Not visible in this picture, but the chandelier-gazing guy’s name tag said “Strong Male”. Unverified.
Last week the PR/marketing firm Edelman threw a party to show off their new San Francisco digs, which are on the twenty-seventh floor of the fancy skyscraper at 525 Market Street. Hence the hashtag #LifeOn27. I asked about the strategic value of this soiree at the entrance, and the door girls (who were employees) said it was a recruiting thing.
I was invited by a Promoted Tweet (Twitter’s ad unit). I would post a screenshot but I couldn’t find it again — maybe @EdelmanSF deleted the post? Or do Promoted Tweets expire and disappear? Anyway, the RSVP website was hosted on — I am not kidding — www.MarketStreetMustacheRide.com, which now redirects to www.SFEdelmanStudioTour.com. I did not witness any mustache rides, but I can’t promise they didn’t happen.
“I done grew up ’round some people livin’ their life in bottles.”
There were three kinds of open bar: alcoholic, taco, and donut. I asked the guy slinging cocktails if he thought the party was as crazy as I did, and he was like, “This is NOTHING.” Apparently many companies are terrible at marshalling resources.
‘Cause look — it’s not hard to hire people. You throw an ad up on Craigslist and applicants start emailing you right away. I guess Edelman wanted to poach other companies’ employees, who wouldn’t be trawling job listings? Maybe this makes sense, but to me it seemed overly decadent. I’m not sure a superior class of candidates decides to attend a party because the Twitter ad mentioned free booze.
Here are the snapshots I took while Alex and I wandered around:
The crowd was extremely white, with a smattering of Asian people. I only noticed one dark-brown-skinned attendee. Generally not a good sign…Empty desks. You can’t see all the Star Wars merch but I promise it was there.Alex drew a bunny on one of their chalkboards.City lights through the window. The twenty-seventh floor is wayyy high up.A twin of the chandelier that “Strong Male” was examining in the first picture.
If you can explain the business utility of this event to me, please get in touch.
“Particularly when you’re early stage, your biggest enemy is indifference. You put a product out in the world and it’s not that people hate it, it’s like they don’t even notice, they don’t even care. And one thing that we are generally good at is making people care.”
Matt Lieber of Gimlet Media on starting a company and recording the process (in conversation with Alex Blumberg and Lisa Pollak). This, my friends, is why you need marketing! And access to that interview is part of why buying a Gimlet membership was worth it — I love discussions of the “new media” biz.
I have never understood the notion that “the exception proves the rule”. The exception proves that the rule is wrong! Or at least that the rule relies on parameters not previously discussed. The exception does the exact opposite of proving the rule.
For example, you could say that Apple is the exception that proves the rule that B2B companies are more valuable than consumer-oriented ones. This is nonsense. B2B companies are more valuable — except in the case where a company peddles a beloved, must-have global product with high margins and luxury branding.
Tech-culture podcast Exponent came back from its summer hiatus on the 6th. In the most recent episode, hosts Ben Thompson and James Allworth discussed Amazon’s work culture in reaction to that now-infamous New York Times article. Their conversation touched on the necessity of soft skills even in creative environments where solid ideas take precedence over everything else.
Successful companies set high standards and enforce them. They must! There is no other way to ensure excellence. Trade-offs are inherent to this arrangement — you can’t care profoundly about your professional results, work devastatingly hard to build something amazing, and still spend plenty of quality time with your wife and kids. The laws of physics forbid it — you can only be in one place at a time. If you’re at the office, then you’re not tossing a frisbee around in the backyard.
More crucially, competitive companies develop and cherish workplace cultures that demand people to identify and demolish subpar ideas. When you prop up bad suggestions to make their progenitors feel good, you guarantee a future of low-quality initiatives. Next stop, loss of market share! It makes sense that brilliant executives want to stamp out the impulse to be nice. Except wait, no, it only makes sense superficially.
Allworth called this attitude “the primacy of ideas”. He pointed out that brutal honesty about the merit of any proposition favors “thinkers” over “feelers”. We INTJs and the like are able to maintain some emotional distance, to take a step back and rationally examine feedback. (Which doesn’t mean we aren’t hurt by criticism — Thompson added that this type of person also views their work as their source of human value. If the output is deemed inferior, we judge ourselves very harshly.)
Allworth explained that a workplace culture hostile to people who prioritize relationships will end up being a monoculture, alienating the voices of potentially useful employees and limiting diversity of thought. Well… yeah. It will.
I’m probably reacting emotionally (ha) and not being fair to either Thompson or Allworth, but it was frustrating to listen while they grudgingly came to the conclusion that there’s value in being nice. I can’t help but think that only men would hash this out at length before tentatively agreeing that maintaining relationships is important. I even felt bitter while listening. It seemed like a classic example of “feminine” strengths being devalued, left invisible by default. Of course, the conversation’s outcome was better than if they had decided soft skills weren’t worth anything at all — but did it really need to be debated?
I’m an intellect-first, analytical kind of person. I’m also a woman, socialized to be nice and put up with a lot of nonsense from other people. Maybe the combination of those contradictory tendencies makes it easy to realize that you need to present information in a way that people find acceptable. Intellectual merit isn’t everything — in fact, it isn’t anything without soft skills. Smart people who can’t work with other people aren’t going to get anything done. (To be clear, this is something the Exponent hosts mentioned and agreed on.)
