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In case you and your job aren’t on the best of speaking terms, take a gander at 50 Bulls**t Jobs And How To Get Them. Maybe you’ll find something new that strikes your fancy. How about #9, ‘Being Donald Trump’? I wonder if they’re hiring for that position.

Some time ago I had posted on technologies that wouldn’t take off because people won’t buy something that makes them look like a dork (see: Making Your User Look Like a Geek).

I just came across this piece on the Onion News Network, which just might be my favorite news source aside from the Daily Show. Check this out as a panel of experts ponders how they can barely remember Life Before The Segway.

A colleague pointed me towards this article in the Int’l Herald Tribune looking for reasons why company’s product design efforts so often go bad: Why the overwhelming number of design flops?.

It got me thinking… is product design a science or a crapshoot? If you go looking, there is no shortage of ‘how-to’ guides. And clearly, there are a lot of useful tips you can pick up from these sources. But even if you follow all of the best practices, the reality is that you still have very low probability of actually scoring big with anything you release. Maybe you can maximize your chances of success, but in the end, it’s still a crapshoot because so many factors that go into success are totally out of your control. The future, for example, and all the unexpected twists and turns it brings. 

With all this in mind, I propose my own 3 rules for product succe$$:

1. It has to do what it’s supposed to do.
   Your perpetual motion machine has to remain in motion. Perpetually.
2. ‘What it’s supposed to do’ must be important to enough buyers to translate into big potential revenue.
   (Your sure-fire cure for schizophrenia in red-headed triplets may work, but there may not be enough buyers to make you rich).
3. It has to be different from whatever everybody else is selling.
   Unless you have a billion dollars for advertising, the best way to stand out from the crowd is to do whatever all your competitors are NOT doing. They zig, you zag.

I’ve developed these 3 rules over the course of minutes and minutes of mind-bending ruminations. Follow them, and I guarantee success. (No guarantee implied, try at your own risk.)

I posted the other day on writing copy, so while I’m on that topic, let me point out something which really annoys me: sloppily written promotional materials. If you’re creating an ad, or a website, you really should put in the effort to make sure that the grammar is not just correct, but also ‘tight’. Why? For one thing, you want to make it as easy as possible for people to get your point. If they have to slog through text which is difficult to read or unclear, they will likely move on to something easier.

For example, I’ve been checking out the website Trendwatching recently. Lots of interesting concepts covered there. Today I was reading the promo for their trend report, and found this paragraph (italics are mine):

To the point slides focusing on how trends can help your brand get (at least somewhat) closer to today’s Holy Grail: innovation! This section also answers how to apply trends in a structured fashion within the brainstorming and innovation processes. After all, you’re going to work with this report to dream up profitable new experiences, goods, and services for your customers.

3 sentences, and 2 problems I see. (I’m going to skip the lack of a verb in the first sentence, because I see they are shooting for a bullet-point feel.) First, I would have written ‘To-the-point’, which to me makes the sentence less confusing. Otherwise, readers may be left wondering what a point slide is. Second, ‘This section’ does NOT ‘answer’ how… it ‘describes how’. It’s poor grammar as written; not the most egregious example by a long shot, but still…

Picky? Yes. But you should be picky with your copy– in fact, you should be more demanding of your own copy than you are of anyone else’s. People are going to judge you by those few words you put out there in the public sphere, so make them clear and make them count. Start off by (generally) avoiding attempts to write as you would speak, since written words lack the visual and aural signals which comprise much of verbal communication. What makes perfect sense when spoken might be confusing in print.

Are you a poor speller or poor grammatician? Have someone proofread for you. Second opinions can be invaluable. You already know what you’re trying to say (we would hope), but your proofreader does not, and thus is less likely to have a blind spot for confusing or awkward copy.

Trendwatching strikes me as not a small organization. They probably have someone on staff who is picky enough about words to clean up the copy before putting it out there for all to see. Every organization should seek out the employee who goes to bed each night with “Elements of Style” under his or her pillow, and turn them loose on public-facing documents.

One of the things I enjoy about marketing is finding the little things which can make such a difference in attracting or keeping someone’s attention. For example, copywriting tips such as: DON’T WRITE LONG STRINGS OF WORDS IN ALL CAPS BECAUSE THAT MAKES YOUR SENTENCE DIFFICULT TO READ.

Another one of these little rules was covered in Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox this week, which is a great web-usability resource (although some tips, such as this one, apply to printed matter as well). A post titled Show Numbers as Numerals When Writing for Online Readers discusses… why you shouldn’t write out numbers in word form online. Seems like a good rule to follow in much printed copy too.

