Inside Seth Godin's Masterclass | 97th Floor Mastermind

So I came last year sort of on a lark because some really nice people invited me and it was such an extraordinary event with really smart people asking good questions I decided instead of bringing my this is for everybody fast moving fun lots of pictures presentation brought my master class which I've not talked about before and I'm gonna put it on you to think hard about what we're going to talk about and ask hard Questions as we go not as we go after we go and then we'll circle around so here we go what marketing

is is not spamming people marketing isn't making average stuff for average people marketing isn't about yelling or getting the word out marketing is quite simply making work that matters for people who care it's not for anybody else but for those people and that's a challenge because a lot of you work for organizations and in Your organization you're getting pushed to pedal faster pedal spelled both ways pedal faster get it out there push faster go faster and the problem with that is that it's not working the way that it used to work here's a little video

from Italy you may have seen this online this guy's last place in a bike race he's pedaling faster it's not working so he decided to try a totally different approach to the aerodynamics of bike racing and for a while it turns Out this is actually an excellent way to move through an environment where everyone else is just pedaling faster so the purpose of my talk today is to help you think about whether you're spending time pedaling uphill in the wrong direction or whether it might be a different way to go so where to begin a

simple question what do we make if we're a marketer if we're in business or running a non-profit if we're trying to change the way medicine is practiced What do we make and I want to argue throughout this time that what we make is change if there is no change why'd you show up we're trying to make a change happen and often we then decide that what that means is we have to make it better but the problem with better is better has no real definition because better is always in the eyes of the customer not

better for you but better for them because people are only going to sign up for things that they decide Are better for them and our enemy in the search for better is average average is what all the other forces around you are pushing you to do average is why you dressed the way you dress today because you don't want to stand out too much average is the way you sand off the edges of a product so it won't offend some people average and average and average so what we're ending up with is an old-world that's

based on yelling at Strangers about your average products for average people so you can reach the masses because mass and average are the same thing toward a different world that's based on fundamentally different principles so here are the principles that I'm going to talk about today and most of them are phrases that you would never hear in a marketing address these are words that we might use in other parts of our lives but we're not comfortable using them When we talk about marketing but what I write about in this is marketing we're going to talk

about today is how these 10 ideas underpin where it all fits together so an example chickens not surfing chickens not docks but chickens so here's the story turns out that Ethiopia is an extraordinary country with more than a hundred million people in that country of 105 million people 15 million of them are small land holding farmers meaning they have a plot of land About the size of this room if they can grow it they can eat it if they can't they go hungry 15 million people guy named David sees this going on and understands that

there's a magnet and not a magnificent a huge problem of protein particularly for children there isn't enough protein being consumed and an entire generation of millions and millions of people are coming along who haven't had enough protein also worth noting is that on this piece of land The primary thing that's growing are chickens and they lay on average one egg a week well david takes a look at all of this and he decides that he can do something about this because they picked the wrong chicken this is the sasso chicken the south chicken is way

more productive than the typical Ethiopian chicken he lays five or six day the eggs a week taking one day off that is a magnificent change because now all of a sudden if a farmer Owns a sasso chicken the amount of protein that's being created on the same amount of land goes through the roof the first month's that Ethio chicken was open they raised ten thousand six a month they take these chicks when they're three days old and they give them to local veterinarians who then create this commercial network and sell them to farmers yesterday Ethio

chicken sold 1 million chickens tomorrow they're gonna sell 1 million chickens one person Showed up and changed an entire country I think that's a marketing solution it's not an engineering solution it's not even an agronomy solution because the chicken was already around it's one person who said I am going to make something better for people who need to make it better alright next example because this isn't just marketing far away if we also zoom in on Utah in fact right here where we are what we will notice is that all the houses look Exactly the

same how is it that we ended up with this form of architecture which exists nowhere else in the world as far as I can tell but is the kind of architecture you have when you have four million dollars to spend on a house and the reason is this architecture isn't for everybody just like you know chickens aren't for everybody this architecture is for a very tiny group of people who are risk-averse and also want to demonstrate To their neighbors that they understand what it is to fit in so the ideas so far empathy meaning David

didn't have a chicken problem the people he was serving had a chicken problem he had to be aware of the fact that they didn't know what he knew they didn't want what he want wants they didn't believe what he believed and that's ok because if we're not willing to say that to the people we serve we've just pushed them away from us that Practical empathy is the humility to serve somebody with your story not saying I got to make more sales to get my quarterly numbers up it's this person believes what they believe and that's

okay because if they don't believe if I'm not willing to accept that it's okay that they believe it they're not gonna listen to me and then the second idea seeking the Minimum Viable audience not the largest possible audience the smallest one you can live with because If you can identify who it's for really precisely you can delight them if you ignore everyone else then you're on the hook to delight the people you began with next idea zoom out zoom back in this is a company called water health international water health international makes change happen they

will set this kiosk up in a village that has no clean water if you don't have clean water you have to spend hours just going to get the dirty water and it changes your Health and it changes your economics the interesting thing about water health besides the fact that they're changing the lives of lots of people in India is if you want to fill that bucket with water cost about a nickel they will not fill it for you unless it's a blue bucket why is that well they'll tell you it's because if you bring an

older bucket it might have germs in it and you might get sick and then they would get blamed but The real reason is more and more people start carrying the blue bucket around town people like us do things like this it stands for something now the interesting thing that happens when you open up a water health kiosk in a village is there isn't a line the first day you're lucky of three families by water how can this be that they don't want clean water for a nickel well it turns out every new idea in every

culture in every country does not spread Instantly the first day the first iPhone was on sale not that many people bought one because ideas spread through the culture differently when we talk about that in a minute so how do you accelerate that well here is one thing that they did water health got these battery-operated microscopes and brought them to local elementary schools and India has a lot of great things going for it one of them is they take schooling really seriously at the Elementary school they have a science class and so the teacher says kids

nine-year-olds bring home bring from home a little glass of water so everyone brings in their water and then they put it on the screen and that's what it looks like because they're doing a lesson about bacteria what do you think happens when that kid goes home and says to his mom and dad what he did in school today hey mom and dad I looked at the water that we have and I looked at the Water our neighbors have and why is there weird stuff growing in our water but not weird stuff going in there water

tension is created every time change shows up the tension of will this work the tension of should I leave now or should I wait till tomorrow that when we think about how we decide to do something that deadlines can be a service to us that scarcity can make it more likely that we take action that people who have a season's pass might Ski less than people who just have a 5-day pass because they feel like it's running out the tension of what will happen next the next idea and I think after you see these two

