Here's a simple analogy. Say you want to study the ocean. Do you go to a popular beach and draw all your conclusions from the scene there, or do you take the time to get a boat and some SCUBA gear and go searching for the big fish?

Look, I know you’re excited. Really, truly, I do.

But for the love of God, please stop trying to convince me that Twitter is the be-all, end-all of marketing.

I’ve been watching Twitter for awhile, and honestly, I think it’s pretty limited in what it can do. You marketers keep telling me it’s great because you can study trends on it. You love that you can see real-time reactions to entertainment media or to big news. You love how easy it is to click on the “trending” tools and see what the biggest topics of the day are.

But what you don’t seem to understand is that Twitter is a social network largely used by vapid, know-nothing attention whores who want to make every aspect of their lives known. Think about this for a moment. If you use Twitter, everything you post is available to anyone who wants to see it. Since you’re restricted to 140 characters, you can only really give the cursory details of your life. Twitter encourages stalking people by “following” them, and it discourages real communication by making it difficult to offer more than a surface reaction to the topic of the day.

I understand that many of you in the marketing world fall into this mold, so you don’t see anything wrong with it. But trust me. Twitter is the most superficial social network there is. It has its uses, but trying to draw any meaningful conclusions from it is ridiculous. It’s like going into a crowded room and trying to overhear how a bunch of people respond to the events of the hour. Sure, there are going to be common threads, but it’s all just a lot of noise.

Do you want to know how Twitter should be used for marketing? 21st century marketing is about having a relationship with your customers. If you want to use Twitter for your ad campaign or your customer retention strategy, you need to use it to encourage a dialogue. Twitter can be very useful as a portal to much deeper, more meaningful content and interactions. You can use it as a means to begin a conversation with people who just want a quick response to whatever their question or issue is.

But all this nonsense about building ad campaigns based on the views of the Twitterati, or testing product designs on Twitter, or any of the other nonsense I hear about every month in the various marketing publications I read? You guys are setting yourselves up for failure, and while you might seem trendy and cutting-edge now, you’re going to look like idiots when this whole Twitter thing gives way to some other trend.

I understand that you’re young and you’re bored and you want to do something exciting, but focus that energy on building a better marketing strategy that’s based on solid marketing research. It might not be glamorous, but it’s going to benefit you down the road when you want to manage a division instead of a bunch of mindless morons twittering banalities at you.

-SJJ

"The Space Merchants" by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth

I love science fiction. I love marketing. So, I guess you could say The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth is pretty much one of my favorite books ever.

And you’d be right. This novel, written, in the early 1950s, envisioned a future where entertainment and advertising have become so entwined that ads are the dominant form of popular culture. Ad writers can become “Star class copysmiths” and be rich, famous and respected. Ad firms are like film studios, and ad executives are the most powerful people on the planet. One of these firms, Fowler-Shocken, is tasked with selling the public on the idea of colonizing Venus, despite the fact that it’s a terrible place where no one would ever want to live.

But in the midst of this consumer culture, a group of people called the “convervationists” is operating in secret. They’re sort of like environmentalists, believing in the preservation of natural things and renouncing the ideas of rampant consumerism waste.  It’s bad to be outed as a “consie”, especially if you work in an advertising firm. But unlike the secret so-called communists of the 1950s, the consies are actually intelligent and organized, with the plan to turn public opinion against Venus so they can take it themselves and turn it into a paradise.

The story itself is something of a fall and rise sort of adventure, where the main character, Mitch Courtenay, works his way to the top of Fowler-Schocken only to find himself framed by a rival and branded a consie. He moves to the evirons of society, discovers how he’s been framed, and outs the consie conspirators. There’s a nice twist to the ending that puts things in perspective, but the structure of the story is fairly standard stuff. Were I judging the book on the merits of its plot, I would probably consider it a readable, but mediocre title. (I certainly feel this way about the sequel, The Merchants’ War, which follows the pattern of the original while updating the book’s ideas for the 1980s.)

No, what makes this book so awesome is the world that Pohl and Kornbluth conceived. It’s frighteningly close to the world we live in today. Advertising is used not just as a means of persuading people to buy products, but to shape public opinion about real issues, like the scarcity of water and fuel, and to make people feel like their lives are better than they really are. Every piece of communication is persuasive; every idea has an agenda. Even the simplest slogan has been massaged by expert ad men. The world is a dark and frightening place, and yet society is kept under control by these resassuring messages that they should be happy because of the products they consume.

