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In the world of marketing, you can score a double-play whenever you can create a promotion that is so noteworthy that more attention is drawn to your methods of promoting than to the promotion itself. A few months ago, the alternative music group (an overly simplistic label on my part) Radiohead released its first major album after parting with its record label. The album is available for download for whatever price its listeners are willing to pay, which was and is an amazing concept for artists and marketers everywhere. Check it out…it’s an interesting site and a great listen.

Of course, this model is only truly economically viable if you are fairly confident that you already have a strong, loyal audience that will carry the majority of the financial burden.

Steve Thorson, one of my friends and a co-worker from a previous life, is a designer for Paste Magazine’s website, and he let me know that Paste is using the same model to sell a year-long magazine subscription - you pay whatever you feel the magazine is worth to you. 11 issues, plus 11 full-length CD’s full of the latest and greatest music for progressive tastes. What’s great about this promotion, is that it’s also a gauge of the loyalty of its current subscribers, as Paste is allowing renewal subscribers to get the same deal. As an added incentive, Paste is highlighting those who pay more than the $19.95 for a standard subscription rate (although Steve tells me this experiment has yielded an unexpectedly high number of subscriptions at $19.96 by those who just want to be featured in the magazine).

This is a great deal for consumer, and a great deal for Paste, as they can expand their subscriber base to uber-frugal people like me that wouldn’t normally pony up the 20 bucks for a magazine about music (yes, guilty, I paid a dollar, but I know that Paste will make it up in ad revenues). Asking people to pay what they want is the next best thing to giving it away for free, and it offers the added benefit of giving you, the marketer, a very real picture of what your value is to your customers.

>>UPDATE: Steve just let me know that the slew of subscribers at $19.96 was inaccurate (and third-hand) information.  So far, only one person has done that.   On the upside of things, he said the highest price someone has paid so far is $70.  So now, I can officially feel less guilty about only spending a dollar.

Have you ever had the experience of working on a project or presentation, and you can’t really get any momentum until you get a draft of the document done first and can “shoot holes in it”? For me, this book has summed up what I’ve always felt but haven’t been able to express succinctly: “form follows failure”.

I’m about 3/4 through this interesting book, which as a history junkie, I initially picked up to satisfy my need to read something fairly dry before heading to bed. What I discovered is a rather entertaining essay on the evolution and science of design. Henry Petroski uses case studies on how common objects (the paper clip, zipper, fork, masking tape, etc.) have been developed over time as a background for his overall thesis, which is that form does not follow function, but rather failure.

What he means by this that rather than necessity being the “mother of invention,” failure of a product or service to perform in some way is what drives an innovator to develop a solution. In short, being annoyed with stuff that doesn’t work is what motivates us to create something new that fulfills our personal or collective expectations.

What’s exciting to me about this argument, although penned by Petroski in 1994, is that it absolutely supports the “always in beta” development model that is the current standard for progressive web sites and applications (such as Gmail, iStockphoto, etc.). You throw something out there, listen to people complain about what doesn’t work, and then you innovate, and repeat the cycle ad infinitum. What is fantastic about the internet age is that this cyclical development process can occur in real-time, and the benefits to clients and users are conveyed at the same lightning speed.

I can’t mention this topic without paying homage to David Armano and Critical Mass for their inspirational “always in beta” website and experience at the 2007 Forrester Consumer Forum (I had the privilege of being interviewed live by David at the event). The website is now evolving (who would have thought?) beyond it’s original intent of a “new idea” at the Forum into a real-time communications portal for Critical Mass.

To tie this all together, offline projects, and really all design challenges that an agency tackles, are subject to the rule of “form follows failure”. At an agency, we listen, we create, our internal reviews and client feedback tell us what’s wrong with our creation, and we continue to hone and refine until the final design accomplishes all that it can.  I guess adding “routinely and adeptly fails on all initiatives” is a great line to my resume after all.