slides you won't forget this one is the idea of status roles professional wrestling is nothing but a public display of who's up and who's down it is not actually about wrestling everyone who knows about wrestling knows that it's my guys up my guys down Therefore I'm up or arm down status rolls are all that theater is about each character in every play up or down in every novel and guess what the same thing is true for Congress for politics for who gets to cut you off on 84 it doesn't matter what we are talking about

we are hyper aware of where we stand compared to the people we are comparing ourselves to and if you don't see status rolls when you're engaging with others and what they care about you're missing A lot so here's a 30-second clip from one of the best movies ever made and then I'll give you the background of it I stood they courted me like it and both to Buster they smile at me then I said to my wife for justice we must go to the colony come on so here's what's happening here it's the dawn's daughter's

wedding day Sicilian tradition is on your daughter's wedding day if someone comes and asks you for a favor you must grant it if you don't You're [ __ ] you're shamed buona sera the first guy who's talking is the Undertaker is there any lower status job than Undertaker he comes to the Godfather whose entire life is about his status in this community and he says I want you to harm the man who hurt my daughter if the Don does it he's the hoodlum so he declines because he's offended and then the Undertaker says I'll pay

you in just 30 seconds Coppola explains the entire arc of the movie which is threats to status what will happen if I don't have the latest pair of shoes what will happen if I am left out of this conference what will happen if I don't get this tool or that tool this is in everyone's brain all the time not everyone wants to be the Don a lot of people are quite content to be buona sera the Undertaker a lot of people want to maintain their status not move it up all you got to do if

you've Got 10 minutes of spare time is go hang out at the front desk of this hotel and watch what happens when someone who's used to always being the top of the heap rolls up to the reception desk and doesn't get the room they thought they were going to get right instant amnesia don't you know who I am right that this idea that we need to be in a certain place in the pecking order in form so much of what we do okay jumping around quite a lot here the next Idea is this there are

brands in lots of areas of our life this is actually a Louis Vuitton waffle iron and also you've got these sneakers from Louboutin 750 bucks or this mattress which cost $65,000 there are lots of brands in our life including Hershey bars which costs $2 that use brand marketing to spread brand marketing is unmeasured on purpose we do not see a Hershey's ad on television and then run out and buy a Hershey bar but the Internet has changed almost everything because at the same time there's direct marketing and direct marketing is measured that's its definition if

you pay $1 you get $2 back and the reason you've heard of LL Bean and Pottery Barn and Lilly and Vernon and all the pioneers of Direct Marketing is every time they spend 100 bucks they made 200 so they spent more and the reason that Google makes so much money and can do all those things that make no Money is because the thing they make so much money on is keeping almost all the profit of every direct marketer who does business with them because the math is really simple let's say a new customer is worth

100 bucks how much you're going to pay Google to get a new customer I'd be willing to pay 99 why not so they auction off every single click that hundred dollars 99 went to Google one went to the company the important thing to understand is not that Direct Marketing is right or wrong but that you can't do both at the same time in the same way if you're a brand marketer please don't measure things that don't matter just because you can how many Twitter followers you have doesn't matter it doesn't matter because there are lots

of ways to make the number of Twitter followers you have go up then have nothing to do with making the value of your brand go up then if you're a fundraiser for a charity the difference Between what it will take to get a million dollar donation and what it will take to get a thousand $10 donations is huge so we have to decide as we think about how we're spending our time and money are we building a brand which is not a logo which is trust which is connection which is interaction we need to build

it regardless of what we can measure that's what great brands do so the superball is a great example of this Super Bowl ads are stupid for a whole Bunch of reasons one of the reasons is you pay a premium to reach the average people you should be paying a premium to reach the specific people but you're paying to reach a large audience the only advertiser on the Super Bowl other than maybe Geico who can measure successfully whether it pays for itself is Doritos because Doritos can check over half time with their computers dude enough people

Go out for more snacks that Doritos sales made up enough to pay for the ad right but for everybody else it's a brand ad we are telling a story that we cannot measure don't try because as soon as you try to measure it you will get fake data which will cause you to do bad things going forward I could talk about this all day but I'm not gonna alright the next one is this idea of how the chickens spread through Ethiopia how the Louboutin shoes spread through the New York elites it turns out when you

bring a new idea to the market about one out of six people say yes because it's new that's why they bought it because it's new so if I said if this was a ski group and I said they're opening a new ski area outside of Yellowstone who wants to try it next winter 15% of people say count me in because no one else has done this before that's why they want to do it this early adopter thing can confuse a lot of people because it looks like It's going to keep going forever and it never

does because in between the early adopter people and the people in the middle something called the chasm what the chasm says is there's a difference to people who buy stuff because it's new like Christian Louboutin sneakers with spikes on the outside and people who buy it because it works that's the next group so all those people the first two years who bought an iPad they bought it because it was new how many of you here Ever are currently wearing an Apple watch raise your hand right most of you are early adopters you might be justifying

it as saying oh this works it saves me so much time and energy but you like the fact that you have one that not everyone else has yet the magic of Apple's value is that three times they cross the chasm three times they came out with products that nerd liked and then suddenly everyone needed one that's really hard to do but it's One of the goals of the marketer okay I'm almost done with my rant and then I'm gonna start taking your questions the next one is this idea of positioning as a service so I

need to give you a little bit of background here positioning started in the 50s and then try to reach wrote a good book about it positioning says people cannot possibly remember every attribute of what you make so let's think about vodka without talking about whether all the vodkas Made in exactly the same factory if we talk about vodka we could imagine that there are vodkas you could buy on the left and right access that range from really cheap to really expensive on the other axes we could imagine vodkas you could buy that are totally neutral

or really profound tasting and flavored within those grids there's a vodka over in the left corner there's a vodka up in the top right corner you get the idea you get to draw the grid because you get To make the product because you get to tell the story and the thing about this and the shift that I'm proposing is you don't get to draw the grid to be selfish you don't get to draw the grid to say we're up in the top right hand corner everyone else sucks that's not the way it works every one

of the elements has to be okay some people want something that's really scarce some people want something that's really easy to get you're performing a Service for the people you are serving right you're saying oh if you want a more traditional thing that's our competitor so when someone comes to you and says I need you to do this you should eat early send them to your competitor because that's what you're doing is positioning you in a corner away from everybody else and we'll talk about that in more detail if you want because there's a lot

of juice in that okay the next one is this mandatory Education almost never works we remember sitting through a horrible calculus class from a horrible calculus teacher just because we had to but we don't remember anything we got taught on the other hand if you're a hockey fan you know Wayne Gretzky's statistics not because someone made you but because you were enrolled in the journey you wanted to go there learn that do this so here's what we know you have 10 million things to be Doing right now you could be on your laptop looking at

