Last week, a bunch of us from Channel 4 and OMD (not Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark but our media agency) had a session to discuss how we promote the new version of channel4.com that will be launching towards the end of the year. The new site will be all about Channel 4 TV shows, the linear TX and watching video. It will build on the developments we’ve made in recent years: free Catch Up of TV shows you’ve missed; tonnes of video clips from shows on TV now as well as classic programmes from the past 26 years; lots of programme support pages to extend users’ engagement with their favourite TV. All very exciting, necessary, and exactly what Channel 4’s main website should be about.
Not to get all Carrie Bradshaw, but it got me thinking how different it is to promote a brand new, game-changing product, compared with something that is making incremental innovations.
It made me come back to one of the theories from my MBA which is pretty well known but very useful – Herzberg’s theory on motivation-hygiene factors. The logic is that there are things that can de-motivate you at work: a broken chair, your computer not working, feeling that you aren’t paid what you should be. However, when these things are fixed (your chair is comfortable, you computer works like a dream, you feel you are being paid roughly what is fair for the job you are doing) then you aren’t motivated to work harder (“wow, this chair is so comfy I’m going to try especially hard today!”). Instead, the things that motivate you are often more intangible, and are factors such as recognition, growth, responsibility – being appreciated, I guess.
Although Herzberg was talking specifically about motivation at work, you could twist it to be about the marketing of existing products which are incrementally improving. Promoting something as new that people assume you are doing already is a bit like the broken chair. Yes, it is right to launch a new version of your product that consolidates all your activities (fixing the chair), but people aren’t going to necessarily see it as new and shiny. Rather, they’ll see it as more (and hopefully better) of what you’ve been doing for years.
As an aside, if you want to become hugely well-off, one way is to come up with a management theory and get it included in MBA material. You are then quids in each time it is published by the hundreds of business schools round the world. Charles Handy, Porter’s five forces, Mintzberg’s organisational configurations. The list is endless.
My management model would be the goat fucker theory, based on the old joke: A man discovers the cure for cancer, do they call him cancer curer? No. He saves children from a burning building. Do they call him child saver? No. But he fucks one goat…
Really, it is a (cruder) version of Herzberg. You can (and should) spend a lot of time making sure that your products are what people expect them to be, people’s desks are fixed, computers work, etc., however you shouldn’t expect extra recognition or a big medal for doing so. Rather, if you mess these up (and worse, don’t also offer the factors that encourage and inspire), then people rightly get de-motivated. And you run the risk of being considered the Goat Worrier.
