The Watchtower of Destruction: The Ferrett's Journal

The Watchtower of Destruction: The Ferrett's Journal - On The Cover

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October 3rd, 2008

10:39 am

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On The Cover
After a few months of buying computer books for Waldenbooks, I realized that the content of any given tutorial was next to irrelevant. Instead, the first thing I'd ask of any sales rep is, "What's the cover look like?"

That sounds weird... But in 90% of the cases, you could have written "To start Windows, aim a huge magnet at your computer's disk drive" and it would have sold roughly the same. Barring some notable exception like a famous author, the pages inside the book were one of the least-relevant things when it came to judging how it would sell.

Why? Well, it comes down to marketing and ignorance. If you were buying a computer book to learn something, that generally meant that you were starting from ground zero. If you were thumbing through "Visual Balaclava For Dummies," chances were good that you couldn't fact-check a damn thing on it. At best, you could flip through a few pages and if it sounded reasonable, you'd buy it... Even if it was total crap.

In those pre-Amazon days, there were no user reviews to check. You had no way of knowing how good it was until you read it - and if it was filled with subtle errors, you might not know it was terrible after you'd read it.

Hence, what a computer book's sales frequently came down to was, "How well would this convince me that this book knew what it was talking about if I knew nothing?" And most of that convincing came from the cover, because if they weren't drawn in by the cover, they'd never see the inside. Oh, I knew that the Idiot's Guides were frequently better than the Dummies books, that O'Reilly generally had the best books out there, that this author was phenomenally talented at getting complex ideas across in a few paragraphs...

...but contrary to the old saw, people did judge books by their cover. A bad cover, one that was grungy and unappealing and uninformative, would often tank a great book. A good cover could float a sucktacular series, making me cringe.

As such, I soon learned to separate "quality" from "marketing." I learned to drop all of my prior knowledge about "What's good" and "What's bad" and just look at what was there on the shelf as though I knew nothing at all... And I became a better buyer.

Then I made it my mission to talk to the high-quality, poor-marketing publishers as often as I could to show them how to do it better.

I say this because from a content perspective, I'm not that impressed with Sarah Palin. But from a marketing perspective, I think she's amazing. Let me give you a real-life example from about two weeks ago, when I was watching the news with my wife's folks: Biden and Palin were giving separate speeches on the collapse of Wall Street.

Biden spent his first five minutes talking about how his family grew up with normal folks, and then spun a tale of some factory workers who were going through hard times. He then spun into a diatribe against the Bush and McCain policies and how toxic they were, and how much damage they'd done.

I stopped paying attention after a few minutes. But Palin's speech? I watched the whole thing, going, "God, she's good."

When Palin spoke, she didn't tell stories about other people; they were of herself. And as opposed to Biden, who talked about these poor workers as though they were hopeless ships at the mercy of any wind that blew down from Washington, Sarah talked about the strength and the resiliency of the American worker, how they'd endured hard times before and would be again.

She talked about how terrible the Democrats were, but she had something that Biden didn't have: With every third sentence, she talked about what the Republicans were going to do, and championed the Republican philosophy as being inherently superior. I was sitting there with my brain off, going, "Man, that sounds good." If I didn't know that the Republicans had gotten us into this mess, I would have been right on Sarah's side, because she sounded like she was going to get us out of it.

Biden, on the other hand, mewled about how awful those Republicans were. Where was the hope? Where was the plan? Biden's a smart guy, I assume he has some ideas... But that wasn't on the cover.

And last night during the debates, Sarah tottered on that narrow plank, refusing to answer the questions, but she scored big. She hit Obama as waving the white flag. She hit Biden's double-talk about the vote, using it to proclaim herself an outsider, and my marketing guy inside went, "YES!" And she even called Biden out for just blasting the Bush administration over and over again without offering any solutions.

Which is the big Democratic problem. The Republicans win by default because they tell you what they want. The Democrats, on the other hand, simply tell you that OMG, BAD REPUBLICANS, WE WANT CHANGE. I once reviewed The Pursuit of Happyness by saying, "Imagine that someone dragged you into a theater and beat you with socks, each sock filled with a bar of hard soap, for one hundred and ten minutes. Then, at one hundred and eleven minutes, they give you a massage. Ninety seconds after that, you're asked to leave." And that's the Democratic ticket; BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD HOPELESS but oh yeah, we're gonna fix it.

Obama is an rock star in the Democratic community simply because he's hammered on the idea of hope and values in a way that Hillary never did. And look what he's accomplished! But even he's prone to just yammering on about the terribleness of things, and at a time when he needs to start his own Contract with America, to really give people a firm idea of what he thinks needs to happen, he's still talking in generalities. It took Wall Street melting down to give him a lead; until then, McCain was actually catching up to him. When you need a catastrophe to pull ahead in the polls, that's not good marketing.

Obama's got ideas. But they're not on the cover.

I'm no fan of Palin's politics (and I think that Biden was solid, factual, and sounded decent, at least for the first hour that I watched). But when I look at her, I see someone who sells well to people who don't know any better. She comes off as positive, enthusiastic, ready to fix things. Biden sounded like an experienced plumber looking around your house with great knowledge and going, "Oh, Christ, this is gonna cost you."

I think she connects well - her talking points are narrow, but she sticks to them admirably, and she hits that perfect note of hope and disdain that the Democrats miss. And I hope the Democrats, as opposed to going, "God, what a twit," recognize that yeah, Palin has appeal. And then figure out how to harness that appeal for themselves.

Get hope on the cover, dudes. Make us feel good. That's what America likes, and if you never make America like you, then you're just going to sit on the sidelines and watch other, more hopeful, politicians steer us into the shore.

(Tell me I'm full of it)

Comments

From:	tdanaher
Date:	October 3rd, 2008 02:52 pm (UTC)

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Really, that's it. Why do people think that politics works best when people are told what not to do? I never, ever say to myself, "Tonight for dinner I'm not going to have hot dogs" and leave it at that. I don't buy clothes because they aren't other kinds of clothes. I don't read a book specifically because it's not a magazine. I would never dream of establishing a romantic relationship by saying, "I will love this person BECAUSE they are not this other person."

Give me a reason to vote FOR. I always vote FOR. I don't vote AGAINST.

(Reply) (Thread)

From:	kmg_365
Date:	October 3rd, 2008 03:14 pm (UTC)

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In one of Ric Edelman's books he made an interesting point: The mind is not conditioned for adhering to negatives. If you say "I'm not going to spend money," chances are that you will fail. If you instead say "I am going to save $x so I can by y," your chances of success is better.

Not sure if he was just blowing smoke, or if he had some research to support that.

Lakoff

Diverting slightly