someone something else checking your email having a conversation with someone you're choosing to be in a room learning something these are choices every one of your customers have these very same choices so we have to earn enrollment so here's a tiny little movie clip it's been probably gonna be hard to see but we'll see and it's about this idea that what we could do is some other person For who they are right so she's a French chef she hates this guy who lives across the street he's trying to become a brilliant chef I would like

to I would like to make your omelet would you be interested what I need your help to break the eggs so what you can't see as both of his hands were burned the key takeaway from this is he didn't come to her and say I'm hustling you for something I want he didn't come to her and say please buy what I want to make Buy it from me it's my job to sell it to you he came to her and said I see you as the kind of person who would like to help me go

on this journey will you come with me because I can't do it without you if you earn that enrollment you don't have to worry about exit pages and sneaking around people and pop-unders and popovers or any of that because they want to go with you they would miss you if you were gone so when I come back to This list of things that we just did in a breakneck 20 minutes or so what we see is that every time you show up with a story every time you decide to spend time or money or energy

to make things better it's not going to spread because you want it to it's going to spread because the people you serve wanted to Ethiopian doesn't run billboards water health international doesn't have people in call centers spamming people on the phone instead their users tell the Others and that's what that thing in the center is it's are not it's a term from epidemiology and what it means is every person who's infected how many people do they infect so the Spanish flu which almost wiped out America in the 1910s had an are not for a while

of over 1 which meant if you got the flu you are going to in fact more than one other person which goes to infinity do the math and it only after a few months dropped below one so when someone starts Carrying around an iPad in the gym or an iPod in the gym how many other people see the white headphones and decide to go get it when someone starts using inste in the high school how long before her friends quit Facebook and start using this other platform and that if you build it to share it's

way more likely to be shared so now the punchline of all this to get back to David and the Ethiopian here's a guy Who's not from Ethiopia who's never owned a small little farm who changed the lives of 15 million people not counting all the dead chickens we'll leave that aside for now but he changed the lives of millions and millions of people what he could have done instead is said not my turn I'm not qualified he could have said this is never gonna work something bad will happen there are critics out there who don't

get what I am trying to do but he didn't because Marketers have leverage now and with that leverage comes responsibility the responsibility to say we could change what we make we could change how we do it we could change who we serve and if we change all of those things than the people we serve will be better for it so a couple personal stories as I wrap up when I was in high school I played the clarinet for eight years I didn't actually play the clarinet I took clarinet lessons That's not me But it could

have been I took clarinet lessons and what they do when they're giving you clarinet lessons is they teach you more and more notes and then they teach you more and more songs and not once in that eight years did any teacher sit me down and say you know you can't even play one note that's less worth listening to you can't even play a middle C the easiest note as well as that person playing it on Rhapsody in Blue why didn't they say to me more Isn't the point better might be the point why isn't it

okay for us to say I don't have to do what everyone else is doing but I have to do something that someone who's not getting paid thinks is better that they care enough to have missed if I wasn't gonna make it if I wasn't here if I wasn't interrupting them if I wasn't building this website who would call and complain where did you go so here's the end of that video from Italy I didn't show The whole thing so the guy's got the method the method the method the method he's a hero it moves him

all the way up to first place great I'm done except maybe not so much because it turns out that in our economy once you figure something out someone else is going to copy you and once they do it's no longer a free ride and I think that's fantastic I love that this group is called mastermind because what It means to be in a mastermind is that you are surrounded by people every one of whom is smarter than you that all of us know more than any of us that everyone is dealing with their own fear

everyone is dealing with their own stuckness that we have bosses or coworkers or boards that don't see what we need them to see but if we can learn how to talk about it how to put the idea into the world then maybe we can take the responsibility for making a Difference so a story i want to tell you is I just have an office in Boston I live just north of New York City and once or twice a month I would drive to Boston but if I drove to Boston I'll get caught in a horrible

traffic jam and I'd look up in the sky and the planes to Boston work Jim Jim Jim so I curse that the fact that I'd driven so every once in a while I would fly but when that happened we would circle the airport for hours and I would look at The cars down below but I can't win so one time I'm going to my office and bosses a long time ago before the TSA and 29 minutes after I leave my home I am in Boston it was perfect it was magnificent and do a long day

it's 8:30 at night we fly back to White Plains Airport and we circle the White Plains Airport until we run out of gas this doesn't seem like a good plan but that's what they do and they said we're gonna make an emergency landing in Albany we Think we'll be on the ground about 10:00 p.m. I'm not in favor of emergency landings but they're better than no landings so we land in Albany I don't know if you know anything about Albany but I'm not gonna get into that because I get in trouble when I talk about

Albany but it's Albany and the pilot comes on he says we're on the ground yeah I knew that and we're gonna be here for three hours or so but I Think but 1:00 a.m. I'll be able to fly us back to White Plains well it's only a 45-minute Drive so I opened my laptop I'm an early adopter so I got one of those modems in there and I go online Avis has one car left and they shot in ten minutes so I grabbed the car four-door I pay for it and I stand up on the

plane and I and I turn to the audience passengers I during their passengers I say ladies and gentlemen I Am NOT a psychopath I'm wearing a tie the thing is my car is in White Plains and so is yours I just rented a car I paid for I got three empty seats who wants a free ride home no one raised their hand as far as I know they're still in Albany and I spent the whole drive home thinking about was it my presentation was it my pitch shape and then I realized when I just before

I got to White Plains what the problem was which is this if you get off the plane It's on you it's your fault stay on the plane it's United Airlines fault and we have been trained to stay on the plane and we now live in this revolutionary time there is nobody on earth through 25 years ago could have envisioned what the life is like today for a marketer just 25 years one generation that an individual has the ability to change the minds the lives the sustenance of hundreds of thousands or millions of people because they

care enough to make A ruckus so that's my mission that's what I do all day is I encourage people to see this thing that's going on around us to get out of the how do I make tomorrow's numbers and get deeper into the why and the how of the change that we seek to make so now we got a full hour to have a conversation about it thank you for listening appreciate [Applause] so everyone this is where the status rolls in tension comes in no one wants To ask the first question I'm aware of that

yes sir please right so when I wrote for Fast Company I was the most published author they ever had and the reason was that I didn't write so that the subscribers the Fast Company would be pleased with what I wrote I wrote so they could raise their status by taking a knife and cutting my article out of the magazine xeroxing it and putting one in every single person's Mailbox at work because if they were the person who did that their status went up that was my job to point things out that they already knew but

do it in a way that they felt more powerful sharing it I wrote it for them so when we think about how we engineer virality the wrong way the manipulative way is to do it when the person has no choice your parasite right your virus being carried around the right way to do it is you've given them a tool so if you watch you Know people walking down the street at the Sundance Film Festival and brand new uggs that is not a functional choice uggs did a service for that person who's wearing them and that's