Of course, I went through the same personal-growth phase that Allworth and Thompson also discussed, aggressively wanting to be right and constantly believing that I knew best, before I realized that a good idea you can’t get anyone to buy into has the same results as a bad idea. That’s really my whole point here:
A good idea that you can’t persuade people to believe in is functionally the same as a bad idea.
Even famously brutal tech founders like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos had to figure out people-friendly ways to present their plans. We know this happened in part because otherwise Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon wouldn’t be iconic companies.
Luckily, collaborators can give each other straightforward feedback without being cruel. Thompson and Allworth do it on the podcast all the time! (More on this in an upcoming review of Ask a Manager blogger Alison Green’s book Managing to Save the World.) I think that’s why I was so frustrated — the necessity of niceness, or at least courtesy, seems utterly obvious, even if only based on their own dynamic. I don’t think the topic shouldn’t have been mentioned — here I am mentioning it at length — but I wonder why the conclusion surprised them.
Have you noticed #brands in your feed, invited or not? Of course you have. Social media and email marketing are powerful channels for anyone selling a product to reach potential customers. The goal is to usher people toward the gaping maw of a sales funnel. Granted, at the moment ecommerce accounts for less than ten percent of retail sales, but the numbers are higher when it comes to apparel. A tenth may not seem like much, but the market-share is steadily growing.
Amazon logistics center in Madrid, Spain. Photo by Álvaro Ibáñez.
National or international brands have the resources and know-how to use digital sales channels with utmost savvy (notwithstanding marketers’ cringeworthy affinity for youth culture). Can smaller businesses keep up? It’s more difficult to coax a customer into your brick-and-mortar shop than it is to get them to click a link. Even when small businesses are based online, lacking economies of scale means that they can’t offer the tempting perks and discounts that big brands do. Keeping everything on sale, all the time, eats into your margins.
The proprietor of a now-closed outdoorsy retailer in Wisconsin, who prefers not to be identified by name or city, doesn’t see big brands “supporting the little guy”. In an email she explained, “Certain brands keep separate inventories for their retailers versus their online business […]. It is hard to explain to a customer that you can’t get an item, when they can go to the brand’s website and buy it direct. The brands generally offer free shipping and many times 15%-off coupon deals just for sharing their email.”
She observed, “Customers are being trained to only buy with a deal or incentive.” On the phone, this former store-owner described a man who went into a local sporting goods shop to examine the products, while as the same time searching for the best deals on his smartphone. “He had absolutely no qualms about that,” she told me. Instead of buying from the store whose inventory he was touching and evaluating, he bought from Amazon or a similar retail aggregator, in order to save a couple of dollars.
From the customer’s point of view, shopping online for the best possible deal makes complete sense. Most won’t even bother to take advantage of testing a local store’s physical goods. Why wouldn’t you purchase the same thing cheaper without even having to leave your home? Everyone knows Amazon is a cutthroat company willing to crush competitors of all sizes, but that doesn’t stop people from shopping there, and it never will. If you can pay less to buy a parka online, and have it delivered to your doorstep, the alternative must be very attractive to entice you to do otherwise.
In 2013, technology analyst Ben Thompson wrote, “With the loss of friction,” meaning hassles and barriers to action, “there is necessarily the loss of everything built on friction, including value, privacy, and livelihoods. […] The Internet is pulling out the foundations of nearly every institution and social more that our society is built upon.”
Thompson continued, “Count me with those who believe the Internet is on par with the industrial revolution, the full impact of which stretched over centuries. And it wasn’t all good. Like today, the industrial revolution included a period of time that saw many lose their jobs and a massive surge in inequality. It also lifted millions of others out of sustenance farming.” It’s not all good, but it’s not all bad either. However, when you’re a family business-owner who is being “disrupted”, it’s almost entirely bad.
Traffic on Pyrmont Bridge in Sydney, Australia. Photo via Powerhouse Museum.
The analogy doesn’t work in every respect, but mostly this is the current state of affairs: Traditional retailers are horse-drawn carriages compared to steam-powered trains, or traditional taxis compared to Uber. Because of the internet, anyone can easily set up the infrastructure to sell directly to end users. Adjust your value proposition and differentiate or die, because the market doesn’t care about your ability to put food on the table.
This is the hard truth retailers have to confront: If you can’t compete on price or convenience you have to compete on quality, but it’s impossible to compete on quality when you’re selling the exact same product that people can easily buy online for less money. All you’re left with is the experience, the feelings you can evoke and the values you extol, urging customers to “shop local” and, as the anonymous Wisconsin store-owner said, “support the little guy”. She suggested staging events and collaborating with other local businesses, all boosting the community together. Her store used to host yoga classes run by a local instructor. Then Lululemon moved in down the street and also hosted yoga classes — free ones.
Castle in the Air is a truly gorgeous shop in Berkeley, California. Photo via Yelp user Michele C.
This is all very grim. Does the internet revolution mean that retailers based in physical stores should give up hope entirely? Of course not. It means that you have to be intentional about your business strategy, and understand the ways in which you can and cannot compete. It means you have to double down when it comes to reaching the customers who you can actually serve, to whom you can offer a benefit that is meaningful to them.
Understand that shopping in person instead of defaulting to the cheapest, highest-rated item on Amazon is now a luxury. Craft a rewarding experience, whether rustic or glossy, for the customers who show up in person.
Written in early June, 2015. Languished in my Google Drive until now.
I am a member of the Amazon Associates program. If you click on an Amazon link from this site and subsequently buy something, I may receive a small commission (at no cost to you).