One of the most memorable and horrifying scenes in the book comes when Courtenay finds his way into the facility where “Chicken Little,” a processed chicken product, is packaged. What he finds is a giant, living mound of chicken tissue, where butchers come and cut pieces of flesh off to prepare for processing and packaging. The campaign around the product leads you to believe you’re eating normal chicken, but this genetically engineered, unthinking living blob of meat is all it is. The idea is that as long as people don’t know what they’re really eating, society will hold together.

A lot of science fiction looks to the future and sees exploration, space ships, aliens, and evolution. These things exist in a world where there is a single government, and poverty has been extinguished, and anyone can be an adventurer. That is not the case in The Space Merchants, where society is, instead, a glittering sea of false promises established to keep people from understanding how bad things really are. Happiness is not rooted in simple pleasures and natural living, but in consuming products and listening to advertising messages. Achievement is not rooted in social benefit, but in manipulation and half-truths. The ad executives have all the real power; public officials (even including the President of the United States!) are an anachronism. In many ways, The Space Merchants is more realistic than most of the science fiction you’ll find from the 1950s… or in the entire genre.

If you don’t want to read the book, CBS once produced a condensed radio version of it. It misses pretty much the entire point of the novel, but it does cover the plot.

I want to comment on one more thing, and that’s the style of this book. 50s sci-fi really has a certain feel to it — an idea of progress towards simplicity, an idea of buying shiny new things and discarding old ones. The future is a place much like the 1950s, where everything seems exciting and safe, and there’s no pain or suffering. More modern books have played with this theme and shown the rotten supports below this sort of lifestyle. The Space Merchants fits into this paradigm, and it was clearly far ahead of its time in its ideas. I fully expect this genre of “nostalgia punk” sci-fi to show up again down the road. I may even write some myself.

"The Merchants' War" by Frederik Pohl

Ironically enough, I’d place the 1984 sequel, The Merchants’ War, much closer in tone to the futuro noir style of Blade Runner than this nostaglic tone I’m referring to. I felt like The Merchants’ War was a lot closer to cyberpunk in tone, though it lacked the foresight to see the impact computers were having on the world. Pohl seemed a lot more concerned with critiquing collectible items and the cola wars than he was about returning to the themes of the original book, and it’s a shame. As I said, it’s not that the sequel is bad… just that it’s not nearly as groundbreaking or memorable as the original.

Sean’s recommendation: Track down a copy of The Space Merchants, read it, and enjoy it. It’s a fantastic book that was really forward-thinking 50 years ago, and which still has a lot of relevance today. The Merchants’ War isn’t too bad, either, if you’re craving more when you’re done.

You can get both in one edition if you’re really interested.

Today’s resource is from Todd’s column called “Publishing Follies,” posted at Comic Book Resources every two weeks.

Though the article is primarily focused on the sale of comic book collections and graphic novels through libraries, Todd Allen offers some interesting research:

How many libraries are there? The ALA lists 16,549 Public Libraries (counting branch libraries, as well as the central administrative unit), 3,653 Academic Libraries, and 93,861 School Libraries. Special (i.e., corporate, law, etc.) Libraries probably aren’t a factor here, but that’s still over 114,000 venues for graphic novel product. If a publisher could get 10% penetration into libraries, that’d be 11,400 copies sold. That would rank as the #4 title for Graphic Novels on the November 2007 list at ICV2. Of course, the “Heroes” graphic Novel, “Black Dossier” and “Dark Tower” all came out in November, so a more fair comparison would have that same 11,400 hypothetical books outselling everything in the category for October 2007 and August 2007, while coming in 2nd behind a new “Walking Dead” volume in September. We’re not talking about a small market, here.

What’s really interesting is that I’ve heard librarians love to carry graphic novels because people actually read them. Sadly, librarians usually have little to no idea which graphic novels to order because many comic book publishers simply do not market to them.

There are several ways to get your product in front of librarians. First of all, you can attend a convention where librarians are likely to be present, such as BookExpo America or an ALA conference. You can get a review in the ALA’s
Booklist or Publisher’s Weekly, both of which librarians depend upon, though it’s hard to get them to review you even if you follow their strenuous guidelines. You can also send media kits to individual library buyers and hope that some samples or galleys will do the trick.

And, at the local level, you can always encourage your readers to help you out:

Now if you’re a reader, not a publisher, there are two things you can do to get graphic novels in your library. First, most libraries will have a form to request new books. Fill some out. The second thing is to start ordering books through inter-library loan like a demon. Get your friends to do it, too. If the demand is documented, the library will likely capitulate. Remember, the mandate is to serve the community, and you’re part of the community.

