February 26th, 2006
What You NEED vs. What You WANT
Should the goal of media be to give people what they WANT or what they NEED — or both? To get 100% what you want is pure echo chamber, like Fox News and many political blogs. To get a 100% of what you need may or may not involve too much “broccoli,” depending on how you live your life. (Thanks to Pete Cashmore getting me thinking about this.)
Years ago, I taught test prep classes for The Princeton Review. Occasionally, I would teach the Verbal section of the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), even though I had never taken the MCAT, never been to medical school, or even took a hard science course in college. The Verbal section is about reading comprehension and requires no knowledge of science. I used to begin every course by taking out a passage from one of the SCIENCE sections of the test and showing how, with some very close reading and a tiny bit of lucky guessing, I could answer every question correctly without knowing any science.
My students HATED this. It wasn’t what they WANTED — what they wanted was help cramming more Bio, Chem, Organic Chem, and Physics into their poor overtaxed, pre-med brains. What they NEEDED was to improve their standardized test-taking skills.
It seems to me that we’re not going to make any meaningful progress on solving the information overload problem until we can help people decide what it is they want out of media. Seth Finkelstein made a great observation about this in a comment on my previous post:
Finding what’s *popular* is easier and more profitable than what’s “importantâ€Â. In order to find the popular, you just poll either the crowd, or the demagogues (people who are experts - at what’s popular). That’s very simple (relatively speaking).
But how do you find what’s important, what you *need*? What do you code for? The first cut is to poll a niche rather than a general audience. But problems there are that there might not be enough of a sample, and the economics are even less supportable.
Perhaps the real question is how successful do you want your business model to be? News Corp has shown that giving people what they want can be very profitable. But I still think there are significant business opportunities in helping niche audiences find what they NEED — especially in a B2B context.
It’s interesting that you rarely (if ever) see any of the Web 2.0 crowd looking at the B2B space. Business intelligence is information that gives you a competitive advantage. In B2B, media consumers don’t want an echo chamber — they want their broccoli. If my goal is to succeed in business, I want to know what I NEED to know — I don’t want to be pandered to.
But even in the consumer space, I think the majority of people still value information that helps improve their quality of life — which is not always a function of reinforcing what you already know (or think you know).
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Good post, Scott. In a more practical way it echoes the point I made in a post entitled What wisdom of crowds? - that relying on popularity as a measure of value is an argumentum ad populum. Popularity has long been recognized as a very different measure / attribute from value or correctness.
The post I wrote was a reaction to the received wisdom I always hear online about voting and the aggregated wisdom of the crowd. I don’t buy it. It seems lazy and disingenuous. It (1) devalues wisdom and (2) gives credence to the idea that referenda are equitable, democratic tools. Wisdom is not something you get through the collective responses on a web form. Referenda, as anyone involved with polling will tell you, are deeply undemocratic. The party asking the question / seeking the input constrains the feedback for their own purposes. It ends up as a power-enabling tool, rather than an empowering tool.
I think that’s a good question, Scott. It’s one of the things that newspapers and other traditional media wrestle with too, to some extent: How much of what you print should be what people want to know, and how much should it be what you think they need to know.
In other words, how many articles about celebrities and their failed relationships should you run, or pictures of traffic accidents, and how many pieces about politics and other things that are BBI (boring but important).
I think part of what makes “new” or participatory media so difficult to handle is that it allows readers much more control over what they read or pay attention to, to the point where maybe they’re not even going to see the things they might “need” to know. How do we deal with that — or should we even try? Tough question.
You might want to read: Interpreting the problems of journalism…
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[…] In his article What You NEED vs. What You WANT, Scott Karp makes the point that what people want isn’t always what they need. Especially with regards to online content. It reminds me of the Innovators Dilemma, where the customers were adamant that they wanted more and better 14 inch mainframe drives. But the 8 inch drive, which enabled the minicomputer, eventually won out because it let the customers do what they need to do in a more efficient manner. […]
Maybe the goal of the media should be to give people what they WANT (because that is what sells), and the goal of the audience should be to want what they NEED. After all, whose responsibility is it to ensure that I, a member of the audience, gets into med school and doesn’t die an early death from lack of broccoli?
One would hope it is mine.
Joanie, are you suggesting that with the freedom of media choice, participation and empowerment comes some level of responsibility? Shocking! Don’t we maintain the right to blame (even sue) Web 2.0 and Media 2.0 if it doesn’t provide us what we want/need — even when it delivers exactly what we asked for?
sbw, I like that taxonomy of news — it’s a sad reflection of the current state of affairs that the categories are not mutually exclusive.
Obligatory Rolling Stones Quote:
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You just might find
You get what you need
The quote says that as a member of the audience your desires may not match with what is provided. Each media has to try to cater for a variety of needs, wants and passing interests (a hierarchy of desire, if you will). There will be a core group of addicts who need the offering, a wider number who would like it but balance their preferences with other media (I prefer “would like” to “want”) and even more who have a passing interest.
My site has a small group of reader/participators, a larger number of regular core readers and then many, many more who simply come by to read one story from a link or search engine. To expect those readers who pass through to participate is unrealistic. But I have to develop all areas to make the site work.
Reinforcement of existing values is a useful function of media. FoxNews was successful because it identified a potential audience (people who perceived CNN as being too liberal) that was not adequately represented and gave the core audience what they needed and a wider audience what they wanted.
or misleading to speak of the U.S. economy or the Chilean economy or the French economy, I’m convinced that the practice of anthropomorphizing countries has gone too far. I explain in my… read more Publishing 2.0 What You NEED vs. What You WANT
Thanks for the kind words. The problem though, is that helping the niche audience, while a viable niche business, often doesn’t have the market to justify speculative development. I’ve seen a few of these types of businesses. And while they do work, they’re very small and specialized. It’s often someone at a firm already in the business, branching-out. And not at all portable to any other business.
[…] A recent post over at Publishing 2.0, What You NEED versus What You WANT gives a great example of the want versus need quandary we marketers often face. He’s talking in terms of media, but it really applies to anything. […]
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Scott Karp’s inequalities of the niche audiences…
Scott Karp posits that web2.0 tools are feeding the audience’s sweet-tooth instead of providing balanced nutrition. Visiting the memetrackers, I can definitely see his point. But reading many of the comments to the above post (and more so, the comment…
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