Every Day is Special
Yesterday was apparently Cyber Monday. Last Friday was Black Friday, whatever that is. Whatever it is, the marketplace seems to feel its necessary to advertise it excessively for two weeks before and a week after. Its like those old signs on the highway that said, “You just passed X, so turn around and drive back to find X”. And today is Giving Tuesday, which I imagine we are supposed to feel is a day when we are obliged to give, just because some person in some marketing roles at some time a few years ago decided it would help to have a programmatic day for giving in early December to play on our newfound holiday spirit. I am reminded of that time in Penn Station when a bum came up to me and asked me what day it was. I said it was Thursday. He said, “No, what date is it?” I said it was December 26th, to which he queried, “You mean like the day after Christmas?” As I replied yes, he was smiling wanly and holding out his hand. I have always been a believer in rewarding creativity, so that bum got $20 from me that day, less out of holiday guilt, but more because he made me chuckle with his better than average creative giving approach. I feel less inclined to reward the creativity of the marketing person who invented Giving Tuesday. If asked, I would tell them that the worst thing you can do with charitable fundraising is to make the person you are pitching feel that they are somehow obliged to give for some arcane reason. The trick to true generosity is to tease it out of a person so that they can feel good about doing it out the goodness of their heart. I’m sure that approach will lead to much higher donations that guilt-tripping them to give…especially if the guilt is artificially imposed like per Giving Tuesday.
As I was gathering my thoughts for this introduction, I mentioned it to Kim, which I occasionally do. She added to the thought (also as she usually does) by saying that Saturday was Small Business Saturday. Presumably that means that we are supposed to use it as a day to support our local businesses rather than just throw more money at Amazon or some other big box store purveyor. I have mixed feeling about that. Generally, I do like to support local businesses, but I will also say that I feel it is decidedly out of self-interest. Having successful local commerce adds to my ease of shopping and makes my neighborhood that much more desirable in my opinion. Sometimes the store around the corner is deserving of patronage and sometimes it is not. I must admit that when it comes to small businesses I tend more to the Darwinian than the kindly. I love the comment in Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It where he describes Jesse’s family, the Burns clan, as a family that ran a store in a one-store town and still managed to lose money at it. I guess I just feel that people need to have a modicum of capability to run a successful business to earn the right to survival. A business is not a person, there need not be humanity expressed for it.
As for Amazon and big box stores, I feel Amazon is in a league all its own. It has earned its place as the foremost commercial business in the U.S. and perhaps the world (I can’t quite get behind Alibaba just yet). Does it show signs of anti-trust, certainly in the way it squeezes small vendors, but they also have the chance to take the harder and more investment-intensive route of self-promotion and marketing outside the Amazon platform, but if they fall prey to relying on the Amazon infrastructure, they get what they get. I’m not sure wither the consumer or the world is better served by a hobbled or weaker Amazon. When we were on the road yesterday I pointed out to Kim the huge double-18-wheeler sporting the Amazon Prime “smile” logo passing at speed past a little and humble FedEx delivery truck with its cute zooming arrow logo embedded in the lettering of the name between the E and X. I felt that there was great symbolism in seeing the powerful and mega Amazon road warrior gliding past FedEx, the last generation of shopping-by-mail dominance. Tom Hanks and Fred Smith, eat your hearts out. Jeff Bezos boot-strapped his creation during the clutter of the dot.com surge twenty-five years ago and just kept his head down and believed in his vision. Where others lost hope and fell by the wayside, getting dinged by Wall Street for not producing enough profits soon enough, Bezos stayed with his game plan and made it work, inventing the Kindle (to many naysayer comments including my own) and the entire Cloud Computing arena that others have now piled into. Bezos is a commercial beast and needs to be respected for what he has built. His success was no accident. I generally believe luck is a critical factor in success, and while he surely had his share of it, I feel the lion’s share of his success is his determination and brilliance. The rest of us are simply not worthy.
So, do I cry for small business and wag my finger at the Amazon beast, even when I hear of their bullying tactics with vendors? Not really. I have far too much respect for how much struggle was needed to get to the dominant position Amazon now enjoys. If you don’t like them, don’t use them. I like them and I use them and Prime really is a great merchandising concept that beats the hell out of other promotional concepts. In fact, Prime Video shares my go-to spot with Netflix whenever I’ve had enough of MSNBC for the evening and it wins more often than not since my preference has always been and will probably always be movies over series. I’m once again showing my age.
I’m going to be a bit abrasive in my assessment of this Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday phenomenon. That doesn’t qualify as good marketing in my opinion. There is so little creative about it that I actually have no respect for it as a tactic. You might as well mark up product and then put it on sale and hype the sale as a great bargain if that is the best you can do promotionally speaking. The truth of the matter is that it takes a lot more than just picking and trying to exploit a day of the week to make a difference in an endeavor. I am sure that marketing professionals are snickering as they read my assessment and thinking that I am naive to think that it can’t be simple and still effective. In their defense, people have been pricing product at 99 cents rather than $1.00 for years and there is strong empirical evidence to prove that that penny is worth 50X in impact for cultural reasons. These people will say that focusing on the day after Thanksgiving as a big buying day to launch the holiday shopping season is classically brilliant. Maybe that’s why I am not a marketing person, because it all seems idiotic to me. Giving away toasters to open bank accounts makes sense. Green stamps make sense. Coupons, as nasty as they seem, make sense. But Black Friday? I want to see a promotion that says, “Screw Black Friday, Every Day is Special at Amazon!” You can be Prime Every Day at Amazon.” Quick, somebody call Jeff Bezos.