Gravity vs. Evolution

Today, Seth Godin posted an idea about marketing that, at its core, is blindingly obvious (”it’s harder to change people’s minds than it is to sell them something they already want”)… and yet Godin’s packaging of the idea is quite clever. (Just the sort of thing you’d expect to see, really, from a chap who sells lots and lots of books based on his ability to tidily package marketing concepts into digestible ideas and images.)

The crux of the post is that gravity is something that people can see working immediately. They might not know how or why, just that it does… making it vastly easier to believe in (or to buy, if you will). Whereas evolution — the science of which most people do grasp and understand — takes milleniums to reveal itself. Therefore it’s a harder sell, and even susceptible to refutation. People have a hard time buying into that which they can’t see, even if they know intellectually that it’s correct or reasonable.

It’s a fine idea and I’m sure will make a fine book one day. But my argument is with Godin’s takeaway: “When in doubt, market gravity.”

As if there were always the choice!

Once upon a time, it was my job to market open-source enterprise software to risk-averse audiences whose shops were solidly entrenched in all things Microsoft. The growing support for open platforms, the cost benefit of eliminating vendor lock-in, the quiet movements of the industry’s technology leaders to clear the hurdles that were standing in front of open source solutions… these were all demonstrable facts. And you can stand in front of a conference session full of people all day long and show these great things, and they will nod with excited understanding at the future of open source.

But when they return on Monday to a desktop running Windows, where they use Outlook to email an Excel file to a coworker with whom they collaborate on Sharepoint… that excitement and understanding is quickly forgotten.

In this scenario, open source is the evolution; it can’t be marketed like gravity.

Don’t get me wrong: Seth Godin is correct that it’s harder to change people’s minds than it is to sell them something they already want. And he openly admits at the end of the post that:

Big ideas often demand a marketing strategy that is a lot more difficult than marketing gravity. Sometimes results do take a long time. Sometimes the consumer has been wrong all along. Sometimes you do need to replace an existing story.

There’s no question that open source is one of the “big ideas” of technology today, and it is in fact going to take a long time to bring people around.

The hidden gem that I see in the “gravity vs. evolution” meme is not in a marketing application, but in leadership or communication. Godin’s theory nails the way people process abstract concepts; remembering that it’s easier to drop a baseball than it is to explain vestigial organs could be a useful key to training, sharing strategies, or presenting to an audience — regardless of whether the message is ultimately intended as marketing.