It’s worth a try. After all, a sale’s a sale, and who knows? You may inspire a whole group of readers to wait for your next book to arrive at the library.

There’s more in the article, too. Check it out!

1) Find a reliable host. Your web host is the company that will be providing your “space” on the web. They’ll also provide the software you’ll need to make your website run smoothly. There are a lot of hosting options out there; some are great, and some are a complete rip-off. A lot of them will only give you a deal on hosting if you’re willing to pay up front. That’s bad if you have a problem, though, because they have your money, which gives you less leverage. It’s better to pay a little extra and be on a monthly billing cycle.

Two hosts that I’ve had great luck with are 100MegsWebHosting (the host for this site) and EasyCGI (the host for my Army Ant Publishing site, which is not yet publicly available). 100Megs offers a $5 per month hosting solution that’s enough for any small website, and I can vouch for their excellent customer service. My only complaint about them is that they’re stingy with the disk space compared to many of their competitors; if you need more than 40Mb of space, you have to upgrade to the $10 plan. EasyCGI, on the other hand, offers a hosting plan for $8 per month that will give you 350Gb of space. I can’t imagine why you’d need that much, but for the price, it’s an amazing option.

Set up an account with either of those companies, or one of your own choosing, and you’re ready to go.

2) Acquire a domain name: This is your name on the web: www.yourcompanyhere.com. Many places will register these for you for anywhere between $8-$25, but there’s no point in paying top dollar since you’re essentially paying for an electronic service. Two registrars that will both register a .com or a .net for $10 are GoDaddy and EasyCGI. Also, if you’re setting up a brand new site, 100Megs is currently giving away free domain names if you set up a hosting account with them.

I used to swear by GoDaddy, but lately, I haven’t been too impressed. GoDaddy tries every trick in the book to sell you service, and they’ve had to raise a lot of their prices recently because, I’m assuming, they’ve been spending too much on their questionable advertisements. EasyCGI doesn’t hustle you, and they charge the same amount; get a $10 domain there and you’ll be fine. If you own a domain already and you paid more than $10 for it, you can also transfer it to EasyCGI for $10 and get a one-year extension on your registration.

A word of warning about domain names: either set up auto-renew or make sure you renew 14 days or more before your domain name lapses. There’s nothing worse than temporarily losing your domain name (as I recently did!) and having your site go down for days. It’s quite aggravating.

3) Download Wordpress. You can find it at Wordpress.org. To put it simply, it’s the easiest and best small website software I’ve seen out there, and it’s absolutely free. Wordpress will set your site up blog style, but it has tons of options and is very easy to configure. The site it kicks out for you will be just as good as something you could pay a professional to design, and it will give you access to all the bells and whistles you need to change the site to suit your style.

The directions aren’t tricky, but they may require some technical ability; you can always ask your webhost to help you install it if you’re stuck. Wordpress will walk you through most of the installation and give you some simple forms to fill in to create your settings.

From there, you need to install a theme (which you can find on the Wordpress site) and any plugins or widgets you think you’ll need. The nice thing about Wordpress is that you can add in new options or changes, see how they look, and change them very easily without having to write a single line of code. Another advantage is that Wordpress will automatically update your entire site on the fly so you don’t have to worry about keeping your pages consistent. This means that if you change your logo on your main page, you change it on all of them.

As you select a theme to give your site a unique look, I would recommend only using a one or two-column design for your website. If you opt for the two-column design, you’ll have a main content area (where your posts go) and a sidebar. You can do anything you like with the sidebar by clicking on “presentation” and then selecting “widgets” or “theme editor” and making changes. Widgets are much easier to use and edit than the theme editor, so play with them first. Wordpress has plenty of widgets you can add in, so be sure to check some of them out!

Wordpress can generate two types of webpages: posts and pages. Posts are archived by category and will show up on your page in chronological order. I suggest using these for company news and announcements, and keeping them archived in sensible categories. Some categories I would suggest for a publishing site include “Company News,” “Press Releases,” “Reviews,” and a category for each book or line of books that you’re publishing. You can file posts under multiple categories, so a press release about your “Doggone Good” line could be filed under both “Press Releases” and “Doggone Good.”

Pages are a little more permanent, and they’re meant for content that you want immediately available from every location on the site. If you look up at the top of my own site here, you’ll see entries for things like “Home,” “About Sean Jordan,” “Comic Book Writer’s Guide” and “Guide To the Site.” These are all pages that I want to be available to anyone who surfs in so that they can easily find their way to content. I could have done these as posts, but they’re much more useful to everyone when they’re visibly available.