why they spread because that walking billboard says you want to be as good as me but you're not as good as me but you could be as good as me if you were I'd just much taste as I do you could buy a pair of these and the person who is wearing it is knows full well that that's what they're doing And the people at odds made the product so that they would do that and the same things true with blog posts and movements and everything in between thank you for getting us started over here

then we'll go over there yeah right yes these are great questions were starting okay so the question is about the chasm how do we know when it's coming how do we know if there is one how do we know for in it there are some things where there is no mass-market It's never going to get to the other side right raising a llama in your backyard raising a llama in your backyard for a whole bunch of logistical and cultural reasons is never going to become a thing but there was a period of time when there

were ranchers in Texas and other places who wanted to have the latest animal they were doing that so part of it is an awareness of what's come before and understanding the dreams the desires and The fears of the people in the mass market so here's an example for a really long time there were three TV networks and if it was on one of the three networks everyone knew how to talk about it everyone knew what was going on then we switched to cable cable is really different because there's many cable networks people that who have

never seen so that changed life for the people in the middle of the market because they want to watch what other people are Watching so they needed there to be a few hit cable networks because they didn't want there to be a lot of choices a lot of choices are bad if you want to watch what everyone else is watching it make sense so one of the things they do at diners in New York City is the the the menu ranges from pancakes to moo shu chicken right there's like 40 pages long but the owners

figured out they put a little blue index card that said today's specials with a paper clip That's what lots of people would order and the specials never changed they were special because the diner made more money on them that's why they were special and they were doing a service though because for the kind of person that wants to order what everyone else is ordering saying these are our favorite items solves their problem people in the middle always want that that's why they're in the middle they chose to be in the middle because being In the

middle feels safer it feels you get deniability you don't have to expend emotional energy to decide what to do right now it's always on CBS whatever is on CBS is what I'm going watch so you need to know that that's a process you're probably not going into a field that no one has ever gone into before so you see the people who've gone into this before what was that like when Richard Branson said I'm gonna sell tickets on the first orbiter he knew That almost everyone would say that's stupid it's a waste you're gonna die

but he also knew that some early adopters would eagerly wire him $250,000 because they got to tell all their friends they got in first but if he was foolish he'd imagine of business as big as United Airlines no that's not gonna cross the chasm because there's no people like us do things like this for the masses involved in that expensive Activity it's also not how much it costs so the last riff I'll give you on this is yo-yos did you yo-yo when you were in elementary school were you the first kid who out of yo-yo

okay so every two years yo-yos have faded long enough that the kids in school have forgotten the last yo-yo craze and then a kid brings in a yo-yo if the wrong in quotation mark kid brings in a yo-yo nothing happens if the right kid brings in a yo-yo then eight kids have a yo-yo I'm guessing you're One of the eight kids who how do you after the right person brought in a yo-yo right and then within two weeks 80 kids have a yo-yo it crosses the chasm briefly because it's a fad and that's what fads

are they cross the chasm briefly and then they're euros are all gone where'd they go because people want to see that go through the cycle same thing happens with stuff that's in the news and I'm glad those kids in Thailand got out of the mine but that's a classic News story that cross the chasm and then it's gone so you've got to see those and say which one am i building here and who do I need to talk to about it because if you're the wrong kid with the wrong yo-yo on the wrong day nothing

what do we got over here anybody yes all right we'll go there and then here I eat hard for me to see so what I mean by don't measure it is don't use easy measurements that benefit a media company or its agencies right Because those we know don't work my grandfather I still remember when I was 12 years old says I bought a new stereo I'm all excited and I said well what do ba he said I bought a Fischer and I said well did you listen to it said no but it's a Fischer that

was their slogan it's a Fischer so he had already determined in his mind that this was the best one because ads had persuaded him there was no way to measure that this was coming if you're the Fischer company You don't know which ad on which day led to this slogan sitting in the back of my 68 year old grandfather's head so that on the one day of his entire life that he was gonna buy a stereo this would come to mind that's the history of branding that we form initial impressions we fight to maintain the

initial impressions but then sometimes we throw them out and we decide to do the opposite right so election however many years ago John Edwards stops his Plane and gets a haircut he has a brand now how much did that cost him to have that brand how much does it cost to get rid of the brand he got rid of it even worse but you the point is that things stick with us sometimes they're in paid media sometimes they're not this is an art it is definitely not a science if you're going to be in that

business it means you need backers who will keep paying until it works and that's why there are so few brands for the ages Because you have to pay and pay and pay and then one day everyone says well of course because they've seen it in the in the ecosystem this is different than a brand that's built on interaction so Wikipedia air be brands that exists because we used them that is a sort of a hybrid between direct marketing and brand because use direct marketing to get people to use it but the experience itself becomes the

brand does that make sense so the last Example I'll give you about this back when Google was beginning to win and Bing had just come out all the Nerds were talking about how much better Google is because it's four milliseconds faster and their search results are better so someone did a test and they just changed the logos so you did a Bing search but it looked like a Google search you did a Google search and look like a Bing search and in a blind taste test people couldn't tell the difference And we know from the

Journal of wine economists that in a blind taste test sommeliers prefer twenty dollar bottles of wine to 100 dollar bottles of one they think 100 dollar bottles of wine don't taste as good but as soon as we take the blindfolds off we want the hundred dollar bottle of wine because that's brand it's part of our narrative who we are and where we see ourselves but we can't measure clicks if we're doing that clicks can help us compare a To B but they can't tell us if we're actually building a brand yes sir and then you

had a question I'll go over here and then totally true story what well I mean well let me ask you a different question have you ever been at the airport where they offered you money to give up your seat because it was overbooked do you take the money good for you most people don't take the money you've seen this right these are people who Scrape together the nickels to get on the flight 200 bucks for an hour delay you don't want 200 bucks for an hour of your time and a safe warm place with free

Wi-Fi well no I don't why well it's bad karma I've already made my commitment I have my seat I'm filled with fear what we'll have not the kind of person that sells their time to you get the idea right so on this plane it's a little bit like taking 200 bucks which is the sense that now we're Gonna go on an adventure that could turn into a John Kennedy movie that once I leave this bubble I am completely on the hook for all the things that will unfold and if you're asking about me in particular

