Selling when people are buying
Traditionally, the only time retail puts anything on sale is after they’re sure the majority of people don’t want it anymore (after the holiday has ended). In 2009, when the financial crisis hit, companies staged pre-holiday sales as a means of self-preservation – everyone was sure sales were going to be soft and retailers were doing anything possible to clear pre-recession inventory levels. That tactic was really all about “the business”, the consumer just happened to benefit (if they felt like buying).

This year, there’s clearly a different strategy at play. This year, if people are in the mood to spend, retailers have a sale for you. And it’s usually online, it usually lasts 3 days, it usually includes free shipping, and it’s usually a percentage of your order. All those things drive more sales volume, which compensate for selling at a discount. The tools and methods are familiar, but the big idea here is that this is approaching is retailing centered on the purchaser. The retailer is having a sale BECAUSE the customer is wants to buy, versus having a sale when the season’s over (and the retailer can’t command full price.)

Release early and often
Based on how the world works today, I’m not sure there are four solid fashion seasons anymore; maybe it feels more like eight. I’m noticing early fall, late fall, early winter, and so on. Retail isn’t different from other experience based businesses- new experiences and new options drive interest and engagement. Very much like the tenant of a new start-up, retailers are taking the core audiences they have and they’re constantly pushing updates, inviting people back and spurring conversation.

Codes as currency
Start-ups use beta codes and early invites all the time, it’s an engagement tool. There’s something ephemeral about a coupon code, and there’s something elite about an early invite. Sure retailers have used online codes for a while, but if you notice they’re using them differently. Most of the time the sales last for a very short period. Retailers are staging multiple sales over shorter periods of time. Each sale pulls a different lever (shipping, specific items, volume discounts.) Through this constant campaign, traditional retail is starting to make good on the promise of being as dynamic as the web will allow it to be. I’m waiting for the next step where retailers break into using one-time use codes that have Easter egg discounts or other crazy interactions. (This will happen at some point, trust me.)

Built on buzz
A sale is a way to generate buzz; no news there. But through the use of codes, and releasing often, it seems like shoppers are visiting online stores from new directions. I haven’t been alerted to any of this online retail 2.0 through the traditional spammy email. Sites like Svpply, Pintrest, and this crazy advent of menswear blogs(?!) are creating new conversation and appreciate for clothing.

Much like a new venture, these retailers aren’t resting on their brand hoping that people will buy. They’ve gotten scrappy, they’ve found influencers, and they’re trying to build buzz in every non-traditional way possible. I’ve seriously witnessed bros trying to help bros make the right decision about which “semi-casual suede boots to buy”…and they’re sharing coupon codes!! I swear I’m living in the twilight zone. (related story here.)

So, we’ll see. I have no doubt I’m late to the fashion party, but I have a feeling some of the things these retailers are trying will probably stick with us. It also feels like maybe online retail is finding a new footing. Maybe these retailers are finally letting the shopping experience be as dynamic and fast-paced as the web wants it to be (as opposed to trying to serve a traditional channel through a digital experience). I hope so – I’m definitely not paying full price or shipping for those brown brogues I’ve been eyeing.

One of the things Joe wanted most out of this project was to experiment with a lot of extreme digital prototyping; he knew the space well and realized this project would be a great place to try a few new things. He also knew that this prototyping was above and beyond what the team had to accomplish; this would be a stretch.

Knowing himself, Joe knew that if verbally committed and told everyone (including the client) about the prototypes the team intended to build; it would be harder to go back on their word. He knew his team was capable; he was just worried they wouldn’t get around to it. If he ran his mouth, he knew they would have to deliver. And with that, what once was a stretch goal became part of the project, and the team is in the middle of organizing and prioritizing to make it happen. It’s a very cool thing to see.

By making a verbal commitment, Joe had burned his boats. If he were on an expedition that had just found new land, he would have eliminated the possibility of ever going back home. After all, the best was to ensure progress forward is to eliminate the option of going backwards.

I think about many of the great people I’ve had the chance to work with over the years, and on most efforts the very best of them make a point of very publically burning their boats. They commit to designing and building what’s in front of them. The also create a common goal that can engage and solidify a team. The effort may fail, but these people never fail the effort.

These people aren’t looking over their shoulder for the next best opportunity. They aren’t constantly running their mouths about a “pivot”. They’re digging in, and they’re going to figure it out. There are always times when a team will need to reconsider things and alter course, but there’s value in committing and working towards the goal.

