On Fishing Lures, Web Design, and Elections
I thought long and hard about posting this. I'm posting it anyway, because I think it's important to draw these parallels and because I think much of what I've learned from starting my own (new) career directly applies. Please, for the sake of honest discussion, read through to the end of this if you're going to respond. And please- think about what I've written before you respond.
I welcome all your polite and thoughtful replies, but I may not have time today to engage in active responses to them. Please try to keep an open mind to what I've said here. I think it's important to everything we do moving forward, both in terms of future successes and in avoiding past (and not necessarily recent) mistakes.
Thank you.
----
Quick: design a fishing lure.
What mental image springs to mind? What is needed to create an effective fishing lure? How can you be sure that your fishing lure will catch fish?
Go draw one. Try it out! What does your fishing lure drawing have in it? Is it heavy? Is it light? Does it sink to the bottom of the lake? Does it flash in the water when it catches the light? How many hooks? Does it have a steel leader? Which lake?
Hmm. It seems that what I've just done is to ask you to make something without a clear idea of what it's for, or why. Let's start over.
When you're designing a fishing lure, you have to consider a lot of things that might not be obvious right from the get-go. Which lake are you going to be fishing in? What fish are in the lake? What lures have worked previously? What species of fish did they catch? Are those the fish you want to catch? When do the fish bite? Where on the lake are you most likely to catch fish?
How do you go about answering those questions?
Step one is to determine what has gone before. You might go to the pro shop on the lakeshore and take a look at the lures they have on the shelf. You might ask the local fishermen what lures they've had success with. You might even ask the fish!
"Excuse me, Mr. Bass, but would you bite this lure?"
"Well, I might, but I'd have to be very, very hungry."
"What about you, Mr. Perch? Is this appealing to you?"
"Oh, hell yes, gimme some of that tasty treat!!"
Well, no, not really. But you might take several of the lures out on the lake and fish with them. You'd record your results, including relevant data such as the time of day, the weather, the location on the lake, the size and species of the fish you caught, and so on and so forth. You might ask fish you didn't want to catch if it appeals to them if you want to catch a lot of different species of fish!
It's only after you've collected all that data that you'd start to interpret it, long before you even think about design. What do all the most successful lures have in common? How do all the successful lures relate to each other? What features catch the most fish? Do they catch the species of fish you want to catch? Did you find that a particular lure caught a lot of a species of fish you didn't intend to catch?
Web design is the same thing. As a web designer, my job is to create a website that will bring people in and create a conversion (a sale). If I do my job correctly, the customer will become an advocate for the product: they will tell others about how good the product is, how good their experience with the company was, and talk about how easy it was to deal with my client through the website I've built for them.
That's what I want. That's success.
What I do not want, and what will lose me clients, is people badmouthing my site, telling people to stay away from the product being sold there, and in general being kept away from the experience due to issues I should have dealt with and foreseen during my design process. Basically, building a fishing lure and building a website are all about marketing first, with the actual design being the very last step of the overall process.
FWIW, the process as I've learned and applied it looks like this:
If a customer refuses to go to the website I have built for my client, that failure is entirely on me as a designer. If I blame the fish- or the customer- I lose future clients. That is just how it works, and it doesn't matter that I might be mad at the customer. Actually, I wouldn't be mad at them at all, but would rather take it as the personal failing on my part that it is, because again, the failure is mine and mine alone. I didn't do my job. I didn't entice the customer to the site. My messaging was off, my customer personas were off, my research was off. No matter what, it was something I did- or failed to do- that didn't entice them or that drove them away. I own that, wholly. I can't escape it by blaming customers I failed to reach.
That is true for all marketing, ladies and gentlemen. Always has been and always will be.
Political campaigning has a very great deal to do with both creating an effective fishing lure (our operating metaphor) and web design (my own actual field). In the case of politics, the "conversion" (again, the "sale"
is the vote. The perceptions the voter has toward a candidate are just as important as the perception the fish has toward the lure or the customer has toward the product via the website (or the website itself). It's all marketing, and marketing is all about managing those perceptions in such a way that the positive perception is the reality from the point of view of the fish, the customer, or the voter, regardless of the objective reality as seen by an objective observer.
All of us have been targets of this. All of us respond to this. All of us make our decisions as customers and as voters because of this. It's universal, and none of us (including myself) are immune to it. It's marketing, and in one way or another, to a greater or a lesser degree, it works on everyone. If it didn't, marketing itself would be a pile of BS.
And we know very, very well that that marketing works. Republican campaign managers know that too, and that's a large part of why they're successful when we think they shouldn't be. I'm not saying at all that "we should be more like Republicans" except in the sense that we should learn how to apply the principles of marketing in the same ways they do. Because, again, marketing works when it's done right, even if the perception that "candidate A is better for my X" is objectively false.
Objective reality does not matter to good marketing. Only perceptions matter.
It seems cynical to put it that way, but again: political campaigns are a form of marketing. Successful fishing, or web design, or political electoral campaigns are not necessarily paired with an accurate perception of reality on the part of the fish, the person surfing the web, or the voter. I know we would all like to believe that we actually are better than the opposition, and that might well be true, but if the fish don't bite, we as fishermen would be fools to blame the fish for not seeing things our way.
The only smart thing to do if the fish aren't biting is to try to find- or build ourselves- a better lure. We want those fish to perceive our lure as being so tasty that they can't help but to go for it even if they aren't particularly hungry. Snack food manufacturers have been doing this for decades (an excellent example is when Baked Lay's Chips first appeared; market research told Lay's that consumers would pay more for a snack they perceived as being more healthy than a friend chip, and they were right... and snack chips aren't ever particularly healthy).
So what's the point of all this?
I've been seeing a lot- a whole, whole lot- of people here blaming the voters for the 2016 election loss. Were I to do that as a web designer, my career would be a very short one. We can not blame the voter for the failures of the politicians' campaigns. That's like a fisherman blaming the fish for not biting. I'm not saying I have the answers that will make the fish bite any particular lure! What I'm saying is that there's a process involved, and that blaming the fish- or the consumer, or the voter- for not biting or clicking "Checkout" or filling that oval for our candidate is a very short path to continued lack of fish, lack of sales, and lack of votes. Blaming the customer has no place in the process and is a recipe for failure- as a fisherman looking to catch more fish, failure as a businessman looking for new customers, and failure as a politician looking for additional votes.
You might be questioning this, but these are methods and processes that have been proven to work and are supported by at least a century of marketing, the kind of hard-fact on-the-ground test-and-reject product advertising, development, messaging, and refinement that has brought us all the household name brands we know and use without even thinking about trying a competitor's product. That process, developed many decades before the WWW appeared, worked very well when applied to web design, and many of those same principles also apply to political campaigns and always have. And again: we all respond to good (or bad) marketing.
We need to stop blaming the fish we didn't catch for not biting. We need to go back to square one, start over, and design a lure we are almost certain will catch a whole lot more fish.