A sentence from Seth Godin’s terrific new book The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly?
captured my attention:
“We don’t need more stuff, we need more humanity.”
“Stuff” is abundant, but “humanity” seems to be scarce.
Consider the great radio stations you know. Are any of them heavy on “stuff” and light on “humanity”?
Now consider the not-so-great ones. Lots of “stuff” there, huh?
Coming up in this blog I’m going to review the “jobs” consumers “hire” radio brands to do. You’ll see that the “stuff” jobs are in great danger of disruption, while the “humanity” jobs are ours to surrender.
“Humanity” goes beyond technology. It is, for example, the “humanity” of Facebook that keeps users coming back for more – the human faces and voices of their friends. A “social network” without “humanity” is neither a network, nor social.
While everyone can agree on a hit song, anyone can package those hits together. “Humanity,” however, is hard to come by; it must be experienced again and again to be appreciated. Only then is it a disruption-proof advantage. “Humanity” requires a leap of faith and that most precious of all business assets: Time.
You can schedule your songs, but have you scheduled your “humanity”? After all, the genome was human before it was music.
Moment-by-moment Arbitron ratings may not reward that “humanity,” but the ratings don’t care about your brand long-term, do they?
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