I'm not nearly as well-known as you think I am and I don't think people on the plane knew who I was but even in that situation there are people who are going to sit here for the whole time and not ask a question same deal Like you came because you know who I am but you're not asking question so this is human nature and the empathy says that's okay I get that you're the kind of person wants to stay on the planet I get the kind of person who doesn't want to ask a question so

you look stupid I don't think you'll look stupid you'll think you'll look stupid so if I was sorry yeah you do look a little like a psychopath what does it say no no there Was no you have all the facts and I can reap I can reproduce this I have reproduced it import like so I'm number one on the standby list to get home and all I got to do is get one person to give up their seat I walk up and down the list the thing I get five hundred dollars in my hand right

who'll take 500 dollars together you see I'm number what no one no one because a whole fog comes on to people's brains and I'm doing this as an experiment because it's Fascinating to see how people interact so what would I do if I really wanted people to get off the plane and get into the car well the first thing you've got to understand is there's a difference between talking to a stranger and talking to a non stranger so if you've had an interaction with somebody you are way more likely to have another interaction with them

and another one and if you read kana Minh Thinking Fast And Slow type 1 and type 2 brain I was asking them to make a quick decision that didn't match the kind of decision you make quickly and so I would have had to make it the other kind of decision and if I had done that and then added scarcity so if I had stood up and I said there's only three seats in my car I'm passing out cards because I always carry deck of cards with me anyone who has a queen gets first dibs right

and then we'll work our way through the deck Because it's scarce now people are yearning for this thing so there's all these things in behavioral economics not to manipulate people but to help them get what they want which is home to White Plains yes sir so you're not saying should you worry about your one-star reviews that's a different question right okay so do you know what the difference is between a survey in a census a census is when you ask everybody survey is when you have a Scientific sample that acts as if it was everybody

so all the stuff you're seeing online that pretends to be a survey in search of a census is garbage it's garbage because all it's actually surveying are people who either have a chip on their shoulder or nothing better to do than answer a survey so you're not really learning anything about the population you're learning about this subset that's easy to get back to my original point metrics that are easy to Get you can learn way more by calling customers by answering the phone when customers call you by doing certain kinds of sentiment analysis Sony did

a focus group years ago for a new kind of clock radio they wanted to bring out they had ten people from the shopping mall with hidden cameras and they're showing them all the features everyone's going this is great I love this I love this the end of the fitting they said how much do you think Sony should charge for this 75 80 85 90 thank you very much we want to thank you for coming your choice as a gift 25 dollars in cash or the radio not one person picked the radio that's really interesting way

more interesting than anything they would have filled out on a Likert curved bubble thing because there you've got all this breakage so when I think about the huge number of reviews that we're being exposed to first of all if it seems out of the Ordinary is because it's faked large number of faked game reviews in the world number two I haven't read my Amazon reviews in five years and I'm not gonna start I have never met an author who says I read all my one-star reviews and I'm way better writing now than I used to

be it's not helpful JK Rowling has more one-star reviews than me because she has way more reviews than me not because she's a worse writer than me so I just not on my radar But if you're sitting there running a small business memorizing your one-star reviews I think you're crippling the idea of the minimum viable audience what a one-star review means is this isn't for me thanks for letting us know it's for them now if you've got nothing but one in two star reviews it means you have an Operations problem but it's really easy to

see go to any town look at the top reviews and Yelp they tend to skew toward fast casual restaurants Because the kind of person is posting Yelp reviews likes fast casual restaurants you look up a Michelin three-star restaurant one-star took too long to eat here okay I get it but I'm not gonna speed up my restaurant to make you happy because I can't make you happy so that's all a long way around saying there's more noise than then information here but there are lots of ways to get actual information if you are open to getting

it yes sir and then we'll do the Person behind you so the questions about building tension well yeah in the water health case we'd like you to not die right so I'm not going to count that as no I'm not not manipulative as I just demonstrated creating tension is really easy you just have to not talk for six seconds right and we tend to rush in to make tension go away when in fact we can use silence to help us let someone else feel seem let them feel like they have control of The microphone and

if you're willing to sit with science a long time you will discover changes to relationships you have with lots of humans to using silence online is really hard because people will just swipe right or left or whatever and they're gone so one of the things that creates tension online is scarcity and fear of loss so supreme has a line out the door 100 people I go to the Supreme store I was on my way someone's like what are you guys waiting For $45 t-shirts why are you waiting for $45 t-shirts across the street they have

nine dollar t-shirts we're waiting for $45 t-shirts cuz there's only 200 of them tension is created because if you don't get there in time you will be the first person who doesn't get a t-shirt right that eBay had a tension problem at the beginning which is this guy might not send me my stuff he might send me a brick in a box in the face of that tension most people left but some people Got really into it because they could find it a treasure then PayPal showed up and eliminated the tension because you got a

guarantee with the whole thing so eBay just became a store and yes they became a big profitable store but they gave up their future because anyone can be a big profitable store there wasn't any magic left go to Comic Con to watch the launch of a new movie they don't show you the whole movie they show you 45 seconds in the movie and then if the Super preview ends the Nerds want that the early adopters want the incomplete preview that's what they came for it's the tension of it might be even better than what they

showed us so in all of these things the lesson is you can't out on Amazon can't be faster than one-click can't be cheaper than Amazon don't try go in a different direction yes the person behind you okay so the questions about marketing to specific demographics first I'm going to put a wedge between Demographics and psychographics demographics have been around forever they are what you look like what I can tell from the census your age your gender things like that psychographics are how you act what you want what you believe psychographics are worth a hundred times

more than demographics there are 80 year olds driving around pickup trucks in Maine with gun racks on the back right if I use demographics I wouldn't know that Because they're 80 years old and they live in Maine but they're out there that's a psychographic thing now the thing about the internet more people use the internet than ever watched TV but it is not a mass medium it is a collection of a billion micro media does that make sense you can't there is no home page of the Internet when I worked at Yahoo there was a

home page of the Internet the home page of Yahoo sold out for a year and a half the People who bought it were buying brand they didn't want us to tell how many clicks they got because then they'd have to tell their boss they were buying brand it's really hard to do that now because it's micro so you should pay extra for the psychographics you seek and you can be really really specific so for example I don't know if anyone else here is a skate skier but I discovered Jeremy ranch which has skate skiing one

exit away and it's empty don't go I Liked it empty but I don't want them to go out of business and I was talking to the manager is a really nice guy and I said what are you doing to get the word out and he said we were doing a little this and a little this and we're gonna buy all the Facebook ads for people who live around here I think that's not how Facebook does its best work you should buy at any price Facebook ads in front of people who also follow tu na or

tune however it's Pronounced and I've also watched this and also have bought this and live in these six zip codes because those people are worth five hundred dollars each to you people who have you know a broken leg are worth zero psychographics so the idea here is it's hard to overpay for the right psychographics but if you're coming at it as a brand marketer who's used to mass media it seems insanely expensive except it's not and that urgent message for every direct marketer Online is you must test you must it is free to test no

