- New Marketing Ideas With a GenY Perspective from Matt J McDonald
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Business is NOT war.
No matter how tough your office is, or no matter how kick-ass-and-take-names your work environment might be, it’s not combat.
Today, a great business has more in common with the Linux community or Wikipedia than the 101st Airborne.
It looks as though Bob Phillips and California Tortilla found the answer to the questions in my last post - the right people.
In response to me, Bob writes “In our experience the vast majority of customers and employees want to do the right thing.”
(check out the rest of his comments here)
And that’s something to be proud of.
I’ve been known to play devil’s advocate from time to time, and this post it no different. Let me say up front that I largley agree with Seth Godin on the Rock, Paper, Scissors promotion and Andrew Barbaccia makes a good point too, but there’s a big part of human nature that neither of these guys are factoring in.
People abuse good things. A lot.
I recently signed up for MySpace, and within the first 4 days I had 10 friend requests from “people” wanting me to check out their webcam. Or notes from “concerned friends” who wanted to show me the best place to get Viagra.
I use (and love) StumbleUpon to find new marketing sites, but after running into the hundredth SEO service or other pyramid scheme, it starts to drag the whole thing down a little.
My point is that while I see nothing wrong with empowering the front-line worker, I think that it has a lot of potential to be abused. The goal is to add some humanity and fun to otherwise mundane tasks, but what about the cashier who just gives everyone the discount because they’re too lazy, or don’t like playing a game? What about the person in AR that gives a prize to a certain company every time because they’re trying to go work there?
How do you fix those problems, which seem rooted in human nature?
Seth Godin is remarkable. Check out this post.
My first reaction to great ideas like this from Godin is usually “Wow. I should start doing this right now.” But the problem is that this idea isn’t a hot tip I got from him at a dinner party or on the train or in a meeting. I read it on his blog, just like thousands of others people. There goes my edge…
But is that really the case? How many people take great ideas that come from the musings of Godin and other bloggers and actually set them into motion. Is it because we’re lazy? Is it because (like me) we think someone else will get there first or do it better?
Today, hesitation equals giving up. Sometimes the best thing is just to go for it and figure out the details on the way.
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