea. They are the wind that carries the paper airplane to its destination. Your words must serve the idea. That’s all.
In researching this part of the book, we thought we’d go find a pithy sentence from an actual six-year-old and point out that it’s obviously well said. That would really have summed up our point. What we found, instead, was interesting. There are many Web sites and many jokes and many hours spent trying to cast children saying something innocently for the sake of a joke. In each of these cases, the child is portrayed as a simpleton and not the creative mind he or she truly is.
That perception, written repeatedly into jokes, may be an even better illustrator of the fear that “Tell it to me like I’m six years old” will lead people to think simple thoughts. So let’s go about this another way.
Exercise: Use Small Words
Take a moment and write answers to the following exercises, using no more than twenty words of no more than two syllables. Try it. Seriously. Don’t just skip the section and keep reading. Anyone could do that.
Describe what you do for work. Describe what your company does.
Describe the movie The Matrix.
If we gave you five million dollars, what would you do with it?
What is your personal philosophy?
What do you want most in a new hire or colleague?
It’s tricky, isn’t it? The urge to use large words or complicated explanations is worth policing. If you can’t say something simply, what are the odds that someone else will understand it any better?
Keep Your Ears and Thoughts Open for
Moments of Small Words and Large Ideas
Examples of and coaching on how to better articulate your ideas are all around you.
While writing this part, Chris went away to a yoga retreat. His instructor, Rolf Gates (who is also a kind of Ken Hadge), explained a complex philosophical and psychological term, asmita, as the “mind made me.” The premise has something to do with how your ego builds all kinds of prisons for you. For instance, your belief that you will never get out of debt is a prison you created for yourself. There’s obviously no real reason why this should be true. But think of that simple phrase: “mind made me.” I am the “me” that my mind has created, and once I accept this, the premise goes, I should be able to step outside that perspective and learn more.
Now take that concept, built off those three words (all one syllable, by the way), and try explaining that to your kid. Talk about what it means to be self-censoring in language a kid would understand. Practice this.
The more you learn how to express yourself using the Ken Hadge method, the more you’ll be able to deliver a strong message. We’ll talk about another idea on Articulation that builds on this.
THE FIERCE EDITOR
How many words do you need to express your idea? Here’s a hint: That last sentence was probably too long. Part of learning Articulation is learning which words to choose. Another is learning which words to lose. And yet another is understanding when you have to explain something a little bit more for it to make sense and be useful. We need a fierce editor, and barring hiring someone for this, you’ve got the job.
We need venture no further than our in-box to see examples of all three situations. Look at your sent items. Have you sent a long e-mail that could’ve been pared down to a hundred or fewer words and gotten your point across? Have you sent an e-mail using too few words that resulted in a ping-pong game requiring you to check your in-box ten times? Now is the time to fix these problems.
One of our favorite Web sites, http://two.sentenc.es/, focuses on this concept by asking senders of all e-mail to restrict themselves to text message–like lengths. When concepts don’t fit into this structure, they can be addressed in a phone conversation, a blog post, or some other form of media. But the larger point is that format should be dictated by need, and restrictions can actually help you become better with your message.
Articulation in Action: Chipotle
Have you been to a Chipotle restaurant? The process is spread across four big signs behind the cash register and preparation area: “ORDER” (a particular format for serving the food), “WITH” (a meat type or vegetarian), “SALSAS” (sauces and what they cost), and “EXTRAS” (chips and guacamole). You can figure out rather quickly how to order. There are only five or six ways to do it. There are only four meat options and one vegetarian in “WITH.” You can pick a few sauces and extras. It’s a flow. The flow exists on the boards. It’s somehow even easier than the typical fast-food menu.
But this language and messaging is in everything Chipotle does. Have you seen its advertising? Swing by Chipotle.com and click the “Back to the Start” link (if it’s still there when you finally read this book). It tells a video story of Chipotle’s commitment to fresh food. It is articulate and simple, told with cute-but-vibrant animation talking about why fresh and local food is better for all parties. It’s clear that Chipotle wants its ideas heard, understood, and embraced as our own.
Can you articulate what you sell in just a few simple boards with very few words? If not, why not?
Connecting the Dots
One of the main reasons there is still a huge difference between a blog post and a complete, mainstream book is that a book must work harder, much harder in fact, at connecting the dots.
The very concept of connecting the dots is human. It’s something that can’t be done by machines but that humans are very good at. Think about it. Where a human being could fill in the blanks and see a lion after putting some of the dots together, a machine might not see anything. So a big part of creating clarity in your idea is connecting the right dots.
A group of blog posts could be a disparate set of ideas that don’t necessarily mesh well. Publishing them as a book would be like adding the details of a painting before the big picture, like adding stars before painting in a sky, or painting a tree, a river, and a mountain but nothing in between to make them into a landscape. As short ideas, they each work well, but they’re nothing you could sell on the art market or hang in a museum (unless the drawing were part of a larger story). Books, or any final, completed media, have high Articulation because they explicitly connect the dots among multiple ideas in order to create a final, concrete explanation.
Connecting the dots gives you a ten-thousand-foot view. It brings together a whole picture, which is much more easily comprehensible. It lets you start at the beginning instead of in the middle, making it less likely you’ll end up confused by what’s going on. In other words, it gives your big idea, your marketing campaign—whatever it is you’re working on—a sense of context.
Let’s take an example. For years, a real estate agent’s blog could talk about housing prices, renovations of kitchens and bathrooms, backyards, and different neighborhoods. Only later co
uld this become a cohesive, sellable idea such as “The Complete Guide to Selling Your House in Boston.” This final product could have connections that are lacking in each small tip you would find on the blog or get from the agent in person.
But adding length and depth isn’t the only way to connect ideas into a collective, larger whole. If we were to simply collect every fact about the American Civil War into a book, for example, we would have something that could easily fill a thousand or more pages. So one of the most important skills in connecting the dots isn’t just putting everything together, which can be done by machines. It’s the process of synthesis, which requires a smart human or two to look at the whole and decide what really matters, what needs to be kept, what needs to be removed, and what two or more pieces can simply be combined into a new whole. In the book Five Minds for the Future, Harvard professor Howard Gardner calls synthesis one of the five critical skills necessary to distinguish yourself from both peers and machines.
Here’s a quick guide to connecting the dots to help you create a better final portrait of your idea.
1. Get data from more varied sources. It’s easy to read everything that everyone in real estate has already read and create a product from it, but that’s the product of a machine, not a human being. But if you’re making a product like How Harry Potter Is Like Real Estate, then you have a bunch of data sources that other people haven’t considered. And connecting weird dots isn’t just about grabbing a bunch of data from unexpected places. It’s also how humor works—the unexpected, when well timed, is usually very funny.