So, the next time you’re up against a big scary challenge, do yourself a favor, don’t start looking for the exit. Commit to what’s in front of you; take whatever measure you need to take advantage of your opportunity. Burn your boats, it may be just the motivation you need.

In the design of the app, the developers must have really thought hard about people’s hesitance to share their location because they designed a timeline into each notification. So, if we were meeting somewhere and I was running late, I could send you a link that would display my location on map and that link would only work for a configurable amount of time, (say 30 minutes). During that time, as I moved around you could see where I was on the map. After 30 minutes, the link goes dead.

I’m pretty excited about this little bit of functionality because I think we’ve entered into a new phase of how we deal with our connected life. We have so much data and so many connections, sometimes the data or the connection would be better if it wasn’t permanent.

What if the systems that carry more temporal data really started to reflect that data’s ephemerality? Twitter is decent example of a designed to decay system, tweets only hang around for a handful of weeks. What if restaurant reviews created a year ago carried less weight than the ones made last week? What if past-date promotional emails just disappeared from my inbox? I have loads of weak Facebook connections that I wouldn’t miss if they just expired? (No offense, but that let’s me focus on the people I have greater connection with).

Right now we live at the end of the digital firehouse, everything just lands in our lap and we have to decide what to do with it. Some of The most meaningful online interactions mirror their real world counterparts. For the moments that matter now but not later, we will begin to have to design for disappearance.

Yesterday I was interviewing with a colleague of mine, Joe. Without realizing it, I think he blurted out a pretty perfect description of the idea of business design. He simply said, “we hack business models.”

I really love that statement because of all the implications of the idea of “hacking”. For me hacking implies that you’re working with an existing system and pushing and pulling on its boundaries to see what will happen. Tools can be crude and fast, but there is an eye to understanding and evolve the larger system. Hacking implies that what you’re doing isn’t a science, but there’s probably a lot of underlying laws ad principles involved. There’s no certification to be a hacker, but not everyone can do it. And to be a good hacker, you have to be pretty curious, confident, and inspired.

As I frame Business Design loosely as a hacking exercise, it also starts to draws some boundaries for what is and what isn’t business design to me. Businesses tweak their model all the time, and not every change is a design. If you increase the price for your goods, that’s not really design. If you change your entire pricing structure to communicate a new type of value, that’s probably business design. Netflix raising rates isn’t business design. Netflix launching a streaming-only pricing option is definitely the result of a lot of hacking and some pretty smart business design.

All this hacking leads me back to the idea of a system. Businesses after all are systems that create/provide value. That’s very academic sounding, but thinking of a business as a system that must remain in balance is sort of the first step to being able to frame and solve problems differently. (And there’s a ton of companies who think of a business as a kit of parts.) These systems have many interrelated parts (and people). As you add or remove some element of the business, a different component will be affected. As you design the customer experience, you have to design the business model that supports it. As you design the business model, you have to think about what sort of experience you can provide.

It’s all about the system; it’s all about balance.

At first, I was glazing over a little bit. The idea of ‘leaders of tomorrow’ is one of those phrases that’s been so co-opted by the business schools and business press of the world, it almost doesn’t mean anything anymore. But as the conversation continued, I started to realize just how massive of a challenge she was talking about.

The idea of leadership is a weird animal. It’s mostly internal personality characteristics that manifest themselves in significant ways. Good leaders see the world from a unique perspective, they get things done, they make people feel valuable. It’s easier to reflect that someone is a good leader, rather than project that they will be a good leader.

After a lot of thinking and conversations, I believe that what makes a ‘leader’ has to do with their levels of curiosity, confidence and inspiration. Of course there are lots of other characteristics at play, but those elements seem to be the three traits I see over and over that define people and how they become these strong leaders. There are many talents good leaders learn over time, these three feel a little more innate.

Now the interesting thing about these characteristics is that they don’t have formal outputs, they’re personality components. They drive how we react internally to our external environment. You see evidence if these characteristics through storytelling. These personal stories help explain the energy that moves people between moments, the ‘why’ not the ‘how’ or the ‘what’. For example, you spotted an opportunity somewhere because you are curious about the world you live in, you were able to attack a problem because your had confidence you could solve it, or you designed/built something because you were inspired and were moved to action. Etc, etc.

