Which would you rather do...

• create a experience that, even if you don't particularly care for it yourself, becomes wildly popular and puts your name on the map?

• ...or... create an experience you firmly believe in, no matter how popular (or not) it becomes?

Here I'm talking about any experience. You could be creating websites or software, or writing books, or designing products, or teaching classes, or producing events, or seeing patients. Whatever the case, what would you rather result from that experience: to be popular, or to create something that you yourself would be happy to receive?

Of course we'd like to do both. Many lucky souls manage to achieve both, and I'm always happy to meet them - and strive to be one myself with my own projects. But there's often a tradeoff between the two.

Let me put it another way. How far are you willing to defend the idea that "the customer is always right"? Let's say you've figured out that consumers absolutely love lemon-scented pork rinds, and you have the ability to bring them to market, but you happen to detest pork rinds. Is it worth it to you to get out on the street and spend a chunk of your professional life popularizing a food product you wouldn't yourself eat?

I've been fascinated by this question for most of my career - you might, in fact, say that engaging the question helped launch Creative Good and this very newsletter. Because here's the thing: the larger culture can't decide which to value. Sometimes a "good experience" is the thing that makes a boatload of money, because it serves some consumer desire, no matter the intrinsic value or integrity - "the customer is always right." And if enough people buy it, it makes for good copy.

On the other hand, sometimes the "good experience" is the thing that is most authentic, and often popular to a small minority. The scrappy restaurant with cuisine for the foodie palate, the indie film refusing to dumb down its plot or characters, the neighborhood or book or community "keeping it real" - it's practically a cliche, given how obsessed the culture is sometimes with finding the real or authentic thing.

And to say it again, of course there are people and products and brands that straddle both cases. And there's a spectrum in between. Still, it's worth considering the extremes.

This tradeoff came to mind recently when I read a profile of the author James Patterson in the New York Times magazine - well worth a read, if you haven't taken a look (read it here).

Patterson, if you're not familiar, sells more books than John Grisham, Stephen King, and Dan Brown - combined. Combined! There are popular authors, and then there's Patterson. Wow.

Not having ever read a Patterson novel, I can't comment on the quality of the writing, though Patterson himself says in the Times piece that that's not his main concern.

Patterson, instead, is very interested in sales. It's no coincidence that before becoming an author, he was a successful advertising executive: the man knows how to SELL.

And in the Times piece, Patterson gives a pithy explanation of how to sell books:

If you want to write for yourself, get a diary. If you want to write for a few friends, get a blog. But if you want to write for a lot of people, think about them a little bit. What do they like? What are their needs? A lot of people in this country go through their days numb. They need to be entertained. They need to feel something.

In other words, the customer is always right. If you want to sell books to lots of people, find out what lots of people want to read. (Rule of thumb: people who sell a lot of any particular thing - books or music or tickets or whatever - tend to be good at selling.)

In the case of Patterson, that means - to take an example from the article - looking at sales numbers of his books versus a competitor, and, well, just take a look:

When sales figures showed that he and John Grisham were running nearly neck and neck on the East Coast but that Grisham had a big lead out West, Patterson set his second thriller series, "The Women's Murder Club," about a group of women who solve murder mysteries, in San Francisco.

And that, my friends, is what it takes to write books that SELL. Find out what the customer wants, and deliver it.

Contrast that with the approach taken by the late J.D. Salinger, who took some pains to write authentically, as described by this New Yorker profile.

Salinger was generous with writers he admired, but he was unsparing about those who had what he called "disguises." He was hard on Kenneth Tynan. "No matter how he stuffs his readers with verbiage, it never amounts to a core of truth," he said. Tynan bent too much to current hip opinion, he thought. "A community of seriously hip observers is a scary and depressing thing," he said. "It takes me at least an hour to warm up when I sit down to work. ... Just taking off my own disguises takes an hour or more."

Which brings me back to my original question: if you had to choose one - and I know you'd probably like to have both - would you create something popular and financially successful in which the intrinsic quality wasn't your main concern... or would you create something you believed in, suffered for, and felt represented your authentic self, even if it didn't rise to the heights of material success?

I'm interested in your answers - post them in the comments.

