Indie sensibilities in microbusinesses

Posted on | December 21, 2006 | 1 Comment

I know I’ve said this before but Kathy Sierra asks good questions.

Recently, she made the point that sometimes the “indie sensibility” that makes for a sort of diamond-in-the-rough quality in an entertainment product is better (or, maybe, more exciting for the audience?) than slick and expensive production values.

Think of it as the difference between a Barry Manilow album and a Greatful Dead concert.

Anyway, Kathy asks if there an “indie sensibility” that applies to other things besides music, film, and fashion?

To which I respond, Hell, yeah!

You know what makes very high and expensive production values a turn-off to an audience? It removes immediacy and intimacy and all sense of accessibility. The really good artists can generate a sense of closeness with an audience that can make for not just “fans” but real fanatics, but not usually if they have the Boston Pops playing in the background.

Once again, think Greatful Dead. (As another example, it’s been a lot of years since I went to a Kenny Loggins concert but he used to be really good at making you feel like you were sitting in his living room with him instead of feeling like you were at Radio City Music Hall.)

Heavily produced stuff beats the audience over the head with “you are listening to/watching a performance so full of glitz and glitter that nobody could mistake this artist for a real person.”

That is also the essential difference between a little microbusiness and a corporate giant.

It used to be fashionable among online microbusinesses to pretend to be bigger companies, operating on the combined theory (which was true at the time) that consumers would feel more comfortable doing business with a larger firm and, on the Internet, nobody knows if you’re a dog.

Only, now that small is the new big, that’s not true anymore. Now, the savvy online micro uses its minute size as the competitive advantage that it is.

Not to be obnoxious, but I’ve always found it pretty funny that corporations have to go hire consultants in order to figure out how to sound human when they speak to the public. I keep thinking, ‘Surely, there must still be a few real people working for that company! Why do they have so much trouble with this?’

Evidently, the real people don’t make it to the corner offices, where the perceived value of glitz in place of humanness seems to increase proportionately with the value of the employment contract. Unfortunately, however, high production values are also the unmistakable forehead-tatoo of the control freak. Corporations are control freaks.

Microbusiness owners, on the other hand, are usually way too busy to be control freaks. Sometimes they are also seduced by the lure of razzle dazzle but, for the most part, they are limited by the same thing those indie artists are limited by: money. As Kathy points out, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Corporations tend to be company-machines. Microbusinesses tend toward being an interesting hybrid between a company and a person.

And, as a general rule, people prefer talking to people over talking to machines. We’re funny that way.

[tags]management, customer relations, microbusiness[/tags]

Comments