Spark Interview Transcript
A while back I was interviewed by John Winsor for his book Spark. He’s just posted the transcript on this blog, and it’s a fun read. Part 1 and part 2.
I thought I’d repost part of it here. I’ve never really talked about my "Community as a Dating Relationship" concept on the blog before, but trust me, in real life I talk about it all the time.
A Dating Relationship
What we really have here – when I talk about the relationship that I have with the fan groups and they have with me – is a dating relationship. If you show up on a date and you’re absolutely perfect, the person doesn’t think, ‘Wow, this is so great – he’s perfect!’ They think, ‘What’s wrong with this guy?’ Their defenses immediately go up and they assume you’re hiding something. When companies do that same thing you immediately think they’re just spinning it, that it’s just marketing crap and you don’t need to pay attention to it. But when you actually start to have an interaction with them, that back and forth, then you have a relationship.
Sometimes it’s bad, sometimes it’s good, but at the end of the day, as long as it’s more positive than negative, that’s what it’s all about. That’s what people really believe; that you’re not just messing with them, trying to get them to buy something. Part of what LEGO.com is, it’s not really an overt sales thing. Of course all of our content, at the end of the day, goes to supporting sales because that’s what we’re here to do. But it’s not about bashing people over the head; it’s about getting them to experience in some way the idea of building with LEGO, or it’s about playing a game where you’re using bricks to do a certain thing. But it’s definitely more than just a glossy brochure in the form of a game.
I talk about this “dating relationship,” even though it may seem kind of weird at first, because it works so damn well. If you’re trying to form a relationship of some sort, whether it’s a product purchase or a consumer to company, long-term interaction, you’re hoping to form a bond of some sort between two parties. Again, everybody has to go home happy. If the fans I’m working with are constantly coming away with the feeling that they’re being used, then I’m not going to be able to tap into them very much longer. By the same token, if they’re not delivering much to me, then I’m not really going to be that interested in working with them. There’s that give and take, just like in any relationship.
If you said to me that your company had really decided to form a bond with your customers, to break down that wall between the outside and inside, and you asked, “What do we do?” – I’d say most companies don’t understand that the way they approach things with their customers is incredibly poor. For instance, you have call centers getting outsourced to India, which is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard. For most companies, that’s the only point of consumer contact they have, and they’re outsourcing it. It’s like if you brought in an intermediary to hang out with your wife, so that you could go bowling. And when you did that, you said, “Oh, by the way, while I’m gone bowling, can you really work on our relationship for us?” It just doesn’t make any sense. You wouldn’t do that in your personal life. Why would you do it in your business life?