P.S. I'm out of space but for those readers especially interested to dive in further, compare Patterson's approach to that of Charles Shaw, the maker of the inexpensive "Two Buck Chuck" wine, as profiled in "Drink Up," in the New Yorker, May 2009.

See also:

• Danielle Steel's writing tip

• Secrets of book publishing I wish I had known

Here's how to figure out if a new product is going to succeed. Just fill in the blank: "With this, you can finally..."

To succeed, a new product must...

1. promise to solve a problem - with people saying "finally!" when they hear it;

2. and then deliver on that promise.

Let's try some examples:

• The iPhone allows you to finally use a handheld device for phone calls, photos, music, and more with an easy-to-use interface. No more horrible user-hostile smartphone designs.

• The Kindle allows you to finally order a new book and start reading it within seconds. No trip to the bookstore, no waiting two days for a shipment.

• The Wii allows you to finally play video games with everyone in the family, at all ages, right away, without having to learn a complicated gaming interface.

The iPhone, Kindle, and Wii all promised to solve a problem, and all delivered. In the case of the iPhone, hardly anyone expected it to deliver as well as it did. No surprise that these devices have enjoyed great success. (I wrote, early on, positive reactions to all three of them, in fact - iPhone, Kindle, and Wii.)

Which brings me to the Apple iPad. Let's fill in the blank.

With the iPad, you can finally... what?

Read the paper on a big screen? Work without the distraction of a keyboard and mouse? I'm being serious - I actually am interested to know what the hook is. What's the nagging problem that just got nailed?

I know, it's got lots of features, and Apple's luscious look and feel, all good. But what exactly is it? A laptop without a keyboard and protective clamshell? A more expensive Kindle with color and fewer books? A huge iPhone without the phone calls?

On the other hand, ebook readers are getting popular enough that Apple might simply need to have a device in the race. Maybe it's not necessary this time to have a "finally!" moment. But plenty of people have come to expect that moment from Apple launches.

P.S. Yes, the name iPad is a strange choice, especially for female customers. But I thought a product named "Wii" would be a tough sell for grown men. It wasn't.

P.P.S. See also this parody commercial:

Paul English, co-founder of Kayak, in an Inc. magazine profile:

If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they'll actually stop what they're doing and fix the code. Then we don't have those questions anymore.

Other tips I liked: get an especially annoying ring on the customer service phone; send out a random customer service email to the company and investors; measure revenue per employee; don't read business books.

English says he also works with Partners In Health, which is one of the nonprofits I recommend for donations for Haitian relief.

The recent events in Haiti have reminded me of some basic truths of good experience. Such as, it's a good experience to have a roof over my head. It's a good experience to be healthy, and have access to food and running water and electricity. And so on.

I often write about the importance of basics. But here we see basics as a matter of life and death.

On the other side of the spectrum, it's easy (I'll speak for myself) to get wrapped up in the details of, say, the flow of a website, or the tactics of a product design. What a poorly worded tag line! What an awful color scheme! (Or what a great tag line, or what a good color scheme.) And so on.

Of course, there's a legitimate value to the concerns of the designer, the product manager, even, dare I say, the customer experience consultant. I just think it's important to keep things in perspective - so that when we brush something off and say "hey, it's not life or death," know that we're lucky to be able to say that.

I've thought for a long time that any discussion of good experience - whether at a conference, or in a book, or in an ongoing newsletter! - should be careful to include voices from all parts of the spectrum. What use is an exploration of good experience, after all, if it runs around and around the same territory?

When I ran the first Gel Health conference recently, I tried to include voices that weren't otherwise being heard in other healthcare or "patient-centered" conferences. Just for the reason above: we have to keep things in perspective. A color scheme is a lot less important to some patients than the availability of any care at all.

One of the speakers whose message continues to resonate with me was Dr. Jim Withers, who founded a street medicine practice - bringing healthcare directly to the homeless population of Pittsburgh - over 25 years ago. Street medicine is now practiced in dozens of cities worldwide, thanks to the efforts of Withers and others. Here's his Gel Video.

I have others, too, to post along these same lines - as well as a couple of book recommendations - but I wanted to start off this thread by pointing out the value of keeping perspective when considering the experience. The basics really are the most important.

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P.S. If you want to help Haiti, three good options for a donation: CARE, Doctors Without Borders, and Partners in Health (also at StandWithHaiti.org).