Assaf on Authenticity
"Authenticity is the side-effect of being small" from Labnotes and "Authenticity doesn't scale"
Nice.
It IS hard to scale authentic, yes. But in some cases, authentic doesn't have to just come from a company...it can come from your community. Firefox keeps it real. Sure, it ain't Starbucks, but it has a big, growing community. Threadless? Yep. Same (I love love love their whole, "Shoot me if I get too big for my britches" attitude).
Decentralize your marketing. Don't just say, "Bah. Can't be done." You can grow...there is a difference between getting big(ger) and selling out. I betcha we see more of this going forward. The markets are changing.
[Caveat: small is the new big...and I believe we're seeing a major downturn of super ginormous multi-nationals...big is 'relative' to me.]
Nice.
It IS hard to scale authentic, yes. But in some cases, authentic doesn't have to just come from a company...it can come from your community. Firefox keeps it real. Sure, it ain't Starbucks, but it has a big, growing community. Threadless? Yep. Same (I love love love their whole, "Shoot me if I get too big for my britches" attitude).
Decentralize your marketing. Don't just say, "Bah. Can't be done." You can grow...there is a difference between getting big(ger) and selling out. I betcha we see more of this going forward. The markets are changing.
[Caveat: small is the new big...and I believe we're seeing a major downturn of super ginormous multi-nationals...big is 'relative' to me.]
4 Comments:
Let's not forget that small = fast too! Maybe we should add this:
Web 1.0 = !!!Big Big Big!!!
Web 2.0 = humbly small
"Authenticity" is one of those words that bugs me, as it's easy to use and assume that everyone has the same meaning. I wonder if there's a definition of "authentic" that both describes the kinds of companies that Seth/Labnotes and doesn't have "impossible when large" follow as a trivial corrolary. Labnotes suggests qualities of a small coffeeshop that are cleary not scalable. So, in that sense, "authentic" and size are completely incompatible. But, if "authenitic" simply means, "a commitment to quality beyond all other factors," there are probably many instances where are Starbucks will shine over a small coffee shop because of their scale.
I'd offer a definition like: "authentic is a when a business shows that they care genuinely about their product/service." If that's not scalable, what a sucky world we live in =)
But Firefox is small. Firefox is just Firefox.
It's not Netscape that does browsers and servers and consumer and corporate and software and online, and needs to average it everything out.
Small is not how many users you have, or how much money you have, small is the distance between the person defining the product and the person just trying it out for the first time.
In the open source world, and in a few exceptional companies, that distance is very small.
High quality is easy to scale, just look at Toyota and Honda.
The authentic quality on the other hand results from the personal touch. You can't measure it, you can't quite identify it. And so you can't scale it.
You can't go to a thousand shop owners in a big franchise point the finger and tell them to be "like that person over there". You have to give them written guidelines and procedures to follow, put an objective measurement system.
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