or perhaps

MAY I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE!

Of course, I can't have your attention. I could borrow it or earn it or if I use all caps, offend you and demand it.

The most precious commodity on a momentary basis is attention. Each moment occurs only once, and if a marketer just takes it, we're understandably annoyed. There is no refund window for misused attention...

Which leads to the idea of free. In case you've been living under a rock, Chris Anderson has just unveiled the outline of the key arguments in his brilliant new book about FREE.

This is well worth a read. I've written about free on this blog about 600 times, so I think it's a pretty important topic.

One reason is the cost side, which Chris writes about so eloquently, but another reason has to do with attention. If you want someone's attention, I'm afraid you're going to have to earn it. To pay for it. To do something that makes the person who just gave you this attention feel like a fair bargain was struck.

You can do that by creating a remarkable service or product. You can do it by paying them with cash. Or you can do it with free. Free undermines the typical human's proclivity to ignore every offer. Even if it's a penny, we'll ignore it. Free changes that. In other words, buying attention is a marketing expense, and one way to budget for that is to deduct it from the cost of your product. As Tim O'Reilly says, piracy is not the enemy, obscurity is.

The interesting thing about most products and services is that we won't buy them until we know what they are and what they do. And often the best and only way to do that is to use them. For some products (like music) using them once and owning them are very close to the same thing. Hence, free. You can view that as a problem or you can see it as an opportunity. Up to you.

Marketing is not advertising, not any more. It is often found in the way you make something, talk about it and yes, price it.

Are you asking your customers what they really need?

On November 30 at the University of Toronto, CATA Alliance, Knowledge Media Design, Whetstone, Pearson, and The Access Group are co-sponsoring a My Customer, My Co-Innovator roundtable event that will take a closer look at the nascent co-innovation trend:

"How can we co-innovate our business processes in order to serve our customers in a new way? What challenges lie ahead? Who's making progress and how? In today's world, customers and competitors are consolidating, revenue targets are increasing and business complexity is at its highest peak. How can today's leaders "co-innovate" their "business processes" with their customers? What are leaders doing differently from the rest?"

As Michael Schrage recently pointed out in strategy + business magazine, more companies than ever before are working with their customers at the earliest stages of the innovation process:

"It's difficult to create products that customers want without understanding what they really need. Now that simple realization has spurred companies such as Cisco, Procter & Gamble, and Goldman Sachs to work together with their customers at the earliest stages of the innovation process, while making the entire process more transparent throughout the value chain. As a result, information flows freely between company and customer, designers have a clearer picture of what customers need, and the resulting products are more successful in the marketplace."

[image: Toronto skyline]

In the 1930's some studies were held at the Western Electric production facility outside Chicago in a place called Hawthorne. The intent of the study was simple enough: invite a handful of employees to participate in various working condition tests to determine which conditions were most conducive to increased production. Those conditions that "tested" best were then to be rolled out to the general production floor. One of things they tested was brighter lights. Production went up. Then they tested dimmer lights. Production went up. In fact, no matter what they tested, production went up!

Dr. Paul Marsden, from the London School of Economics, brought my attention to the study and the results which have come to be known as the "Hawthorne Effect." He explains it like this in the preview chapter of his book Connected Marketing:

By singling out a small group of employees to participate in an exclusive trial, participants felt valued, special and important. The special attention they received gratified their ego and created a positive emotional bond with what they were trialing. The practical upshot was that the research trials effectively transformed the research participants into advocates for whatever it was they were trialing.

What does the Hawthorne Effect have to do with growing your business? Creating advocates, or promoters, or evangelists is the first step to harnessing the power of word-of-mouth marketing. The researchers at Hawthorne created advocates by singling out a small, exclusive group, giving them special attention, and asking for their opinion. It is possible to do the same with your product or service.

Case in point: text book publishers. Whether they know it or not, text book publishers have been using the Hawthorne Effect to sell more text books for years. The smart publishers pro-actively select instructors with large adoptions and stellar reputations to review forthcoming text books. Sure, they get good feedback to improve the text, but they also realize that professors that review texts are much more likely to adopt them. I know this because I worked with a unique company called Content Connections that helps publishers do exactly that. Content Connections has developed online tools and processes that facilitate the review process and helps authors and publishers harness the power of the Hawthorne Effect.

Put the power of the Hawthorne Effect to work for your business today. Choose some customers, make them feel special, and ask for their feedback on new products or services. Not only will you get good feedback, you'll get advocates and all those they go on to tell.

Need some help? Contact us at Zeryn.