On branding

[chipotle]

Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech featured some thoughts from Jason Calacanis, founder of Weblogs, Inc. (Engadget et. al.) and Mahalo, on branding. Craigslist, the venerable classified ad service, blocked a site called Craigsfindr which searched all of the Craigslist sites at once. From Craigslist’s standpoint, it doesn’t matter that this is “adding value” to their website—they don’t want somebody scraping their data and taking it out of their sandbox, period.

This led to discussion of why, in the past decade, somebody hasn’t built something “better” than CL. One can argue that the Web 1.0-ness of Craigslist is a feature, not a bug, but it’s not hard to imagine genuine improvements to the searching and cataloging functions, not to mention the potential benefits of a (moderately) open API. So why hasn’t that happened? To do a rough transcript from the episode:

Jason: In order to get people to switch a service, it’s going to require hitting them somewhere between three and seven times with a marketing message, it’s going to require having a product which is 50%, 100% better. You can’t just make it 10% better. There’s zero switching cost, theoretically—you just type in a different domain name—but it means you have to market the heck out of it to displace it. If someone wanted to start “This Seven Days in Tech” and it was a show that was twice as good, it’s gonna take them a couple years to do it.

Leo: Thank God! […] Didn’t Tom Peters say that a product, to supplant another product, has to be not twice as good, not three times as good, but ten times as good as an established brand? You know what you have. Why take the chance unless I can see a significant improvement? And Craigslist does the job.

I couldn’t help but think about this in relation to some discussion I’ve been in on two friends’ journals recently, which those of you who read some of the same LiveJournals I do will have no doubt seen—the discussions about art archive sites. It was asserted that the “Big Brand” in our fandom isn’t very good. It isn’t: the software is slow, fragile and under-featured, and one might argue that spending $16K in donations on a new system with three single points of failure is, shall we say, sub-optimal. So why, my friends asked, aren’t better alternatives succeeding?

Honestly? I think Laporte and Calacanis nailed it. Here’s my own takeaway bullet points; visualize PowerPoint slides if it feels more Web 2.0 for you that way.

FA provided the right service at the right time: they took the deviantArt model of a gallery merged with social networking (home pages, blogs, comments, watch lists) and targeted it squarely at this fandom. It turned out a strong demand wasn’t being met. Whether or not you think FA met it well, before they started nobody else was meeting it at all. Yerf was dead, FurNation was in shambles, VCL remained state of the art for 1994, and dA was perceived as hostile.

But in barely more than a year, everything had completely changed; when you have no competition, going from zero to majority market share is easy. Anyone post-FA doesn’t have that opportunity. A “competing” site has to succeed at what Calacanis outlined above. Are any of them?

• “Significant” improvement is subjective, but the responses I saw suggested that by and large people didn’t feel the new sites were two or three—let alone ten—times as good as FA.

  • ArtSpots is, to me, the best gallery site both technically and in terms of “added value” service, but it’s made a conscious choice to limit its content in both form and rating. I don’t see this as a problem, but limits are limits. If you’re a writer, AS isn’t even under consideration; if you’re an artist who does both all-ages and mature work, you can just put it all on FA.

  • The wincingly-acronymed Furry Art Pile has an innovative approach to organization, but based on what people were saying in discussion, “different” isn’t translating to “better” for most people. It may not be translating to worse, either, but just being different isn’t good enough.

  • YiffStar has an art gallery in addition to their story archive, and they also have a second domain, AnthroStar, which essentially filters the porn out. (Did you know that? I didn’t either, but that goes with the next “slide” about marketing.) But there’s no compelling technical reason to switch from FA to YS; the gallery features seem less about expanding YS’s audience than about expanding the services for their existing audience. That’s a big audience, mind you, but so is FA’s—and my comments about FAP three bullet points down apply here, too.

• Back to Calacanis: “hit [the audience] with a marketing message” means getting a banner, an AdWords ad, a press release, something that makes the case for checking the site out in front of people’s faces, and “three to seven times” means just that: you can’t just do it once or twice, you have to keep doing it. You might object that in this fandom word of mouth is the real advertising, but two points. One, there are places to advertise just to the fandom, from web sites to con books. And two, if the discussion here or on tilton’s journal was the first time you’d heard of ArtSpots or FAP or AnthroStar, what does that say about their name recognition?

And last but not least, two personal observations:

• With the exception of YS, all of these sites—even FA—are comparatively new, and as outlined above, FA has a tremendous “first mover” advantage now. Even if FAP did everything right it would take years to build up significant mind share. And even though it’s doing some seriously cool technical stuff behind the scenes, FAP’s interface and marketing could both use work.

• FurAffinity has positioned itself as allowing erotica without explicitly (ha!) promoting it. By contrast, FAP says: hey, we know you’re really here for the porn, have a front page full of tags that sound a touch fetishy even when you’re not logged in and seeing the really “adult” stuff. Yes, I know that the audience for porn is huge—but from a marketing perspective, “we have everything including porn” trumps “we have porn and also clean stuff.”

So here’s the two million-dollar questions, figuratively speaking:

• What would a site have to offer to be better enough to get people to switch?

