Must-Read: Ben Thompson: Selling Feelings
Must-Read: So how do we build an information-age economy in which producers have incentives to learn as much as they can about consumers to successfully anticipate them without also giving them an even bigger incentive and capability to deceive them?
: Selling Feelings: “The model is broadly applicable…
…I wrote two weeks ago about how the future of publishing will not be about monetizing pure words but rather about using words to gain fans that can be monetized through other harder-to-discover media. Time and attention remain precious commodities…. Earning trust in one area gives you the right to make money from it in another…. Software generally should be seen as a lever to solutions that are much more meaningful to customers…. Software is infinitely copyable: better to use that quality to your advantage than to base your business model on fighting gravity….
Business is difficult–it was difficult before the Internet, and it’s difficult now–but the nature of the difficulty has changed. Distribution used to be the hardest… but now… time and money… must instead be invested in getting even closer to customers and more finely attuned to exactly why they are spending their money on you…. Create the conditions where the need might manifest itself and then meet that need, and not only will your business succeed, it will, in all likelihood, succeed to an even greater extent than the physically-limited lowest common denominator winners from the ‘good old days.’