Remarkable beats excellent

THE GIST

Gist: In a world of infor­ma­tion abun­dance, the most dif­fi­cult step is not to be excel­lent at what you do, but to be noticed. Any entity that is good enough and noticed will dom­i­nate the excel­lent but unre­marked one. This MP is obvi­ous for a lot of peo­ple, yet most ignore how per­va­sive and deep it is.

Another way to put it is how mar­ket­ing guru Seth Godin describes it in his not so recent but still excel­lent talk at TED:

The suc­cess is not always about what the patent is like. […] It’s about can you get your idea to spread or not. […] The way that you’re going to get what you want. Or cause the change that you want to change hap­pen. Is you’re gonna fig­ure out how to get your ideas to spread. […]What we are liv­ing in is a cen­tury of idea dif­fu­sion. […] Peo­ple who can spread ideas, regard­less of what those ideas are, win.

Ori­gins: The best expo­si­tion, by far, of this MP is given by Seth Godin in this TED pre­sen­ta­tion: (embed after the jump)

Watch the vid, really, it’s insigh­ful, short and enter­tain­ing. But if you can’t, here are the key extracts:

Con­sumers don’t care about you at all. They just don’t care. Part of the rea­son is: they got way more choices than they used to and way less time. […] And in a world where we have too many choices and too lit­tle time, the obvi­ous thing to do is just ignore stuff. […] The thing that’s gonna decide what gets talked about, what gets done, what gets built is: is it remark­able ? […] And remark­able is a very cool word, because we think it just means neat. But it also means: worth mak­ing a remark about. And that is the essence of where idea dif­fu­sion is going.

At Stake

Strat­egy: This MP shapes all dig­i­tal goods value chain, all pro­fes­sional ser­vices, etc. Almost all of them. Pervasively.

Cor­po­rate: How do you com­mu­ni­cate with your employ­ees? How do you con­vey and get across the key mes­sages about your strat­egy? How do you pro­mote employees?

Mar­ket­ing: If you’re in mar­ket­ing and ignor­ing this, well, what can I say… :-)

Action­able ?: Real­ize the neces­sity, not the lux­ury, of being remark­able, and incor­po­rate it in your check­lists and processes. It’s dif­fi­cult, but sadly not optional any­more. Quot­ing Seth:

We’re now in the fash­ion busi­ness. No mat­ter what we do for a liv­ing. We’re in the fash­ion busi­ness. And the thing is, peo­ple in the fash­ion busi­ness know what it’s like to be in the fash­ion busi­ness, they’re used to it. The rest of us has to fig­ure out how to think that way.

And don’t think that being excel­lent is going to do the job (unless it makes you remarkable):

And being very good is one of the worst thing you can pos­si­bly do. Very good is bor­ing, very good is aver­age. If it’s very good, it’s not gonna work. Because no one is gonna notice it.

MORE DETAILS

Example(s)/Exhibit(s)

118 Project: This fun but telling project is a good illus­tra­tion of the neces­sity to be remark­able. Here’s the story: the emer­gency num­ber for the fire­men in Switzer­land is the 118. In 2006, and to com­ply with fed­eral reg­u­la­tions, the national direc­tory ser­vice line 111 (you call them if you need any num­ber) was deac­ti­vated and replaced by com­mer­cial oper­a­tors with num­bers of the 18xy for­mat. As you might imag­ine, this lead to some con­fu­sion and a lot of peo­ple were mis­tak­enly call­ing the emer­gency num­ber instead of one of the direc­tory services.

So the Geneva fire­men launched a clas­sic com­mu­ni­ca­tion cam­paign, which failed to get the point across. Yet, as the phone calls con­tin­ued, pre­cious min­utes were lost for real emer­gen­cies. So a group of fire­men decided to make some­thing remark­able and this video is the end result. It’s in French, but you prob­a­bly don’t need to speak it to under­stand the power of the video. It did get noticed.

More MP ? Resources page. Sug­ges­tions, cor­rec­tions ? Com­ment and I’ll update.

[seri­al­posts]