Show of hands: how many of us have stood in front of a meeting or a boss or a client or a conference horde and said something infinitely pithy that included the word ‘scale’?
Me too.
But I’m done. No more ‘scale matters’, at least not at the front-end of a strategic inspiration. I’ve come to see this canard of a litmus test for any business, brand, product or service idea as the total dodge it is. At the risk of going all Area 51 on you guys, I’m serious when I suggest this is exactly what the alpha ape scale queens Jeff and Sundar and Mark et al would like you to think.
Here’s my logic. The more I do this stuff, the more I return to a very simple formula: find an insight, articulate a strategy, create some value, see what happens.
If you consider the genesis of a strategy for almost anything – a start-up, a marketing campaign, a product design, hell, an app or a website – focusing on anything beyond this first critical moment of value creation and hopeful exchange isn’t just distracting. It’s soul-killing. Worse, it’s anti-productive to the extreme. And production, my friends, is what all this stuff is about.
Still, we embrace an ethos which insists on testing any idea’s ability to scale before we even give it the slightest chance of success. My cynical hunch is this limiting prejudice is rooted in our infatuation with all the sparkling fruits of contemporary technology – dominated by a handful of data, tech and services platforms. FAMGA to the b-school nerds – Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon.
The insight to all this was sparked by an unlikely source, one of my dwindling posse of VC pals. In a check-in this week he mentioned that he and his fellow travelers have become terribly bored these past couple of years. They’ve lost their edge, their sizzle and momentum. Their heads just aren’t in the game. Perhaps the game is done, I wondered. Or at least the venture funding and start-up growth-enabling game these virile cats once played with such admirable daring and panache. FAMGA, and a handful of next level behemoths just beneath them, have come to monopolize innovation to such a degree that, barring the increasingly unlikely appearance of the once-awaited unicorns, the foreseeable future is theirs.
That should make everybody who cares about creating value in this still-youthful century very nervous, if not nauseous. The idea that the next new thing – whether it’s grounded in the agreeably hysteric promises of AI and ML, or AR and VR, or embedded tech and IoT, or 5G and bendable interfaces – is gonna come from the usual suspects is radically unacceptable. But it’s not surprising. Habit breeds inertia. We’ve grown accustomed to the steady parade of increasingly convenient innovation all coming from the people who brought us our first generation of digital comfort tools.
From a consumer perspective, I get it. But from a business perspective, from a brand, product and marketing perspective – a value creation perspective – this is an extraordinary moment of global hypnosis. We’ve agreed to silence that would-be genie inside us all with a crushing surrender to the platforms. We’ve so sanctified these emerged gods of big tech that we’ve allowed ourselves to buy into their self-serving narrative of ‘scale matters’. It matters because they’ve come to own it and they say so.
And so we all reflexively chime – “yeah nice – but can it scale?…” to kill any dreamy (and currently unscaled) plans and prototypes of inventors or entrepreneurs or social justice warriors with an idea. Maybe a killer idea. Maybe an idea based upon an insight about human need and behavior that everyone else till now missed.
As we say in the strategy business, this is extraordinarily fucked up. It’s bad enough we as a planet have collectively signed-over our personal data, payment solutions, health records, intimate comms and product loyalty to these brute-force dominant platforms. But to also relinquish the future of innovation – surprise and delight itself – to them who have already got scale, is a criminal mismanagement of our worlds. And a tragic waste of budding insights.
The argument supporting surrender is daunting – these guys have established an almost insurmountable edge – scale. A singular advantage of reach, penetration, distribution and measurement, one that suppresses potential innovators along with their now-departed competitors. Listen up you remaining dreamers: without the scale these monsters already own, your idea isn’t going anywhere. Unless, of course, you pay a uxorious rent to “leverage their scale” on their terms.
We’re not going to solve, at least anytime soon, for the failure of people, governments, regulators and markets to put these genies back in their bottles. But what we can solve for is really all that matters, for at least now. And now, if you think about it, is really all that matters.
Now. Now happens quickly in these accelerating times. Now is a quarter, maybe a weekend. Sometimes it’s, well, literally and quantitatively “now”, as in while you’re reading this sentence.
In this sense, we – the rest of us who haven’t already achieved market caps exceeding many countries – can still own now. Now, if you think about, is just sitting there, ready and waiting for us to do something interesting with it.
Who knows what happens after that. That’s called optimization. But I have been in the business, marketing, technology and startup world long enough to guarantee you this: if what you do for a few thousand people has truly unique and compelling value, well, word will leak. It’s hard to keep anything special quiet for very long.
This is the insight I shared with my bored venture cap buddy, and it’s what I’m going to mention to my radical marketing students tonight. It’s the new insight I drag around with me to meetings with clients and colleagues. The pitch is simple. Yo! worry about now, worry about unfathomably special value, one human moment at a time. Trust me, it’s how those now-faceless dominating value monopolists started. Until they started buying into the “scale matters” dodge their investors, advisors and boardroom scaredy cats all began to uniformly insist upon.
Screw that. Scale will come if the idea – the value event – is real and compelling. Scale is not a goal, even if it’s an outcome. Scale can’t be a requirement and it’s most certainly not a feature. I’d argue it acts a whole lot more like a bug when used as a predictive test of value. A nasty bug with the power to kill some amazingly great ideas for creating value now and here – not then and there. Yet.
Try this: the next time one of those scale queens squints at your insight and your idea, screws up their face and snarls dimissively – “yeah, but can it scale?” – politely snatch your idea out of their sight and thank them. Then go do what you need to do now so the next time they see it it’ll be one of their buddies sending them a link to it with the insistent urge to “check this out!”.
This article is adapted and excerpted from Kennon’s upcoming Madland: Battle-Plan for Radical Marketeers to be published in the Fall of 2019.