Archive for July, 2005

July 12, 2005

Found Art (2)

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More interesting notes from my trek last week on Maryland’s Eastern Shore: the area daily newspaper featured a front page story about a local man who claims to see an image in a tree stump in his front yard. An image of … not the Virgin Mary … not even Jesus … but of the late chicken magnate Frank Perdue.

I’m sure beatification proceedings continue apace.

P.S. Yes, I said the front page.

July 10, 2005

Love and Hate

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From Business Week’s Brand New Day marketing blog:

“I was dining recently with the head of product development of Chrysler who was talking about the company’s success with the 300, Dodge Magnum and new Dodge Charger. I told him that as I drove up on the Magnum wagon, I commented to my wife that I really liked it and would consider it for my next set of wheels. My wife immediately commented how much she seriously disliked the car’s looks. ‘Looks like a gangster’s car,’ she said. My dining companion said. ‘Perfect.’ At Chrysler, he explained, they are looking for 60%-70 of people to really like a design, and the other 30% or so to seriously dislike it. The danger, he said, is in creating products about which 90%+ of the public simply shrug their shoulders out of apathy.”

Unfortunately, organizational nature tends toward the mushy middle which results in products that instill apathy. In the association sector (why are we afraid to refer to it as the association industry?), a commitment to consensus in governance all too often is carried over to product development, which is not the same thing. And it results in programs and services that offend no one but don’t excite anyone, either.

The goal should not be to create an organization whose programs don’t irritate anybody in the market. It should be to create an organization that instills passionate loyalty in the members it serves. Passionate loyalty is hard to define and even harder to achieve.

One thing I can say for sure is that it requires great organizational risk — a willingness to take leaps to create programs that are unusual, that meet a market need (realized or not), and that sometimes “looks like a gangster’s car” even if 30% of your market hate that look (but the other 70% can’t wait to drive it).

“Fear of losing members” is a common motivator but not an effective one. At our organization’s annual conference last spring, our CEO proudly stated in his opening speech, “We didn’t start growing until we stopped being afraid to lose members.” To get the right members, sometimes you need to be willing to say goodbye to the wrong ones.

July 9, 2005

Found Art

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While en route from the Eastern Shore today, we noticed a billboard beside the highway advertising, I think, a used car lot. Its headline:

Jesus recycles people.
We recycle cars!

July 9, 2005

Weekly Association Blog Roundup

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Some interesting posts from association-sponsored blogs this past week:

Pat Cleary at the National Association of Manufacturers shares a scenario making the rounds about current power struggles at the AFL-CIO. He also shares a video of a Fender guitar being manufactured, reminding us that it’s cool to watch stuff get made.

Warren Bickford at the International Association of Business Communicators deletes a comment and suffers a crisis of conscience. (Comment moderation — pro or con? — continues as a subject of some debate. See Steve Rubel.)

This is technically from last week, but the National School Boards Association’s BoardBuzz shows how retiring justice Sandra Day O’Connor was a swing vote on issues important to their members. (Note to BoardBuzz: Get permalinks!)

July 9, 2005

Your Web Experience

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Via Toby at Diva Marketing, I found this link (PDF) to a research project from the Online Publishers Association identifying the 22 “user experiences” that drive website usage.

Associations should take note. The most common experiences driving traffic to a site are:

A credible, safe place
Easy to use
Makes me smarter
Looks out for people like me
Entertains and absorbs me

One of the least common experiences was “worries me.”

July 8, 2005

Am I the only one…

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… who can’t see the difference between podcasting and streaming audio? Because there really isn’t a difference? Except for the RSS feed? Which is just downloading the streaming audio? And “podcasting” sounds slightly cooler than “Internet radio” which sounds irredeemably geeky?

Perception is everything.