People Like Bad Pizza

I woke up in the middle of the night with the thought: people like bad pizza. There are times when my wife and I are on vacation and we've done a lot of touring or activities and we pick one night where we call it pizza night. We order in pizza and it's usually the hotel pizza or Domino's. Neither option is usually very good, but it really hits the spot nevertheless. Then there are other times I seek out the BEST pizza. I'll use an app like One Bite, check Yelp or Google reviews, and ask friends.  Often it's NOT convenient. It requires me to go out of my way or even to another city. But I'm not measuring success by convenience or even price. It's about quality.

Sometimes I want the BEST pizza.  And sometimes I like bad pizza.

How will we measure success?

One of the most important lessons I have learned from my good friend and mentor Mike Ross is all initiatives need to start by answering the most critical question: How will we measure success? It's like starting on a journey without knowing the destination. How will you know when you get there? Unless the journey IS the goal. And that's how you will measure your success.

On those days that my wife and I order what many would consider bad pizza, our measure of success is NOT the quality of the pizza. Success is the ease and comfort of a meal we can easily eat while watching a movie. When I went to Chicago, success was having what is considered a fair representation of Chicago-style pizza. I had Giordano's. A fair representation? Success for me was not finding the absolute best, just a good version.

My product is the best!

After all these years in business I cringe when I see vendors hawking their products with superlatives. The best. The most comprehensive. The fastest. My questions are always "compared to what?" and "for what buyer?"

The bottom line is: your product may be just right for how someone measures success. It's up to you to add context to those superlatives to help those whose success measurements match your product. When how your customer measures success aligns with the outcomes you can help achieve, you have a real opportunity for a sale.

How Context Shapes Narrative

This idea is central to storytelling and strategic positioning. What truly matters is not just the story you tell, but how it integrates into your audience's lived experience. The best of anything is not an absolute. It's always relative. Is it accessible? Is it convenient? Is it cost effective? It may also be about aligning with the story your customer is telling about themselves.

They may not be looking for an exquisite gourmet meal. Just an ideal late-night snack.

Berkson's Bits

AI is regression to the mean.

GenAI is statistically generated content. It is literally using statistics to determine what word is most likely to come next. By definition it's going to be average. Outstanding is hard, and statistically unlikely.

Want to stand out in an AI world? Be statistically unlikely.

What I'm Listening To

I'm a big fan of the People vs. Algorithms podcast. This one goes back a bit but is still relevant and well worth it. The hosts approach the world from a journalism and media space and their topics are pretty wide-ranging. One of my favorite episodes is The New Interface. They do a great job discussing how our primary interface to find information is through search. A year after the release of ChatGPT, they discuss how search is/will be overtaken by genAI.

If you have a favorite pizza joint (anywhere in the world) please let me know where and what makes it so special.

Looking forward to continuing the conversation.

Alan