I spent the day yesterday down at the Microsoft campus in Redmond brainstorming with them on a new publishing platform they are developing. It was a fascinating discussion which I found repeated a pattern I've seen so many times. "We can do this, so let's develop a product." It's a discussion that starts with what can be produced and then searches for a way to make it a product that people will want. The problem is that this is exactly backwards. I've made this mistake myself, so I know how seductive this line of thinking can be.
The better and correct approach is always to ask, What do people want and need that we can provide? It's starts with human motivations and aspirations and works backwards from there. I call it reverse marketing.
Here is a classic example from the world of photography. Someone is personally motivated to do a project. Compelled as they are, they amass a pile of prints and then immediately leap to the eureka conclusion, "I could do a book!" — without stopping to ask whether anyone in the world will want it or buy it. I can recall only a few instances in my decades of sideline observation where a photographer first identified a market of folks who would love to own a book on a topic and then went out an photographed and produced the book specifically for those people. In the few instances where I can recall this, the books sold out very quickly and the photographer walked away happy and content.
At Microsoft, the conversation was all about what they could produce using a new technology that would fundamentally change the magazine paradigm in the digital world. It was interesting, but I tried to steer the direction of the conversation toward what the public wants and needs, what publishers want and need, and what content producers (writers and photographers) want and need. They listened and I think we had a pretty successful brainstorm session.
And speaking of that, a couple of weeks ago we conducted a survey to see what our readers thought about a fundamental question that keeps surfacing here at LensWork: Should we include color portfolios in our magazine? We started out as a b/w magazine way back when — in the age of b/w darkrooms and long before digital cameras and printers made color so much easier. Now that so many ardent b/w photographers capture their originals in color and occasionally produce color prints, we've wondered if we are falling behind the times and should start producing color work in LensWork. I was tremendously relieved to learn from our survey that 80% of our readers would prefer that LensWork stay b/w only and that we use LensWork Extended (our PDF format parallel publication) for any color work we publish. Actually, I was more than tremendously relieved. I was downright ecstatic. In my roots, I'm an old b/w guy, and I started LensWork because I wanted a magazine that focused on that passion.
We are the publishers, but LensWork exists because readers want it. If they wanted color, we would probably have had to start producing it in spite of the fact that it would not have been my choice. That our readers overwhelmingly want us to stay true to our roots (and their passion for b/w) suits me perfectly, so there it is. LensWork will remain a b/w only publication. Thank, God.
Reverse marketing doesn't always work out so well for the producer. We may not always like the decisions arrived at through reverse marketing — for example, when we want to produce a book of our personal work but there simply isn't enough demand to sell a press run. But if we are lucky, we get to produce what both we want and a lot of people want, too.
