American Idol as Marketing Paradigm

0 comments | Aug 23, 09:40 AM | off-road-disciplines | by Earl Creps

Today, Glen Davis, Chi Alpha missionary to Stanford University, http://www.glenandpaula.com/ sent the email below to Alicia Chole http://www.onewholeworld.com/ and me. The subject: books as a consumer product. Glen reports an interview with one of my favorites, Seth Godin http://sethgodin.typepad.com/:————————————“Seth Godin (marketing guru) was recently interviewed by Guy Kawasaki and the first question seemed apropos since both of you have already shared so much of your content in public venues:

1. Question: I am not worthy: How did you get your publisher to give you a contract for a book of stuff that you had already written and published?

Answer: Books are the new t-shirts. We used to buy t-shirts as a way of covering our hard abs. Now, though, the purpose of the t-shirt is to be a souvenir, to give us a concrete way to remember something that mattered to us—and to give us an easy way to spread that idea to others.

Every non-fiction book published today has its core ideas available for free, online. Freakonomics was in the NY Times, The Tipping Point was in the New Yorker and on Malcolm’s site, plenty of stuff is on Changethis. The Long Tail was endlessly dissected years earlier. All are bestsellers because a book adds a different sort of value.

So, yes, the words have been in various places before, but not in a handy, nearly waterproof, easily shared and referred to format. My hope is that people will identify the nine most clueless people they know and buy one for each.”

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/08/ten_questions_w.html——————————————My reaction to Seth/Glen (and I would love to hear from Alicia on this, too) goes something like this:

1. Content and delivery vehicles: I couldn’t agree more with Godin that books are usually just a handy collection of thoughts and words that have been available mostly for free elsewhere for a long time. A friend of mine, for example, just attended Willow Creek’s leadership summit, which he enjoyed, but found that almost all the famous presenters just repeated the content of their latest book, in some cases virtually verbatim. Well, if that happens after publication, it makes sense to me that it probably happens before the book appears on Amazon, too. A lot (but not all) of writers are verbal (not necessarily oral) processors so they naturally tend to develop ideas by expressing them in writing or speech. As a result, what becomes the content of a book next year often appears first as a lecture(s), seminar(s), blog(s), or article(s) this year. Of course, once a person has written several books the odds increase of assignments from publishers that require them to work from whole cloth a little more. Even then, the 1-2 years it takes to get a book in print will usually not be a period of silence. Rather, authors are working on the ideas that will become the book through a mix of research and expression. Off-Road Disciplines came together so quickly, in part, because I’ve been thinking and writing smaller pieces about the book’s theme for several years. So, yes, a book is often just a new delivery system for existing materials, the way an online course delivers material that used to appear in classroom lectures. There are probably positives and negatives to this tendency. Most of all, it’s a warning to me that, if I want to do the “next” book, I have to be talking about its core concept today.

2. Markets and American Idol: I’ll never forget the first session of AI (no matter how hard I’ve tried). The music was mediocre, the shows were cheesy, the whole idea just failed to interest me, but I did see the final show. The most significant moment was not the announcement of the winner, but the few seconds after that when a record executive walked on stage to announce that the new AI (whose name I can’t remember) would receive a recording contract with RCA, as I recall. The audience went wild. And there it was: the way to sell a product is to develop the market for it first, then infuse that market with the goods or services that you have prepared them for. (This is an interesting way to think about preaching, the first task of which is to develop a great audience.) In a sense, this market-first approach is what has happened with Off-Road Disciplines. Years before I stumbled into a contract for this book (hey, remember it ships on Sept. 8, but can be ordered on Amazon any time!) I started doing seminars, email newsletters, websites, blogs, and traveling all over the country meeting people. All of this was baptized in a small ocean of coffee consumed across America with friends, mainly younger, of all kinds. I had a rip snorting good time througout. In fact, it was really these experiences that wrote the book, I just composed the words later. After the fact, I also realized that these people and their networks now comprise the readers most likely to be interested in O-RD. I will live and die as an author by the response of this “market.” Once again, if I’m going to do another book, I have to prepare the audience for it now.

My Amazon Daily Sales Rank today: 267,783. Uh oh.

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