one cares about your opinion your opinion should be will test it if someone comes up with a bad idea we'll test it cost eight dollars we'll test it that psycho is how you always come out ahead the one thing I got to add to it is if you test things on the internet enough you will build a porn site because in in every a/b situation that's the directions going to keep moving so you have to be also really Clear what is our brand what is the change we seek to make who are we here to

serve because when we can make the numbers go up by doing something that's not that you must say no because otherwise you're just going to be roadkill alright yes sir in the beard and then we'll go over there could you be you don't use your example but give me a super specific case that you'd like me to give you a non-traditional advice about Okay so let's go back to the positioning grid but before I do the positioning grid we'll say the challenge of trying to grow an SEO business is there's only two kinds of people

in the world people who know they need SEO and people who don't and people who know they need SEO probably already have someone helping them so if you want them as clients you got to get them to fire the person they're currently working with people don't think they need SEO you've got to Persuade them that they do that's a big lift particularly for a small organization right so that's where we walk into this thing that you're looking for people who are looking for you in that moment of flux so then when I look at the

positioning grid the number of axes that are available to you are huge so there are people who say I like hiring firms that specialize in what I do there are people say I like hiring firms that don't specialize in what I do Because my competitors don't know about them to extremes so you could be number one for dentists or you could be we've never had a dentist before you want to come be our dentist client and we only do one person per industry better hurry because if you don't sign up the dentist next door is

going to sign up tenshun scarcity so those could be two axes when I look at these axes up here there are some people who say I've thought about this this is the prime driver of my Business and I also know that it's worth investing in things that grow I'm the kind of person that wants real estate on Fifth Avenue not real estate in New Jersey that's one mindset there's somebody else who says and I'm not really sure this and I'm a bottom-feeder what's your price because I got an RFP I'm asking 20 people to look

at and you say we're the cheapest and so when you look at these positioning grids of what axes you're Going to put we're the fastest we only do one campaign every six months it's worth waiting for those are two extremes you got to find where can you make a promise that's true where you're going to own a corner once you do that then it gets a lot easier to imagine who you're here to serve so think about FedEx when FedEx launched I know most people here on old enough 74 when FedEx launched the idea that

you would put a piece of paper into an Envelope and someone across the country tomorrow for $12 was insane because it only cost 12 cents for them to get it in three days so FedEx first had to find people whose status would go up if they could send a letter fast not because it needed to get there fast even though that was their slogan but if they acted like it needed to get there fast so when I worked at the software company in 83 I can vividly remember this 45 FedEx envelopes ready to go every

night Because we were in a hurry we're not gonna wait for a stamp that's who FedEx was for at the beginning that's not who they are now but that's where they chose to be so yeah I get it your SEO might very well work it might very well work better than other people's SEO that's not the question questions what story do I tell my son myself my boss my coworkers about why I hired you That's what you sell we had one person back there and then I'll come back up here yes okay surprising delighting informing

versus thought leadership I get it versus validating exactly so did you read Kevin Kelly's book 20 years ago 25 years ago about the future of the Internet it's free keh keh org all of it in one book Don Mike drop done all I had to do was read That book and roll out a paragraph a week for years I was fine because everyone said wow really that's smart I was just taking another idea from Kevin along the way and there's maybe a dozen of those that could account for 80% of my output and yeah I

was the guy who named permission marketing and I was the guy who named Purple Cow but other than that I don't think I've gone first very often first is way overrated when it comes to Bringing an idea to the table relevant generous and persistent those three pieces matter way more and so often someone will stand up and say bitcoins gonna sell for 19 thousand dollars a coin and when it was a hundred right but that person wasn't persistent they were sort of flaky and not relevant I didn't know where they came from and they certainly

weren't being generous about it so even though someone said when it was A hundred he should go buy some most people didn't she was right but it didn't matter that she was first because she wasn't believed she wasn't trusted she didn't have that leverage of showing up and doing the work so that is where I think all this comes a lot of a thought leader stuff crosses my desk and it almost never is the work of years of persistent generosity it's I have this one idea where as my traffic and that's really rare yes please

[Music] so the passion for creating a ruckus well I'm not sure there you probably saw there were a lot of kids in the lobby six-year-olds just want the ruckus part right that it's the thrill from the disruption that fuels them I think I got a lot of that when I was in my 20s that oh I could break something and make it a little better that was fun but soon after that I think my shift has been if I'm sitting at a restaurant it's really Drafty and the door is open I get up and I

close it some people don't and that doesn't make me a better person that's just my habit and that's the way I feel about the work I am doing is if I'm seeing a worthwhile cause like yours that's saving so many people and I can talk about fundraising in a way that helps you raise more money how could I not and that's sort of what I'm spreading here is you're in the moment of the revolution it's happening today And 20 years from now it won't be it'll be a different one so what did you do during

this revolution that's what I feel like is my obligation and I'm Way more tired than I used to be and you know the Energizer Bunny doesn't go forever even the commercials but watching what people I've taught teach other people is fuel that keeping me going because I really think we could make things better we don't have to race to the bottom we don't have to say Iran Was right and everyone should have an armed security force we can actually make things better and if I can help with that that's enough to get on another airplane

thank you yes sir yeah I want you to alienate potential customers that would be interested I think I can articulate why that is a really good idea there can you start up you want I'll tell you how they did it Airbnb right Airbnb said to business travelers for Years nah don't they might not even change the sheets don't no don't come to Airbnb not for you right Airbnb said to people who just want to grift and go to the cheapest route nope we have a code of conduct you're part of a community don't we don't

like you go away it's not for you now as they grow and they're the biggest hotel chain in the world they're doing all this other stuff like guaranteed pricing authorized blah blah Blah so it's safer for someone who's not a crazy early adopter Jackson Hole Wyoming doesn't have money things in the way of bunny slopes as far as I know they're saying two families with four-year-olds please don't come we do not want your four-year-old on our Mountain it's not for you here's the phone number for Beaver Creek they would be happy to see you that's

how you build something of distinction if you can say Jackson Hole Is for people who want to do death-defying things off you know cliffs then don't close those slopes because those slopes are why you're there now most people will come won't actually go on that slope they just like knowing that they could that's what they sell and so again when you see a brand of distinction that's how they begin they begin by saying there's a certain mindset a certain psychographic and when they see what we do there go count me in I'm in and then

you delight them which is hard because they already know the journey you're on they're enrolled you delight them and then they tell their friends the slower ones and maybe they come to that work yes please privilege yo yo the example here use it as it relates to a Minimum Viable audience but also for that school correct yep right well so you're implying volition and intention at the beginning I don't think Duncan thought about that very much at The beginning that Duncan didn't do a lot to make sure the right kids showed up bertin sure did

right Burton Snowboards you would never see in the early days a Burton snowboard add or Patagonia add that featured Gwyneth Paltrow because if you had done that you would have completely confused who's it for what message am i sending about which status to which person and so that idea that you can sponsor or elevate that if you have a youtube channel which Testimonials are you putting on it who are these people who are speaking for you people ask me to blurb their book erroneously believing that a blurb sells books it doesn't what blurbs do is

they make the author feel confident and so I like the supporting authors to feel confident but it's a silly way for them to spend their time but if the book is mentioned by Bill Gates is one of his eight books of the year all of a sudden Bill Gates is sending a Message to Bill Gates his followers which is you talking about this book will make you look more like Bill Gates so you pick where are you going to go not because lots of people listen to the Joe Rogan podcast don't go on the Joe