I would suggest having a page called “About Us” that gives some basic information on your company, and a page called “Store” where you either set up your own shopping cart (we’ll discuss that in the next step) or have links to your books on a retail site like Amazon.com. You should probably also set up a page for each book or line of books with information about your titles, including the cover, the author’s name, the publication date, the ISBN, and a summary of the content. If you want to include previews, put those on a separate page and then, using the “Manage / Pages” option in Wordpress, assign those previews to be “children” of the related project page by setting the project page as the “parent.” Just don’t forget to provide a link readers can click on to access the preview!

Wordpress also features something called a “blogroll,” which is really just a fancy name for a “links section.” I would discourage using a blogroll in a product website, unless you really want to link to outside sites. If you do, make sure every link has its target set for “_blank” so that it will open links in a new tab or browser and not take visitors away from your site.

4) Get some shopping software. What you’re looking for here is not just something that will allow you to do ecommerce, but something that will take your visitors to a secure site and allow them to make purchases with a credit card. This will be the most expensive part of your site, but depending upon your scope, it doesn’t have to be.

If you just want to test the waters or you don’t anticipate high sales, you can start with Paypal’s ecommerce service. What I like about this service is that it’s easy to set up and it doesn’t have any usage fees. When a customer makes a purchase, Paypal collects the money, removes its fee, and deposits the rest into your account. The fee is a little high ($.30 plus up to 2.9% of the sale), but the fact that you don’t have to spend a dime on the software up front makes it an ideal solution for a small publisher who’s only going to sell a few hundred books over the course of a year.

If you’re planning on selling a few hundred books a month, you might want to consider a small business merchant account with Yahoo!. There’s a $50 setup fee plus a monthly fee of $39.95 for the basic package, but you only have to pay a 1.5% fee on sales. Paypal has a similar program for $30 per month (no setup), but with a fee of up to 2.9% plus $.30. I think the Paypal service has a little bit more to offer the small business owner, personally, but Yahoo!’s service is reliable as well. It’s always good to know what’s out there.

Here’s a link to a useful article that really goes in depth on other ecommerce options.

Chances are good your host has an ecommerce frontend and backend you can use on your site to keep track of orders, so you may just need a credit card service to ring out your orders. Fortunately, these companies often don’t charge you much more than a small merchant fee on transactions. Unfortunately, they tend to hit you hard with a lot of extra fees. If you’re going to use one of these services, I’d recommend CardService International, since they are one of the least expensive and one of the best rated.

If all that sounds too complicated, or if you’re set up to do Print On Demand through a site like Amazon.com, you can just go ahead and link directly to your products and let your retailer worry about the payment. But if you’re selling through Amazon, you can still make a little bit extra by joining the Amazon.com associates and getting credit for link click referrals to your products or other products you might like to feature.

5) Keep your site updated. Once you’ve got everything you need to get your content rolling, start actually cranking out posts and pages about your products… lots of them! Every time your products are reviewed positively, post a link and a quote from the review. Every time you or one of your authors conducts an interview with a website, podcast, radio show or television show, post up a link with an excerpt. Every time some big piece of news happens with your products, post up an announcement. Every time you’re nominated for an award, or pass a goal, or have something else worth bragging about, post it up on your page. Don’t be shy about talking about your company!

I say this for three reasons.

1) You will naturally improve your search engine results just by having lots of content. There’s no reason to pay someone to submit your sites to search engines; if your site is online long enough, it will be indexed. Registering the site with Wordpress and sites like Feedburner, Technorati, Digg and Reddit will help you get indexed faster because you’ll have more links coming in to your site.

2) Visitors like fresh content — and I can attest to this from experience, believe me! They also like to read about the things they’re interested in. If you’re constantly talking about how great your books are, and they’re interested in your books, they’re more likely to come back and buy your books.

3) The more focused you are on keeping your content fresh, the better a job you’ll do promoting your product, because you’ll start seeking out interviews and reviews, start looking for good promotional quotes, and start thinking about the good news you have to share with your fans.

When it’s all said and done, you can set up a fully-featured, functioning, professional-quality product website within 2-3 days for just under $20. It’s just that easy.

My team met weekly, and I was able to put my knowledge of publishing to great use. We shaped a great concept for an online marketplace that would even allow McGraw-Hill to take advantage of used book buying and selling without incurring any inventory costs, and we backed it up with a campus consumer program to make sure the website would be well-used. I took our notes and wrote up the bulk of the proposal, made some corrections with the input from the team, handed it over to our team leader, and went on a cruise, promptly putting the case competition out of my mind.