So, as the conversation continues, I start to realize just how curiosity, confidence, and inspiration work like the physical engine in a car or a virtual engine in a video game. They need inputs to produce outputs, and, depending on their design, they deliver radically different things.

This is the point at which I started to think about how the idea of leadership has changed. People that are twenty years old today grew up with massively different inputs than people who are forty, (and in someways we’re culturally trying to fit them into this classic leadership definition.) These people may lead in the same style, they make some of the same decisions, but the way they find their confidence, inspiration, and curiosity to make those decisions is so different, we can’t even know how it works yet.

Today, anyone curious and inspired enough can have massive amounts of data from completely different industries to consider, they have global networks they can learn from, and possibly most importantly, they can operate in near-real time. Our connected world is probably the greatest force in upending the classical definition of a leader. The problems they will tackle and outcomes they will know will probably be drastically different, but I still think those three characteristics will survive (they’ll just function very differently).

I’m definitely not doing the conversation justice, but You can see how it’s easy to focus on a lot of misleading elements when we try to identify leadership. It’s easy to go for major achievements and heroic moments, but the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’ always will tell a deeper tale.

There’s much more to think and write about here…this is sort of a beginning.

What do you think?

According to the foreword in the report, the author ( Heather LeFevre ) found herself in a pretty normal predicament; she felt she was underpaid, but couldn’t prove it. So instead of sitting on her hands, she put together an anonymous survey and sent it out to her network inquiring about their skill level and pay scale. She promised to share out the results and she’s been conducting this experiment for a few years. So, with a cheap web survey and a decent address book, she completely turned an age old process on it’s head.

This is pretty inspiring for me for a few reasons. First, instead of wringing her hands that she didn’t have the information to figure out her problem, she just went after the data. Instead of reinventing the wheel, she used simple tools she had at her disposal- an anonymous survey and an email. The data we don’t have often seems to be the first roadblock to progress; we don’t start because we’re not sure. This is such a great example of how to keep it simple and get it going.

Second, she solved for her problem, not all the world’s problems. If she would have stepped back and thought to herself “this is a big idea, how can create a salary report for the entire industry” she probably would have failed. Even limiting to the industry, she probably wouldn’t have gotten enough responses to complete the first report. By keeping the effort small, she could actually engage her audience. There are salary comparison websites all over the web (Glassdoor.com, Salary.com). These sites promise to share salary data, but they never seem to get enough scale to be useful. The idea behind the concept is so big people don’t know where they fit in the process. I love how she used technology to amplify her effort and didn’t make building the tool the object of her project.

There’s a big idea here for me. It’s the same thing that drove the success of Facebook (and social media in general). How can you use technology to amplify the network, connect people and then get the hell out of the way. The Internet isn’t much different than a good house party- if you can set the stage for people to interact, the party will usually take care of itself.

Beyond the volume of people tweeting around MJ’s death, there is this graph that compares the Iran controversy to MJ, which is far more interesting to me. Roughly the same number of tweet over a 10 day period, distributed over a different area. You can see the difference between breaking news and a complex conversation, which os pretty cool. All this from 140 characters across millions of people…that just blows my mind.

I usually find lots of inspiration from video games. I’m not a big gamer, but I’m fascinated with the space. Usually it’s less about the graphics or the game content, and more about the interactions that have been designed into the game. As games go, there seems to be a lot of really interesting things going on in massive-multiplayer games and web and phone-based games lately. Console games are sort of pushing each other deeper into this better graphics/extra gore niche. That’s mostly games for hardcore gamers. I’m more interested in what happens when there’s a wider cross-section of people just screwing around entertaining themselves.

I’ve seen a couple of interesting design/stratgey things lately, here’s my take on a few things I’ve seen. Hopefully you find some inspiration along the way.

Always Farming
I was reading this article that talked about a pretty interesting concept embedding in a game called Happy Farm. (The article is about a Chinese game but there’s also a Facebook app called Farmville and a few other knockoffs….farming seems to be the new shooting.) The gist of these games, which are massively popular at the moment, is that you have a virtual farm that you grow crops. It’s pretty simple and there’s a heavy fiddle factor around maintaining things. It sort of occupies your mind like Tetris or Minesweeper.

One of the things that makes this interaction interesting to me is that users can steal one another’s crops. The grounding concept behind the game is that it’s always on. When you’re away form your crops they grow, and you need to tend them. Sort of like a networked tamagotchi. The interesting interaction here is that if you’re not around tending your virtual farm, someone could nab your spinach.

