Wain's Wednesdays: 1: Weekly Thoughts on Ecommerce & Business
They Stopped Writing Product Descriptions. Their Sales Rose…
Andy Warhol was the godfather of pop art. At one-point his work accounted for one-sixth of all revenue generated by contemporary-art sales. In 1967 he helped produce The Velvet Underground & Nico, a work Rolling Stone described as the “most prophetic rock album ever made.” He was also a successful illustrator, publicist, photographer and filmmaker. It’s as if he lived six amazing lives in the time it takes the rest of us mere mortals to live just one.
In 1988, a year after his death, he made headlines yet again for his collection of 175 kitschy cookie jars. Auctioned off to a standing room-only crowd at Sotheby’s, the final bid was $247,830. It was the largest sum ever paid for a collection of cookie jars.
In short, backstory is money! Product descriptions describe what you’re selling. Product stories let people know why it matters.Click here for more examples of this principle at work:
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How one store sold an axe for $268 that the other sold for $34
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The story Cotopaxi used for a successful launch and memorable brand
I am a fan of James Clear’s newsletter so in true great artist fashion [1], I will steal and experiment with his format but in a more business context!
[1] “Good artists copy but great ones steal” (usually attributed to Steve Jobs or Pablo Picasso)
2 Thoughts
On Avoiding Mistakes
Avoiding mistakes and bad deals is rarely celebrated but can be just as important as clinching the multi-million dollar deal. At each step along the way Jerry Levin (the legendary Time Warner CEO) could have walked away from the most destructive deal in corporate America’s history: The $350 billion AOL-Time Warner merger that destroyed 97% of shareholder value. Instead he chose to consummate it, seduced in part by the allure of a splashy press conference to announce the biggest deal ever. Had he walked away, there would have been no press attention but his job, reputation and fortune would have remained intact.
--Marshall Goldsmith, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There
On the Need to Be Less Efficient (Have More Slack)
DeMarco defines slack as “the degree of freedom required to effect change. Slack is the natural enemy of efficiency and efficiency is the natural enemy of slack.” Elsewhere, he writes: “Slack represents operational capacity sacrificed in the interests of long-term health.”
Amos Tversky (collaborator of Nobel-Prize winner Daniel Kahneman) said the secret to doing good research is to always be a little underemployed; you waste years by not being able to waste hours. Those wasted hours are necessary to figure out if you’re headed in the right direction.
Do you have enough slack in your day, week, budget and organization?
--Shane Parish, Farnam Street Blog
What I am Reading
The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene
Well researched and a better book than his popular The 48 Laws of Power (apparently the most popular book in prisons and banned in several!). A few quick observations.
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Much frustration and problems with other people result from projecting our desires, goals, and wants, on them.
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If you don’t invest the time/effort to truly understand others and get along with them, you have to work a lot harder for less success
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How to cultivate desirability and a dash of mystery. Being an open book or “Just Being yourself” is lazy and uninteresting to others!
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How to detect people’s true motives
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