• What would be the best ways for that site to get sufficient name recognition to bring in the switchers?

Comments

Creature Feep!

[krdbuni.livejournal.com]

In no particular order, here's what a site would have to provide me to encourage me to leave FA:
1) Content locking. I hate to say it, but right now I'm looking at publication of Beautiful World through SofaWolf, and that means that at least until the first rounds of negotiation are complete, I probably ought to keep any piece of the work not already posted somewhere out of the limelight. That means a friends-only or alpha-readers-only or X-group-only filter on my posts so I can ensure that a few people can see them for preview and everyone else has to wait until the final purchase. Ideally, this feature would let me set on a post-by-post basis who's in and who's out.
2) Text markup at least as intelligent as BBcode if not pure HTML insert. Right now, FA offers embedded text and links to .rtf and .doc files, but if I want to post HTML-markup, I can't unless I cleverly rename it a .doc, and even then it's not embedded in the page itself. It's instead a link available for download, which isn't what I want. I want to be able to embed markup in my documents and then have them pre-rendered so people don't have to go through the extra step of downloading and reading with an alternate tool.
3) A collaboration forum intended to bring artists of multiple stripes together. "Writer seeking artist," "lyricist seeking musician," "animator seeking scripts," et cetera. I want to start encouraging mixed-media presentation and so far everyone partitions individual categories and lumps in mixed-media presentations into other categories that might or might not be appropriate.
4) The true challenge: an audience large enough to justify deleting my FA account. I don't want the hassle of having to maintain multiple "art site" accounts and then remember who has what rules about posting where. I want one account to which I can point people that serves as a gallery of all my work. In fact, I have one, on my website, but I'm too lazy to code up the content-control features I want, and I dislike the idea of getting a second LJ account and giving them any more support just to have the content-control.

Speaking of publications, by the way, I'd like to talk with you at some point about Why Coyotes Howl and the "publication through SofaWolf" process if you have the time. Beautiful World may have just expanded slightly in scope, and before I settle on a publisher I'd like to hear some thoughts from you on your experiences with them.

Kristy

Re: Creature Feep!

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

A collaboration forum would be wonderful, even though I've given up on artists in general.
"Oh, I want to concentrate on my own stories!"
"Okay. What story are you working on?"
"Nothing. But I'm not interested in working with you."
"Umm, okay then. Sorry to bother you."
"Hey, you're a writer! Can you help me figure out a way out of this corner I've written myself into?"
"..."

Re: Creature Feep!

[krdbuni.livejournal.com]

You have my deepest sympathies with this. I've been there.

Kristy

Re: Creature Feep!

[higginsdragon.livejournal.com]

4) The true challenge: an audience large enough to justify deleting my FA account. I don't want the hassle of having to maintain multiple "art site" accounts and then remember who has what rules about posting where. I want one account to which I can point people that serves as a gallery of all my work.

Just as an FYI, this is what's going to prevent any other site from getting to the size of FA. Even if a site does every feature you want and more, you're not going to switch until everyone switches, and everyone isn't going to switch until everyone else switches. So why even bother trying to please folks with stuff they want? :) That's probably one of the most important lessons of marketing I've learned at my current job--don't design features people say they want, because 90% of the time, those aren't the features they want.

Re: Creature Feep!

[krdbuni.livejournal.com]

In this case, I'd be willing to argue that the fourth is a nicety, but not a necessity. If I had a way of posting HTML-encoded stories directly to a site, locking posts to certain users, and otherwise managing my content the way I'd like, I'd be willing to jump ship and I would. However, I can get away with saying this because my readership on FA is in the teens. I'm really not losing anything by moving, and I might very well be the one that motivates a couple of other writers to jump ship, since FA only barely caters to us at all.

Still, your point in the general case is well taken. The reason LJ continues to survive is because everyone's using it, not because it has the best feature-set or quality of service.

Kristy

[astolpho.livejournal.com]

I think there might maybe be too much emphasis being placed on 'switching'. I've got accounts that I contribute to on Artspots, Furaffinity, and Deviantart, in addition to my own websites. I like to drink Mountain Dew, but that doesn't mean I won't also drink Coke or Dr. Pepper.

I also know many artists will sign up at new art sites as they pop up for the sole purpose of camping their preferred username should the site in question begin to pick up momentum, or just to make it harder for other users to pretend to be them on sites they don't post to.

I don't think it's really the artists that need to be pursuaded to switch, because artists tend to move in this giant clump; I think it's more the casual viewers that need attracting.

[higginsdragon.livejournal.com]

I totally agree with you, actually. The problem is that casual viewers are hard to find if artists don't post art, and artists tend to focus on one gallery. Understandably so, because they don't want to have to post to three or four places. My main thing is getting artists to just use ArtSpots to attract said casual viewers. But again, there isn't much point because all the artists and all the casual viewers (well, at least 75% of them) are at one place. I wouldn't mind if more artists were like you, who appreciate posting to several places. But when commissions of my own character end up on FA without regards to ArtSpots, it's a bit vexing, ya know? :)

Although we're taking ArtSpots in a totally different direction currently. I think you'll like where its going, purely from an artist's standpoint. It's starting to attract a rather different community.