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How to create an experience that sells - and do you want that?
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
If you have the opportunity to reach the masses, then your follow-up effort has the opportunity to represent one's "authentic self"
I want to think I would create something I can believed in but some may believe in creating somthing that sells and the content loses its importance.
Both can be noble if you use the right language. Clearly being true to oneself is noble. If you change the language of creating for others from "sales" to "altruism" then it is more clearly a noble pursuit. The act is the same, just the motivation is different.
Perhaps Patterson does write to improve his financial standing, but perhaps he is also motivated by bringing the joy of entertainment to others. Not quite altruism. But there is something valuable to having people out there who want to study you closely to provide you with what you need, whether or not that need resonates with the provider. It just takes a special person who can form deep empathy for someone who is so different from one's own self.
Of course I'd like EVERYONE who buys essential oils to only buy ours... but since what we do has been my passion since long before the business started, I think I'll stick with what I love. The products that I love and believe in tend to sell well, while perfectly good samples that are just not my taste don't move off the shelves. So I guess our relative success in doing what we love is the answer to your question. I am (relatively) successful in making available things I love; I'm a total failure at selling something I don't believe in.
I'm leaning more and more towards the latter after seeing the results of those on a personal level who focus on money.
But yes, it's a dynamic tension, and both must be considered.
Such a tough question.
Obviously there are a lot of circumstances surrounding any decision. I believe too often we keep ourselves from succeeding by disguising fear or complacency as standing up for we believe in. A good example of this in user-centric web designers downplaying the importance of SEO and social media integration.
Are there a lot of "experts" out there right now that should be avoided? Absolutely. Should we discount the value it can bring our clients? Absolutely not. If we do our clients have to leave an established and trusted partner to enter new territory with a stranger.
I think this is valid in every industry. If we embrace the potential of things we don't fully understand versus discounting them everyone can benefit.
So to answer your question, I'm leaning towards successful. That said, I have to at least like what I'm doing even if I think it's trivial in the big picture. I can always use the proceeds from success to fuel my passion.
I don't think the choice is between creating your preferred good experience or a popular experience.
Step back, why are you creating the experience? You will have an objective and success means achieving that objective.
If you need to engage the customer, you need to accept where they are coming from and apply the only tools at your disposal - your techniques for resonating with their priorities, their expectations and their assumptions.
Whether you write a diary or a blog, you are still seeking to achieve something. It's really no different from writing to sell zillions of books. The moment you seek to engage one person or the universe, you are in the customer's court, faced with the fact that they will deliver your success. What drives them at the moment you choose to engage them will determine what you do, say and write to achieve that engagement.
I don't believe you can have true long term success selling something you don't believe in. To be able to put the time and effort that is required, there has to be passion and belief in your product or service. I think belief and passion are also necessary even when you are selling a product or service that is not your own. It is hard to sustain "the act' for very long when you don't believe in it.
This is the entire reason I left theater to go into User Experience. Each theater production (in the best case) tells a great story to a few hundred people for a few hours. Designing a better experience reaches exponentially more people by removing an otherwise frustrating moment. I loved meeting the audience, but UX is ultimately better for the karma.
The real center of the issue at question is what your personal values are. Mr. Patterson's motivators seem to be to make money; so in his eyes he is very successful.
I see this in the artistic field; my father-in-law is a fine artist of some repute. His motivators as a fine artist are to create the best painting his skill permits and to endeavor to improve that skill thru study of his betters and experimentation. He gives small regard to those artists that follow fads and/or charge exorbitantly for their work simply because they are the current rage.
It seems I would choose something popular (if I could make that choice and know it would be popular) as I think I would learn to love how much people love it. This whole thread reminds me of Sullivan's Travels (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sullivan%27s_Travels) where we try to intellectually to decide whether what we do has meaning in the world - when really the world gets to decide the meaning of our work.
I am fascinated by this question as well.
It seems you are laying out a utility spectrum. The judges/interpreters of the utility of the product are on each end...either a maker or buyer in your model.
I would add to this line of thinking that there are often multiple utilities in a product. Two people may find value in a product for different reasons or one person may have multiple reasons for embracing a product.
A related question that I think is interesting, is what is the value of the utility slight-of-hand that goes on to reduce the risk of selling something? Like attaching a celeb to a product to make something of questionable valuable a bankable product.
It also seems like all of these issues should be considered in context of culture and economics to be more precise. Taken in context, there may be appropriate short-term and long-term approaches to the different ways of creating UX and a product within a larger business strategy.
Service. (Economics?!)
Same dilemma about art. For whom?
Is it art when only you and no one else has seen or can appreciate?
Time element.(Long term- short term)
Success now to fuel passions later or passions now whatever the cost.
Surely just can't predict when it's 'time's up'. And time always offers a better perspective in hindsight.
This is easier to comment on now that I am 60.
It depends on what you want out of life as to which approach is suitable. To make a lot of money, go for what the public wants. To build a community of like-minded people by expressing yourself, go for what matters to you.