Rogan podcast if you don't want to listen reach Joe Rogan listeners you do way better on a smaller podcast where the right people are listening right in quotation marks because they can carry your flag because it will help them Achieve that so why does the t-shirt have status it's just clothing some t-shirts have status among rock climbers and some t-shirts have status among skateboard is totally different people same kind of garment so you get to invent the fabric of your story and let people take it into the world yes sir okay so it's important for

me to be clear I am not telling you how to be in the world I'm trying to help you achieve your goals so if your goal is scale then I can give you advice on how to scale if your goal is to be a freelancer with clients your door that's a different goal don't do things to scale you will wreck it that make sense so there are no clones of me writing all the time in the background and if I'm on stage I'm on stage I'm gonna do this 15 times this year because I want

to do it that way by hand I'm not trying to scale so I got to Keep track of the right thing so if you're saying your comfort is when you feel secure in where you are standing and that there aren't huge surprise is positive or negative on the horizon you're in the right spot just don't hope that you're gonna get picked because Oprah is not gonna call write that in the old days if you were average enough you could fit in all the way and come out on the other side there are Kraft singles and

Heinz ketchup in more Refrigerators in America than any other products because they're the most average my argument is you can't do that anymore salsa out sells ketchup from now on not one brand of salsa many brands of salsa if we look at beer the number one best-selling beer in America is now other if we take the top 10 Bud Lights in there Miller lights in there but of the top ten the number one is the long tail all added up so that's our future that's why it pays stand for something Yes please right right so

this is a really challenging dynamic that shows up with consumer products as well so I'll start with the consumer and I'll switch to b2b I'm told that if you get a good haircut people will say looks like you got a good haircut you will then instantly tell them where you've got your haircut it's super rude to not do so that's why it's easy if you're really good at being A hairdresser to grow your practice on the other hand no one ever says you look really relaxed did you get a good massage no one ever says

that so no one ever tells anybody else about the place they got a massage so it's really hard to build a massage practice because one thing is you're supposed to talk about and one thing you're not so if we look at the growth of something like LinkedIn or Facebook why did they grow so fast they grow so fast because it works Better if your friends are using it that's Metcalfe's law that's why there are fax machines because as soon as you buy a fax machine first person who had a fax machine you can't do anything

with a fax machine if you're the only one you have to tell everyone you know your lawyer your account go get a fax machine so I could send you a fax and so it spreads so what we see with things like software as a service is that certain varieties of it are engineered to spread Because it works better if other people so slack is the homerun example of this slack in my office if I'm the only one on slack it's a little lonely so Stewart designed it to do what it did now he's got to

figure out how he wants to steer it going forward because it's not going to keep doing what it did on the other hand if you have a piece of software that's going to give your company a spectacular competitive advantage that will go away if your competitors get it Too you're definitely not going to talk about it and my point is if you're trying to build a business to grow don't make software like that or if you are going to make software like that the secret is to pick one player per industry and charge them a

huge premium so when NutraSweet first came out is that true story as well a friend of mine used work at the company the maid NutraSweet they had a choice they could go to Coke And go to Pepsi and get them both to buy it or they could have gone to just one and say we have this patented thing and your competitor can't have it bid against yourself interesting choices along the way right so that the the punchline that story is an admin made a mistake on the final ingredient and the final contract and added an

extra zero to the price per pound to one of the and they were so eager to get it they signed it so she increased their profit for the Two-year window for I playing factor 10 good day for her anyway what else we got I'm wearing you out I always do this yes right doing well or poorly at using metrics to grow sorry I will so let me give you an intuitive one which is Red Bull so there was no red bill fifty fifteen years ago out of nowhere now it's a multi multi-billion dollar brand how

did they do that did they do that by mailing a Coupon to your house no they did that by things like paying bartenders to serve Red Bull and vodka drinks to high status customers in a public way they did that by sponsoring sports events that had no sponsors so that people within those circles would see it as early adopters right because who else is going to a rock climbing competition on the outskirts of Cleveland a certain kind of early adopter well there's the Red Bull van built on top of a mini it's unusual Looking what's

your oh I don't know right CEOs in Thailand we were just going to spend the money figure it out because the profit margins ninety-five percent you're not paying for the ingredients you're paying for how it feels to order a Red Bull you're paying for the caffeine where after you drink one and that Head Start allows them to cross the chasm and oh there's a hundred people who want to be Red Bull and they're out of the easy tactics because Red Bull took them but they weren't easily measured compare that to the mattress example I gave

you so my mattress bit the dust I to buy a new mattress that's the one I bought that's why I put that picture up there it cost nine hundred and $50 fine mattress I have seen their ad four thousand times since then everywhere I go on the internet there's their ad because someone in some department said we can look at the metrics we have proof that This is building blah blah blah blah because it will lead to conversion in blah blah blah number one you're not doing it right because I already have one but number

two that's not going to be a strategy for the long haul because all you're doing is taking most your margin and giving it to an algorithmic middleman there are other ways you can do things that are memorable right that if your ad and your competitors ad are the Same except you could swap the logos you haven't done anything to build your brand and my point is that feels safe but it's never going to get to where you want to go then what gets you where you want to go is doing ads that people don't like

that don't work for some people that are hard to forget that address a problem I had before you even showed up not ads to say we raised a bunch of money please buy from us because our boards angry those ads don't Work all right we got time for a few more yes so if Whole Foods wants to cross the chasm and let's remind ourselves that walmart sells a hundred dollars worth of food every time Whole Foods sells 50 cents it's that big a difference right there we're all in this little bubble but Whole Foods is

not a mass-market retailer Whole Foods is right now becoming an everyday supermarket for a certain group of people but they charged a premium for a Long time by catering to early adopters and people who saw status in paying an extra 50 cents for an avocado right but to get from where they were to Kroger's was not something that Whole Foods could do on its own so either they had to embrace the fact that there were specialty retailer and they were going to be constantly under pressure as all the other supermarkets went online which would give

them a geographic advantage or they had a say we got to get bigger Go home and the easiest way to get big was to talk to a company that thinks through and through like a mass marketer that the the secret of Amazon that most people don't realize Amazon is very good it's better than anyone in history that's selling everything but they're not good at selling anything they can't promote a product in a way that gets it excessive sales the way Neiman Marcus can or Macy's can or even Bed Bath & Beyond count like Bed Bath

