Avoid The Dead Zone

The dip between real and slick.

Seth Godin posted a topic on his blog called “The Dead Zone of Slick” . I’ll give you a quick summary, but if you haven’t read it, you should head over and read it.

Basically Seth was saying that when people or companies are used to operating in the hump of real and they try to migrate to slick, they get stuck in the dead zone in between.

This is very true of small businesses who don’t always have the skills to make the migration to slick. They may be the most honest, real business, but when its time to put a large presentation together to woo a large potential investor, they often fall short. The opposite can be true, a company could put together the slickest marketing materials, the best website, the best looking office, but when its time to become real and deliver the goods, they fall short. This exact problem caught a lot of business in the original dot com bust.

There is a lesson to be learned here. Master the real first, without it you will fall of the slick hill very quickly. But what I think Seth forgets to mention is that the real skill is the person or company who can migrate quickly from one hump to the next. This company would be like a talented skateboarder, gliding down one hump, and up quickly the next. The person or company who can not only do this, but also understand when they need to do this will have a distinct advantage in the marketplace.

A bad skateboarder would just sail down one hill and get stuck… and that’s exactly what Seth points most people do.

So the lesson is if you want to grow your business online and off. You need to know when its time to be a slick marketer and when its time to be real marketer, and you need to make sure you are good at both.

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