Musings of a Marketing Maven

Seat­tle is well known for lots of things. Besides the rainy cli­mate, dead rock stars, envi­ron­men­tal activists, micro-brews and mediocre sports teams, we’re home to more than our share of global brands — Ama­zon, Star­bucks, Microsoft and Boe­ing among oth­ers. Inno­va­tion and cre­ativ­ity thrive here. Per­haps fueled by all those lattes we drink. Not to men­tion the big minds and free spir­its who choose to live here.

Less well known (except among book pub­lish­ers and authors), Seat­tleites read more books per capita than peo­ple in almost any other city in the US. So it’s not sur­pris­ing that estab­lished or aspir­ing authors visit Seat­tle to pitch their lat­est books. We enthu­si­as­ti­cally sup­port an ecosys­tem of inde­pen­dent book­sellers, as well as one of the most active pub­lic library sys­tems in the nation.

Last night Daniel Pink, pro­lific author, came to town to pro­mote his lat­est book, Drive: The Sur­pris­ing Truth About What Moti­vates Us. I loved his prior book, A Whole New Mind, so I per­suaded 3 friends to join me for Pink’s pre­sen­ta­tion. Lit­tle did I know that the expe­ri­ence would be more about pro­mo­tion and less about substance.

Our rep­u­ta­tion for rain, lattes, and lib­eral atti­tudes was clearly top-of-mind for Daniel Pink. He quickly shed his for­mal navy suit jacket when he real­ized he was the only guy in the audi­to­rium wear­ing a suit. (It reminded me that I couldn’t remem­ber the last time I’d seen a guy in a suit and tie in Seattle.)

Sadly, Pink com­mit­ted the clas­sic sin of under­es­ti­mat­ing his audi­ence by talk­ing down to those well-read, if casu­ally dressed Seat­tleites. He put more empha­sis on enter­tain­ment value than con­tent in the sub­stance of his remarks — clearly his goal was to per­suade us to buy his new book rather than edu­cate us. So Pink’s attempted low-brow humor — fre­quent apolo­gies for using big words like “fidu­ciary respon­si­bil­ity” or “cog­ni­tive work” — kind of missed the mark. I don’t know — maybe that goes over well in the Heart­land, but not here.

Dur­ing the drive home one of my friends, a retired restau­ra­teur, com­plained that his 60-minute speech felt more like “an out­line” than a solid pre­sen­ta­tion. Hmm, I said. So this morn­ing I com­pared his 18-minute pre­sen­ta­tion in Lon­don at TED to his hour-long pitch in Seat­tle last night. And she was absolutely right: he deliv­ered more sub­stance in 18 min­utes to those Lon­don­ers than he did to his book lov­ing audi­ence in Seattle.

Dur­ing the Q&A ses­sion it became clear that the Seat­tle audi­ence was full of edu­ca­tors, entre­pre­neurs, local gov­ern­ment offi­cials, busi­ness man­agers, execs, retirees, and out-of-work tal­ent look­ing for jobs. So we prob­a­bly under­stood his vocab­u­lary and allusions.

Another social sin was Microsoft-bashing (a home­town sport, but not one peo­ple wel­come when out­siders do it). I sat next to a friend who is a director-level exec at Microsoft, and she had just blogged favor­ably about Drive. Her wince when Pink knocked “Microsoft­ies” was pained. [Dis­clo­sure: as a for­mer Apple employee who has never worked at Microsoft, I enjoy the bash­ing but rec­og­nize that it can be provoca­tive to a Seat­tle audience.]

So, my advice to pre­sen­ters and book pro­mot­ers: know your audience.

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