Last week, I found out that out of the 60 or so schools that submitted case proposals, 46 were considered really top-notch. But my proposal stood out above even those, and our team was invited to the final stage of the competition, where the top 8 teams will present their ideas to McGraw-Hill executives in New Orleans this April. I’m really excited to have the chance to make a brand new set of contacts in the publishing industry, and I’m hoping we’ll knock ‘em dead.

Meanwhile, Marvel Comics released Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter #7 over the last couple of weeks – the first issue of the series since Dabel Brothers Publishing dissolved its partnership with Marvel. I was the editor on the first five issues, and my wife did the adaptation.

But what a lot of people don’t realize is that I also handled all the marketing and PR, and we pushed the heck out of the first six issues in every way imaginable. The first issue had three printings and sold well over 50,000 copies. The second and third issues also went into an additional printing, and each sold around 35,000 copies. The fourth, fifth and sixth issues sold around 30,000 copies each. The graphic novel collection, which came out later in the year, was one of the bestselling graphic novels of 2007, and from what I’ve heard, it sold around 60-70,000 copies. These numbers are great when you consider that the average Marvel comic book sells 3,000-5,000 copies, and the average successful independent book sells 2,000-2,500. I have no idea what’s currently “average” for graphic novel sales, but our next bestselling graphic novel, Red Prophet: The Tales of Alvin Maker vol. 1, which I also handled the marketing on, was considered quite successful at around 16,000 copies sold.

Anyhow, Anita #7 has received zero marketing support from Marvel, and it’s selling dreadfully — a friend in the industry told me it’s only sold 9,000 copies. That’s pathetic. It’s almost like they expected the book to sell itself. I don’t think they realized how hard my team was working with the customers to make sure the book was a success.

But then, that’s exactly why you can’t have a product-oriented perspective in publishing, as Marvel’s definitely learning once again with their ridiculous reset of the Spider-Man story. You’ve got to focus on what the customers want, not on which products you think you can sell. Today’s consumers don’t want to be told what they want unless you can get it right every single time. Mess up too often and they’ll find someone else to buy from. The sad thing is, consumers are very vocal about what they want, but many companies do a lousy job of listening.

On a final note, my apologies for the various hiccups the website has endured over the last week. Between a domain name issue, a server problem and some configuration issues, it’s been tough to get it back online and working. Fortunately, it looks like the problems are finally resolved. All I’m waiting for now is for the “Time Tourists” portion of the site to go back online.

As I’ve written my business plan for Army Ant Publishing, I’ve done extensive research on the world of publishing. Here is an article I found useful:

Make Marketing a Core Business Strategy by Chip Conley and Eric Friedenwald-Fishman via PMA.

There’s an awful lot of ignorance in the world of business about what marketing is all about. There are two reasons for this. First of all, marketing professionals have done a terrible job of defining their field, and have allowed hucksters and gurus to appropriate the word as a snazzy synonym for “sales.” Second, marketing is an umbrella term that encompasses many different activities that are only really related in the regard that they end with the customer. Thus someone who works in marketing might work in sales or advertising, but they might also work in product development, or marketing research, or public relations, or another similar field.

Thus when many small publishers hear the word “marketing,” they immediately begin to fear the costs and scope associated with some elements of marketing (such as advertising and promotions) and put off developing a marketing strategy for their products. Sadly, their misunderstanding of the word prevents them from laying an important foundation in their business.

Today’s article does a great job of explaining things.

Many people use the word marketing to refer to a broad set of promotional and outreach activities aimed at communicating a business proposition to customers and other important audiences. These activities often include advertising, media relations, direct mail, promotional offers, online promotions, sales materials, and various tactics. While all these are important, we are focusing here on marketing strategy.

Strategic marketing involves acquiring a deep understanding of the needs and desires of your existing and potential customers, and designing your business (products, services, delivery mechanisms, customer experience, branding, outreach, and more) to meet or exceed their needs and desires. At its core, good strategic marketing can be deeply aligned with building a socially responsible business because it demands a constant focus on the customer’s needs, drives development of quality products and services, and often encourages alignment with customer values.

Thus, marketing is a core business strategy. Think about it as a baseline of business development and ensure that marketing-based questions and analyses are present and utilized in all business planning processes. Instead of mapping out the product concept, price point, and manufacturing and distribution plan, and then asking, “How will we sell it?” ask, “How do we design the product concept, set the price, and so on to best meet the needs of the market?”

