Toward a "Local" Approach to Building a Business
Or, the trouble with scaling up
Audiences don't buy stuff. People buy stuff.
But it's understandable if you or a brand you love has forgotten that along the way.
Scale is central to the premise of the attention economy. In this system, one person's attention—or their data—isn't worth much. But an audience's attention—and their data—is worth much more.
Platforms take the raw material of individual attention and produce audience attention in an endless array of variations. They then sell that audience attention to advertisers for the price of a hoagie at Jersey Mike's.1 More individual attention leads to more audience attention, which leads to more advertiser attention, which leads to more ads paid for—and so platforms win through economies of scale. In turn, those relying on platforms to market their businesses have learned to produce audience attention, too.
Further, as Sublime founder
points out, "Because the laws and constraints of the physical world don't apply to the digital world, the theory goes, anything online should be huge." The cost of adding one more individual's attention to an audience seems tiny to nonexistent. The cost of accommodating one more customer is marginal. Why court the attention of a single individual when you could court the attention of an audience?Audience attention is an abstraction of individual attention.
What I mean by an abstraction is an idea of what is true or how things work derived from examples and applied as a general understanding. Audience attention is abstract in that it represents individual attention but is not individual attention.
When a brand focuses on the attention of an audience over the attention of an individual, that brand may engage with more people, but it can't do so with the same precision it once did. An individual is a collection of specific needs, questions, desires, preferences, experiences, etc. No matter how careful the messaging or how clear the value proposition is, an audience will always contain variations that a brand (and its offer) can't account for.
This isn't necessarily a problem—as long as a brand is selling a fairly standard commodity: toothpaste, cheeseburgers, kitty litter, software for editing video, a step-by-step guide to starting a podcast, or an online course about surface design. Because these commodities are standardized (to a degree), a brand can market and sell them at scale without worrying too much about what a specific individual might expect versus another. Each product performs similarly for each customer.
However, marketing to an audience (marketing at scale) can cause real headaches when it comes to less standardized products and services. Azout points to examples of companies scaling to the point that the unchecked variations among its customers and conflicting internal priorities led to a breakdown of quality and effectiveness. I've seen (and experienced) this first-hand.
Further, the ethos of scale that's central to the attention economy can infect the way a business is designed and an offer is developed. Once one sees attracting audience attention as more valuable than attracting an individual's attention, they're more likely to design a business that depends on scale to work financially. They're also more likely to use marketing tactics and messaging meant to cast a wide net for potential customers. They judge success by abstract metrics rather than specific results.