This interaction is that makes MMPORGS like World of Warcraft pretty fascinating. Since you’re pitting real people against each other, anything can happen – you can’t design all of the foolish deviousness human opponents can create. If you were playing against the computer, that’s a rational device…playing against another player brings the fuzzy interactions that make the game interesting. I love how the simple act of making the experience open for multiple players takes something that would be very static and makes it quite dynamic. It’s a new flavor of immersion; if you’re into the game enough and you’re “AFK”, you might actually worry about someone stealing your crops and getting credit for it. That type of interaction adds this extra level of chance and richness to the experience, there’s the chance anything could happen.

Alternative Currencies

Continuing on the farming theme, many of these apps have a few ways to earn the crops you have. You can pay with time, waiting patiently for these cyber-sprouts to grow and slowly cultivating your empire. You can intervene and pay dollars and that allow you to grow crops faster. Or you can pay in effort – by taking quizzes or signing up for credit cards the game gives you some sort of currency or in-game tools in return.

Michael Arrington has sort of made a huge stink around this idea. He argues that paying through effort is a scam and it’s unfairly baiting users into all types of shady activity. Judging from his examples, he’s p right about the scam part, but the fact that you can pay through different means other than dollars is interesting. (In other gaming circles this buying in game currency rather than earning it is called ‘gold farming‘ – shocking amount of ‘farming’ going on here.)

I’m pretty interested in games that run internal economies. Lots of multiplayer games have this interaction and much like real life, money is one of the scarce good people compete for and use from trade with other goods. Most hard core gamers hate gold farming because it breaks their economy, goods aren’t scarce anymore when you can buy them in real life. This path to alternate currency is interesting because it doesn’t necessary throw an entire economy off, but it gives people an option in how they want to pay – time, money or effort. This is an interesting way to level the playing field and let the player chose which path is least scarce for them. For example, Tweens have more time than money, adults often more money than time (broad generalization, I know).

Pay For What You Get
OK, the final inspiration continues the thread around online currencies and economies. online multiplayer games usually have a two-stroke revenue engine. You pay for the software to play the game, and then you pay a subscription to play the game. It’s easy math to figure out these immersive models are big. money. Not only do you sell a $50 game, but each player drops $15 as long as they care to continue playing. To drive subscriptions, the games usually release minor patches to improve the game and major content releases (in another $50 shrink-wrapped boxes) to continue the experience.

Mike Masnik posted an article a few weeks ago talking about a pricing change to play an online DUngeons and Dragons game (yes, the exact one your thinking about). This change did away with the initial software fee and subsequent subscription in favor of allowing people to play for free and charging for certain features in the game.

The inspiring thing about this is that it orients the model around what the users really want. They want to play a game where tons of people are playing and wreaking havoc (that’s why they opted to play a massive multiplayer game in the first place….if it’s not massive, it’s not quite hat they’re looking for). ANyway, the other bit was how by removing the subscription fee, they actually “took the ceiling off of what people were willing to pay for the game”. There’s an interesting dynamic going on here, if you pay $15 you have an expectation of getting something. If you aren’t forced to pay, you’ll pay for what you want (and value what you receive). Additionally, if you take a break from playing the game for a few months, you don’t have a bagging feeling of getting charged for something you aren’t using. This segment is pretty hardcore games that switch between a few games, to keep things fresh. (The original article linked by Techdirt here.)

This balance is a pretty hard thing to pull off, and you sort of need an existing market. (Techdirt’s comments mention that the D&D brand equity really helps here.) Still, transparently pricing around exactly how consumers use your product seems so amazingly liberating. You’re now free to concentrate on how you can make them happier, and you just price against it, lots of the original complexity seems to fall away.

It’s potential over features.
It’s experience over function.

Inspiration: The World is Just Awesome (campaign by 72andSunny)

The Discovery Channel just extended it’s “the World is Awesome” campaign. The original spot was so popular, it’s even got a wikipedia entry. They could have made feature level claims around their content – we’re all in HD, most adventurous programming ever, 20% more shark week, etc. They used to have a whole campaign around ‘explore your world,’ putting the viewer more in the aggressor or adventurer postion. I love how they’ve taken a step back and decided to celebrate the world they cover with their viewer instead selling their viewer on the ‘value’ of their content.