& Beyond puts A ridiculous little LED light nail clipper that and it triples it sales Amazon never does that Amazon's an algorithm does this all through the chasm to the other side and that's what they're gonna do at Whole Foods and they're gonna keep it's gonna pay for itself as it goes they made a profit on the acquisition their stock went up enough to pay for the whole thing so if your goal is ubiquity And your original company's name is relentless calm it was an exact right thing to do what else over here well good

yes please all the way in the end my biggest failure without a doubt are the things I haven't done and the most expensive one was in 1993 when a co-worker showed me this I had one of the first Internet companies co-workers showed me this thing he said this is the world wide web I said that's stupid it's slow there's No business model I don't want to see it again what did that cost me five billion dollars right easy that was expensive but mostly it's it's not just opportunities unexploited its people and changes not seen because

I was too much in a hurry to be right that I didn't see what was possible and so I try to remind myself of that and then the shift I've made since selling my company a little while ago is I don't want to be an entrepreneur at scale I want to be Someone who makes things and so I see lots of cool opportunities they got seven business plans on my laptop that I'm never going to build because I don't want to do that and I know someone else will do it I'd rather be able to

spend time teaching or opening doors for people who can go to places I can't go and don't want to go to make things better so I'm aware every day of what I'm not doing those are my big failures and I know it But it's great question yes sir right okay so this is the challenge of industrial education because the education industrial complex is real it's 100 years old and it is sustained by the fact that all the parties in it benefit from it being the way it's being so you've got compliance because factories need compliant

workers you've got certification because that ensures that the certifiers can maintain something that seems like status You've got bureaucracy that wants stability you've got I mean go on and on and on excuse me so I think it's good I wrote an 80,000 word manifesto on this called stop stealing dreams it's online there's also an 18 minute video that you could just watch that's easier to watch because 18 minutes and my argument is parents need to ask what school is for and they don't school boards need to ask what school is for teachers need to ask

What school is for kids who are over 10 need to ask what schools for we're not asking the question and if we all agree that school is for compliance and getting you in debt then I'm not gonna have a fight with you about it but we're not even asking I think school is to teach kids to solve interesting problems and teach them how to lead and on a typical school day we spend 90 seconds on those two things put together I think organized sports are designed to Keep teach kids to comply not to lead go

down the list so for me the idea of putting this idea into the world asks the question is how I got on to the path I'm on now and then the schools I'm running the alt MBA in the marketing seminar and the others that's what we do we have no tests we have no homework we have no compliance and it's peer to peer and we're watching people change I just haven't figured out how to do it at a scale that I'm happy with yet but it's Not just me there's 10,000 people who are showing up

to say there's nothing that's happening in that classroom in real time which is super expensive that belongs in that classroom in real time the way it's being done an education pot is spread and we're seeing it spread and when it spreads extraordinary things happen and the last riff I'll give you about this Nicholas Negroponte a talking about opinion leaders Nicholas invented the Smart phone invented GPS invented a whole bunch of things that you had no idea someone invented at the MIT Media Lab and he left there after a couple years ago after 25 or 30

years what he did was he filled two huge wooden crates one with android tablets that had been carefully prepped and one with big solar panels and they went to a village outside of a village outside of a village in the heart of Central Africa and they said two of the elders may we Do this and the elders said sure so in the middle of the night they dropped a box and had a tablet for every kid under 20 and they dropped the solar panel for recharging and the kids figured out within a day how to

use the tablets even though they didn't speak English they figured out and I'm getting all this dates and statistics wrong but approximately within a week some of them had figured out how to read within two weeks they were teaching the Other kids how to read within four weeks they'd figured out how to program the tablets and undone the blocks on video that had been put on the tablets they'd hacked all the tablets so they could find video lessons right and I don't know nor not there was no teacher in the room and this spectacular shift

happened and one of the reasons was there wasn't a corporate energy that was trying to get these kids to buy something or feel bad if they couldn't and mostly there Was this human need to connect and to learn and to teach and that fills me with an enormous amount of optimism because we don't need more stuff we spent more money last year in America on self storage units than movies and so making more stuff isn't the point it still gets back to what leverage will we use to make things better all right let me just

do two more and then I'm gonna hit the road anybody want to help us wrap up we'll do that wasn't it yeah was Good all yours okay so used a couple words that I'm not sure what you were when you say authentic what does that mean right so when I hear influencer marketing what I hear is paying off someone to speak on your behalf who wouldn't do it for free so that seems like the opposite of what you mean by authenticity and so again we see the short-term market or wrecking things that didn't need to

be wrecked before they got there I think authenticity is dramatically overrated and people don't actually want authenticity they want consistency they want promises made and kept so if you need shoulder surgery you don't want the surgeon to show up on the day of surgery so yeah I had a fight with my husband I really don't feel like doing surgery you want her to do surgery like a world-class surgeon that's who you hired be an authentic consistent world-class surgeon not sharing your inner feelings With me so there are a few tiny points on the Internet where

inner feelings are the currency but in general I think what people want is what we're promised I also don't think you have to be four years old to design a toy for a toddler right I think that empathy is possible and that great toys are designed by people who aren't 4 years old so where this leads is that the Procter & Gamble's of the world that are built on TV have been persuaded that the Internet Is just like TV but free and they're freaking out because they can't get anyone to click on their Tide commercials

why would you and their business was built to work on television it will not work five years from now it won't there's going to be something else that takes its place and some of its going to be people who want to be railroaded and manipulated and pushed final sale coupon code every night trickery Could people marketers do it cuz it works it works as some people want that done to them right and that's a shame and we need to educate more people so that's not the case because then they end up in debt and behind

the eight-ball but going forward early adopters opinion leaders people who can shift the world they don't just have five hundred people reading their blog they have a million people reading their blog earning their trust and attention isn't gonna happen Because you bought them off it's gonna happen because you made a product that was better and that is my hope because if we're all working to actually make things that are better so that unbridle spread the word for you a virtuous cycle is created and it's one that could lead to the kind of stability that we're

seeking thank you for ending on that note I appreciate the work you do thank you so much for you [Applause]