Doubtful Intel’s cofounder Gordon Moore realized how much disruption his 1965 paper would cause. Moore’s Law noted transistors capable of being inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit double every two years. Computers become more powerful even as costs decline.
Moore’s law is the secret driver to our modern world. Look at the similarity between the Moore’s Law graph and Technorati’s graph of the explosion of the blogosphere. These two separate charts illustrate the same trend. Computing power gets cheaper every year changing the world around us in dramatic and unanticipated ways.
(First chart shows effect of Moore's Law with computing power increasing as costs decline. Second chart on the right shows the growth of the Internet. If these charts look similar it is because they are. They aren't similar in data being graphed. They are similar in cause and effect.)
In September 1998, thirty-three years after Gordon Moore’s paper, two Stanford Ph.D. students and Google creators Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page understood the new law’s implication – creators make markets and digital markets naturally reach toward infinity. Google may be the most powerful “less is more” tool ever created.
Less is more is becoming a dominant trend in our post Moore’s Law world. Here is how Harvard Business Review explains the modern consumer journey:
…today’s consumers, assaulted by media and awash in choices, often reduce the number of products they consider at the outset.
Ref: Branding in the Digital Age: You’re Spending Your Money in All the Wrong Places – HBR December, 2010
There are more than two hundred million web sites. It takes almost 400 years to visit every site spending a minute on each. 60,000 books are published every year. 18,000 magazines generate a quarter of a trillion pages of editorial content yearly. There are 15,000 new grocery products yearly even though the average family only buys 150 distinct Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) each year. Less is more is and will be the most dominant trend in a post Moore’s Law world.
Attention as the true currency of an overloaded times is another important trend. Here is how The Attention Economy defines the issue:
Certainly the attention economy has laws of supply and demand. The most obvious one is that as the amount of information increases the demand for attention increases. As Nobel prize-winning economist Herbert Simon puts it, ‘What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.’ Ref: The Attention Economy by Davenport and Beck pg. 11 emphases added
Up is DownThis post is dedicated to Joe. Joe is my financial friend who wrestles with valuation. Why, Joe wonders, is Twitter worth almost $4 billion. Facebook made less than 3% last year, he likes to point out, how can it be worth more than $11 billion? The world is upside down. When I started selling bar soap in upstate New York I was part of an army. P&G had thousands of Sales Reps just like me combing over grocery store shelves looking to pick up a little real estate here and there. Back in the day the battle was on and it was about shelf space. Then Moore’s Law shows up and shelf space became infinite. Winning a little grocery real estate became moot. Real estate without consumer demand is wasted.
Consumer demand, that strange kismet of purchase, pleasure and brand advocacy, starts with attention. If you don’t know my widget exists you can’t buy it. The number of things in the world is easy to describe – there are too many. One of my favorite factoids is 15,000 new grocery items introduced yearly despite the average family only buying 150 distinct products in a year. This statistic explains the battle ahead clearly; the future is about grabbing attention and keeping it by living up to your brand’s promises and being exceptional. Not exceptional? Stay in bed, don’t even bother because only exceptional brands will make it. If your business idea isn’t changing the world then it won’t fly.
On the other hand changing the world is an impossible business plan. No one sets out to do so. It is a fool’s errand to try. The best business plans focus on solving a problem, often a small problem. Good To Great, Jim Collins excellent and highly recommended book, explains great companies are based on values. Great companies plug away on problems creating value and always knowing who they are and what they stand for.
Great companies believe and so can instill belief.This is how our new marketing world gets changed. We set out to do a job, to use technology, our smarts and our money to solve a group’s pain. We listen carefully and care about results, our customers and team. We become exceptional by failing until we don’t. We win hearts and minds simultaneously. Our customers become the best advertising we can’t buy. They help shape our widget company. They become stakeholders in our success and an integral part of our brand and company’s future. Winning hearts and minds must be the second thing right after grabbing attention. Everything a company or brand does binds its customers closer to it or pushes them away. There is no neutral.
The game isn’t even fairly weighted. It takes ten positive things, at least, to counterbalance one negative. In a global connected world where 6% of the population owns a blog (and rising) companies must do the right thing. Doing the wrong thing will bring the wrath of an angry blogosphere down upon the head of any poorly vetted marketing team. You can’t spin your way out of a hole. Marketing is as much math as anything else: the math of search engine algorithms, the math of reputation algorithms and the math of price comparison engines. Spin all you want but the math wins in the end.
The rise of social networks is not a trend in-and-of itself. Social networks are increasingly important in service of the larger marketing trend, the battle for hearts and minds. Marketing has so abused its tools, turned up the noise even as we seek peace, consumers are forced to a new search. They search for brands and products who understand and are "like me". If Google is the best less is more tool Social Networks may be the best word-of-mouth bull horn ever created. We don't make decisions alone anymore. We dip into the pool of our
Wisdom of Crowds (great book by James Surowiecki) anytime and soon, with mobile technology, anywhere we want.
If your company and brand aren't winning hearts and minds everyday good luck with that. If your company wants to win hearts and minds but lacks the marketing strategy to do so, ScentTrail E-Commerce can help. Email Martin (me) at MartinSellingZoe(at)aol and we can sit on the ground and talk of the death of kings, Google, Moore's Law and winning hearts and minds.
Martin
President
ScentTrail E-Commerce
919.360.1224
Wisdom of Crowds blog: http://nyr.kr/_wisdom_of_crowds_blog
James
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