As I’ve said in my “Marketing 101″ articles, marketing is often thought of as being divided into four fields: price, promotion, product and distribution. There’s an awful lot of talk about target markets, secondary markets, and other stuff like that. But really, the whole thing can be summed up in three words: understand the customer.

So a practical marketing strategy is just a simple document that explains who the customer is, what the company is doing to meet the customer’s needs, and how the company plans to make the customer aware of its product. In publishing, this can be an easy thing to do if you begin with a customer-oriented product, like a how-to manual or a cookbook. But it can be an extremely difficult thing to do if you’re starting with a creator-oriented product, like a line of novels or a book of poems. It’s hard to classify the customers as having a need beyond “entertainment” with these products, and really, the reason they’re developed in the first place is because the author is interested in telling a story, not because anyone is demanding to hear it.

Different products require different types of strategies, but the article is quick to point out that there is a difference between marketing tasks and marketing tactics. The former are part of product development, while the latter are “tricks” geared at selling more products. Marketing tasks make an excellent foundation for a product line and will guarantee better sales in the long run; marketing tactics are intended to boost sales regardless of quality and are often put into use when a publisher needs to move its books quickly to cover the costs of a print run. If you’ve worked for a company that has a failing product, you’ve probably heard this line of thinking before — “Product X isn’t selling. We need to figure out a way to move it.”

But no matter how much time a publisher invests into these tactics, the company is more often than not wasting its time and money without a well-developed strategy. There are companies that know how to consistently generate great sales because they are in tune with their customers. And then there are companies that seem to “win the lottery” from time to time and lose money on everything else. This is because they are focused on their products, not their customers.

Many marketers do not maximize and leverage resources because they invest in marketing tactics before establishing a marketing strategy. Focusing on an ad, media release, brochure, Web site, or other promotional tactic before identifying your priority audience and your core value proposition creates waste, inefficiency, and missed opportunities, just as would purchasing Sheetrock, pipes, and windows prior to developing a design concept and blueprint for your home.

I recommend reading the rest of this article; it’s loaded with plenty of good ideas and principles. In the meantime, let me close with an analogy that publishers will hopefully be able to relate to.

Joe owns a factory that makes ladies’ straw hats designed to keep the sun off a woman’s neck and shoulders while she’s outside. Larry is his competitor, with a similar factory that makes similar products. Both companies sell their hats to a chain of touristy stores along the beach. Joe wants to corner the market to keep Larry from expanding, so he makes several attempts to one-up his rival.

• First, Joe tries to improve the quality of his hats, but he can’t really do that without making his costs go up, which will raise the price of his hats and put him out of business. So he abandons that line of thinking.
• Next, Joe looks for a way to lower the retail price of the hats, but he’ll only be able to lower them by about a dollar per hat, which will cut heavily into his profits without making a big difference in his sales. Plus, Larry will continue selling hats for slightly more, which means he’ll make more money. So Joe abandons that line of thinking.
• Next, Joe looks into setting up a hat stand on the beach where he can sell hats directly to tourists for a larger profit that he’s getting through the retail stores. But the stand will cost a lot to set up and staff, and besides, people walking along the beach don’t carry a lot of money with them. The stand will be lucky to break even. So Joe abandons that line of thinking.
• Finally, Joe decides to ask some customers what they would like to see in a straw hat, and he is surprised to find that they want hats that won’t blow off their heads when the wind gusts across the beach. The problem can be solved with a simple strap that only costs a few pennies to add in.

Joe listens to the customers and adds the strap. Within a month, his hat sales begin to double, and Joe soon finds out that Larry is scrambling to figure out why his own sales are dropping. Joe has scored a marketing victory.

But the straps are uncomfortable and not very stylish, so Joe decides to take advantage of the situation by introducing a new product — a smaller, more stylish hat that is designed to stay on a woman’s head without needing to be anchored to her chin. The hats are well-designed, and they look nice. But no matter what Joe tries, they simply will not sell. He finally asks some customers why and finds out that they don’t want hats that are small or stylish — they want hats that will keep the sun off their neck and shoulders. Thus in his zeal to improve the product, Joe has forgotten about the customer, and he has lost the ground he gained.

I’ve noticed many companies going through this sort of cycle. What’s sad is that they never seem to learn their lesson — that the basic rule of marketing is to always, always understand the customer. And so they gain ground with their successes, and lose ground with their failures, and always because they listen to the customer out of desperation… not out of habit.