Everyone Liked It

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as ever. Your century today, and the subject is a piece of work everybody praised and nobody bought from.

Two firms both put their message out,
Both spend the same, both go about.
One's widely shared and much admired,
One's plain, and plainly gets enquired.
By June, one's famous, one is paid.
Which one was clever? Tell me. Which was made?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two firms in the same trade, and their work, all together now, was equally good. Both decided to put some real money behind getting known, in the same quarter, at roughly the same cost.

The first commissioned something clever, and it was clever. A neat idea, beautifully made, funny in the right places, the sort of thing people send to one another with three words of admiration attached. His own trade loved it. Two rivals sent notes saying they wished they had thought of it. It was shared widely enough that he stopped counting.

He got four enquiries.

The autopsy is worth doing slowly, because he never did it and it cost him three years. Everyone who saw it remembered the joke and not the firm, which is the commonest failure of clever work: the idea does the remembering and the business is merely where the idea happened to be standing. Nothing in it said what the thing cost, who it was for, or what a person should do next. And it was admired most enthusiastically by other people in his own trade, who were never going to buy anything and whose applause felt, at the time, exactly like success.

The second firm's was plain to the point of dullness, and her friends said nothing about it at all, which stung.

It named the trouble in the first line, in the customer's words rather than hers. It said what she did about it and what it cost, in a figure. It showed a photograph of the actual work, before and after, unimproved. It carried one sentence from a customer with her name and her town beneath it. And it finished with a plain instruction: ring this number before Friday, she had four dates left in April, and here is what happens when you do.

Nobody sent it to anybody. Nobody in her trade admired it. She got sixty-one enquiries and filled her spring.

And then she did the thing that separates a business from a lucky quarter. She counted. She knew which line had brought them, because she had asked every caller how they came to ring, and so the next one was better, and the one after that better again. Her rival could not improve his, because he had no idea what had gone wrong; he only knew that everyone had liked it, which is the least useful piece of information a trader can hold.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Admiration is not evidence. The only question worth asking of any piece of marketing is whether it sold anything. Everything else is applause, and applause has a habit of arriving from the wrong people: your peers, your rivals, your friends, your own trade. Those are precisely the people who will never buy from you, and their good opinion is the most expensive thing in this business, because it feels like success and can be enjoyed immediately.

The confusion happens because cleverness is genuinely pleasant to make and to receive, so both parties are rewarded on the spot, while selling is measured later and in an unflattering column. And notice the specific way clever work fails: the idea gets remembered instead of the firm. If a person can retell your advertisement and not name you, you have paid to entertain a stranger, and entertained them rather well.

None of which is an argument for dullness, and it would be a poor reading of this letter to conclude that plainness is a virtue in itself. The second firm's work was not better because it was plain. It was better because every element in it was doing a job: naming the trouble, proving the claim, stating the price, asking for the action. Charm is welcome to come along, provided it carries something. It is only a fault when it is the whole cargo.

Then the part that compounds. Work judged by whether it sold can be improved, because a number tells you which half was wrong; work judged by whether it was liked cannot be improved at all, since admiration gives you nothing to change. That is the knife man's old discipline, and it is why one firm gets better every quarter while the other simply hopes for a better idea next time.

Three questions, and use the last thing you actually sent:

1. How many enquiries did your best-liked piece bring? Not views, not shares, not compliments: enquiries, and then customers. If you cannot say, then you did not run an advertisement, you made an entertainment, and you will never know whether it was any good.
2. Who praised it? Write down who said kind things. If the list is mostly people in your own trade and none of them are buyers, you have been marketing to the wrong room, and the applause was a cost rather than a result.
3. Does every element do a job? Go through it line by line and name the work each part performs: names the trouble, proves the claim, states the price, asks for the action. Anything that only makes it nicer is cargo you are carrying for free, and it may stay only if the rest is already aboard.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which one was clever?

The one that filled a spring. The other was witty, and wit is not the same trade: it was made to be admired, it was admired, and it did precisely what it was built to do, which was nothing at all for the man who paid for it. Cleverness that sells is the finest thing in this business. Cleverness that is merely enjoyed is a gift you have made to strangers, at your own expense, and they will not remember your name when they open it.

The verse:

They shared it round, they liked it well,
And not one soul was moved to sell.
Ask not who smiled, nor who admired,
But only this: who then enquired?

Until next time. Go and find out how many enquiries your favourite piece of work actually produced, and ask every caller this month how they came to ring.

P.S. The hardest version of this is the piece you are proud of yourself. Peer approval can be dismissed with a little discipline; your own fondness for a line you wrote cannot, and it will survive every piece of evidence you put in front of it. When the numbers and the affection disagree, the numbers are describing your customers and the affection is describing you.

Also in the archive: The Chandler's Two Jars, Lettuces and Apple Trees and The Follower Count.