As others have commented, it depends on the goals. Building good user experiences is part of my job and while I hope the products I help create align with my personal tastes, I recognize that isn't always the case, that I work for a company and appealing to a broad audience is an important goal of the business. In my own personal creative pursuits, creating something I believe in, that truly excites and resonates with me, is more important than popular or commercial success. But yeah, both would be nice!
Great question, no doubt I would strive to figure out and sell what is popular...not for popularity sake, but I have a sense that if you know your customer's concerns, frustrations, missed opporunities or motivators, you can deliver value. There is someting very satisfying in that no matter if I'm the target customer or not!
Very interesting question, and a very open approach. I write novels, in which I try to maintain a brutal honesty about what I believe is quality. I only make things in which I believe. I see this as writing 'for the book', as opposed to 'for an audience'. I think there are a good number of people who want to read that, want the pure stuff, without additives.
Pehaps this group is your 'minimum audience', and everyone who is honest towards his or her work has one. Perhaps if you want to make that audience larger, you will start evening out the rough spots to bridge the gaps between the differences of temperament and mentality between the members of that larger audience. I can also imagine one would want to write some books 'for the book' and others 'for an audience'. Maybe if you like writing for audiences, your passion is 'writing for audiences', and it's the same things as having a passion to write for the book.
I also think Erik Fabian has some good thoughts about this.
Clearly your question is for those who are creating but as one who likes to read/view the creativity, I find I have very little patience for those "creators" that are so self absorbed that they don't have anything of relevance to share.
I watched the White Stripes guitarist in It Might Get Loud and he only seemed to care about suffering for his art. I couldn't connect with his "talent" or his music.
Those creators that can do both are amazing treasures.
Your question gets to the heart of one's purpose in life. Creating passionately to one's own vision and producing opportunistically to the public's perceived desires are not mutually exclusive. It's a Darwinistic dynamic. The public doesn't always know what it wants; it imitates, it follows the herd, it's easily seduced by the newest fad, especially effortless ones that appeal to superficial sensations rather than to deep intellect.
Not everyone is driven to create. There are producers and consumers. They also help who only stand by and admire, or pay their money to acquire others' output. This voluntary exchange of values goes back to when humans first discovered the division of labor and trading as opposed to simply marauding. The art of selling started there, where each supplied what the other needed, wanted, or might want, when respect for individual property was found to be the basis of civil society. And the height of salesmanship is creating desire, leading to trade.
People are prewired for fandom, whether sports or entertainment or patriotism or religion. But always there are the originals who "take first steps down new roads" [Ayn Rand], who create and do the hard work of plowing and seeding and seldom get the financial reward their imitators cash in on. The exceptions are the practical creators, the inventors like Bill Gates (unless they are first burned at the stake), who offer the world a new direction that is a value to all in the largest context. From a synapse firing in a single brain, to global conflagration of connectivity, humanity embraces and rewards inventions that serve life and advance human civilization.
Art is not a first tier of need. If "selling" means getting others to give you a piece of their life, their substance, in exchange for some benefit you offer in return, art--whether visual, auditory, literary, or otherwise experiential--is the flower on the end of a branch. It is the intangible ornamentation of the psyche. The survival needs, the roots and trunk, have to come first and be solidly established before we can add the trimmings. In a sound society, there is margin of safety and wealth for artists to flourish, whatever message their work encodes. And if Art is mind made visible, what artists shout from their pulsating consciousness is the value matrix of humanity. Artists are meme factories. You can trace social change through the evolution of artistic forms and tastes.
In sum, my art is the creation of "gamepuzzles for the joy of thinking"--unique tiling sets that celebrate the mind, the human capacity for thought and reasoning and problem-solving and creating beauty. I am an artist first, and only secondarily a business person to raise the monetary means to keep going. I design what pleases me, what encapsulates a piece of universal truth in its purest form. I am deeply satisfied to see the good experiences people get when they have a chance to interact with my creations, and when they make the well-reasoned and well-felt decision to buy them.
M.C. Escher in his day did not become rich, either. Now hardly anyone has not heard of him. Dare I hope that if I stay true to my vision long enough, the pendulum will eventually swing my way, too? Someone long ago told me that my problem was that my stuff is too good. That's an indictment of humanity I still hope to disprove.
-- Kate Jones
I think people respond to what is authentic. I'd like to believe that people can tell when a creator really believes in his or her work and when it is just something they are selling. But regardless, I'm not interested in doing something just to make money. Admittedly, I'm fortunate to have a career that I am slowly shaping into expressing the qualities that I would like to express, in addition to a blog with minimal readership where I can share my thoughts.
In response to other commenters, I don't think there is a clean distinction between creators and consumers any more, as tools exist for everybody to create and "user-generated content" is something anybody can do. I also think that it's important to remember that art is a connection between creator and observer - I don't believe that art has an objective quality (http://www.nehrlich.com/blog/2006/09/17/art-and-connection/). Lastly, I like Valeer's concept of a 'minimum audience' - it reminds me of Kevin Kelly's conception of 1000 true fans (http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fans.php).