Thanks to Tom Asacker, I just discovered Kathy Sierra’s blog, Creating Passionate Users. For personal reasons, Kathy is no longer maintaining the blog, but I urge you to browse the posts there, which explore the intricacies of artificial intelligence, learning, productivity, marketing, and whole lot more. To be honest, I’ve just scratched the surface at this point.
While reading this post on a new, more ethical approach to marketing, I threw up my hands and proclaimed Hallelujah!.
The most important skill today is… teaching……you’re not interested in using deception and bulls*** to manipulate someone into buying a product, membership, or idea that you don’t believe in yourself. And that’s your big advantage over even the biggest and best-funded competitors: your belief.
Because what you believe in, you can teach. And teaching is the “killer app” for a newer, more ethical approach to marketing. While in the past, those who out-spent (on ads, and big promotions) would often win, that’s becoming less and less true today for a lot of things—especially the things designed for a younger, more-likely-to-be-online user community.
Kind of a markets-are-classrooms notion. Those who teach stand the best chance of getting people to become passionate. And those with the most passionate users don’t need an ad campaign when they’ve got user evangelists doing what evangelists do… talking about their passion.
Kathy’s assertion that teaching, and by extension, empowerment, is the key to making customers passionate about your products strikes me as a very good way to define what I’m doing with Nutintuit Studio.
It’s not enough anymore to throw money at fancy campaigns and high-dollar eye candy that try to convince people that your products rock. The better alternative is to get people to believe in your products, in their value and purpose for their lives.
It’s no accident that Apple has poured a lot of resources into their Genius Bar services, as well as their new personalized customer training programs. That’s right, customer training programs. And why? Because it creates belief, empowerment, and passion.