Web copy needs to be scannable, because most people are only going to scan your web page. They don’t have time to read the whole thing, because they just stopped by your site in between surfing for porn, so you have to get their attention fast. Nielsen writes that eye-tracking studies reveal that “numerals often stop the wandering eye”, likely because people feel that numbers stand in for facts, and people love facts.

So word to the wise: If people want facts, give them facts. And try to put the facts in numerical form to stop your readers dead in their tracks.

“Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover” just doesn’t pop out at you the same as “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover”. See, Paul Simon instinctively knew all about the numbers-not-letters thing, and you should pay attention since he’s one of the greatest living American lyricists. As a matter of fact, Simon really only dishes out about 5 ways to leave your lover (I just counted), but he astutely realized that a song titled “Five Ways To Leave Your Lover” just wouldn’t have the same hook.

Ironically, the one exception I would cite to this rule would be use of the number “1″ in a heading or title. For example, the title of this post. ‘1′ should really be written out as “One” since it looks kind of weird stuck on its own. On the other hand, you read the post this far, so maybe I’m wrong about that.

Check out The Web Development Clients’ 10 Commandments.

It’s a pretty funny list. Someone did once lament when I removed a cheesy, flashing, constantly scrolling graphic from their site homepage. And they weren’t too pleased when I told them that a) that wasn’t cool since 1996 (and it was then 2002), and b) animated graphics = porn site. But the truth can sting sometimes.

In a post the other day, I mentioned my soft spot for the ‘New Coke’ conspiracy. A few moments of googling turns up an analysis of the whole New Coke fiasco, as well as the rise of conspiracy theories as to whether Coke planned it to fail in order to drive sales of Coke ‘classic’.

So read up on the New Coke fiasco, and then later we’ll discuss if it was in fact Dr. Pepper out there on the grassy knoll.

Somewhere along the line I know I’ve read about an Asian trend called shopmobbing, or maybe mobshopping. The gist is you get together with 10 or 15 people who all want to buy the same camera, and you go to a store all at the same time, and you tell the store owner “OK, you’re either going to sell 15 cameras or none. To sell the 15, you’re going to have to give us an acceptable discount.”

Great idea, I’d love to see it in action. Like all (many?) Asian trends, maybe I’ll have the chance if it makes its way to the US.

Just recently I came across this website called trendwatching, which has a world-wide army of hipsters and trend watchers to keep paying clients well-informed on What’s Next. They recently posted something on Crowd Clout, which they describe as the trend towards the rise of crowd power. This would encompass other trends such as the mob shopping I described above. I suppose the transfer of power to the little people is inevitable once it is enabled by factors such as the internet, a networked society, and cellphone technology.

It’s really interesting, and chock full of examples of businesses and sites demonstrating various aspects of what they are describing. Check it out.

So here’s a question: how does the role of marketing change as the consumer gains the upper hand in the producer/consumer relationship?

Easter bunnies have floppy ears. But rabbit ears are not the only things that flop. So do companies, and products, and technologies.

 So in today’s Easter special, let’s turn our attention to the miserable failures of others… here’s an interesting piece I came across called Don’t Believe the Hype: The 21 Biggest Technology Flops.

That article focuses pretty much exclusively on computer-based products. But how about flops in the rest of the world of products? Just thinking off the top of my head about a few big flops over the past 20 years or so…

• Betamax. I have a friend who’s still ticked that VHS won. “Betamax was a superior technology”. Yeah yeah, and the player made a great paperweight after it got boxed out.
• Segue scooter (or whatever you’re supposed to call that thing). Weren’t we all supposed to be using these instead of cars by now? Once your ‘untippable’ product gives the leader of the free world a bloody knee, your chances of world domination decrease.
• USFL. That alternate pro football league worked out really well.
• New Coke. Actually, I’m not so sure about this one. Sure, it flopped. But I’m not convinced it was intended to succeed– I’m partway in league with the conspiracy theorists that this was actually a brilliant and devious market plan to boost sales of regular Coke by telling people it was going to be taken away from them. More on Wikipedia about that if you’re not familiar with it.

I know there’s more where they came from. So, any lulus which I missed?

What goes up comes down. Taking a little shine off the apple. I’m just about ready to start writing headlines for the Daily Show, aren’t I?

In any case, even anointed holy ones like Apple occasionally take some flack:

 Greenpeace takes issue with Apple’s environmental policies.

On a lighter note, The Best Page In The Universe would like to tell you about One thing PC users can do that Mac users can’t.