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In film theory, a McGuffin is a story element which drives the plot and is essential to the motivations of the characters, but which is insignificant to the audience.

Maps, treasures, ticking time bombs, glass slippers, magic rings—you get the idea.

The McGuffin is fictional, which means it can’t actually help or hurt the audience, so the audience doesn’t really care about it one way or the other. We only care how it affects the development of the characters and the plot.

Here’s the thing . . .

It can be tempting to create content about something that is very interesting and motivating to you, but if it is unattainable by the audience then it’s just a McGuffin.

McGuffins aren’t bad, per se, but they are a pretty clear sign that you’ve crossed over into the realm of entertainment rather than education or anything else you might be aiming for in your content.

Remember, if your content revolves around a McGuffin, it’s not actually the McGuffin which is the subject of interest, it’s you.

People primarily use their social media feeds for two things:

1. to stay “up-to-date”
2. to “shut their brains off”

What that exactly looks like for each person might be slightly different, but ultimately this means that everything on social media effectively becomes either news or entertainment. (And the push toward algorithmically driven feeds is shifting the balance far more in favor of the latter than the former.)

Anything which can’t easily be converted into one of these two modes in the mind of the audience is likely to simply be considered annoying (i.e. a waste of time).

The Michelin brothers were masters at creating value.

Not only did they produce a product, the pneumatic tire, which was objectively superior to the solid-rubber contemporary standard, but they frequently invested in marketing which provided genuine value to their customers (i.e. anyone with a bicycle or an automobile).

The most famous, although far from the only, example is the Michelin Guide with its maps and restaurant star rating system.

Of course, the point of the guide was to encourage travel, thereby increasing the demand for tires,¹ but it also created genuine value for tourists and foodies, and it’s still a world-standard for restaurants nearly a century later.

So let’s take a step back . . .

The Michelin Guide is content created by a tire company which provides intrinsic and extrinsic value through its maps and recommendations, respectively.

But they also treat this content like a product, because that’s what it is. Imagine how much time, R&D, and resources go into producing a full travel guide.

And all this extra value is created in service of an industry which is tangential to the actual business.

So, when you’re thinking of ways to provide value to your customers, don’t be afraid to think beyond your primary offering.

~ ~ ~

P.S. If you want to hear more about the business acumen of the Michelin Brothers, I recommend this episode of the Founders Podcast.

1. As evidence of the tire-centric nature of the guide, these are the criteria descriptions of the Michelin star ratings:
   * – “A very good restaurant in its category”
   ** – “Excellent cooking, worth a detour”
   *** – “Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey” ↩︎

In response to my recent message about strategy, in which I said that every tactical decision has a strategy assumption built into it, I got this question from a fellow list member:

Good question!

Here was my response:

~ ~ ~

Here’s the thing . . .

A strategy is simply a plan for achieving an ultimate goal.

You have an ultimate goal for your business, so you have some kind of strategy for achieving it, even if you haven’t said it out loud or put it on paper. If you didn’t have any plan you wouldn’t take any action, so you wouldn’t have a business.

There are all kinds of strategies.

But not all strategies are winning strategies.

If you wrote down the strategy assumptions built into every one of your day-to-day decisions, would it look like a winning strategy?

The ubiquity of social media combined with an essentially non-existent barrier to entry for creating content means that more often than not content gets created first and the determination of whether or not it’s a good idea comes later.

As obvious as it sounds, I’ll just say out loud that this approach is backwards.

What this often comes down to is the age-old conflation of tactics with strategy.

Quick definitions:

A tactic is an action taken for the sake of its immediate result.

A strategy is a plan for implementing a series of tactics to achieve an ultimate goal.

Essentially, tactics are the “how” while strategy is the “why.”

Here are a handful of hypotheticals that might help illustrate the difference in the context of our media:

Tactics: “When does this video need to be posted?”
Strategy: “Why does this video need to be created?”

Tactics: “Should we update our feed weekly or monthly?”
Strategy: “Is a feed-based content platform the most appropriate way to publish our content?”

Tactics: “How can we make this more relatable?”
Strategy: “How do we want to be perceived?”

Notice that pretty much every tactical decision has a strategy assumption built into it.

Basically, you can either decide your strategy up front—in which case most of your tactical decisions will have ready-made answers; or your strategy will be revealed in retrospect as the result and sum of each individual tactical decision.

Suppose a woman wakes up one morning and the first thing she sees when she picks up her phone is a text message from her long-term boyfriend.

Aw, that’s sweet, right?

But suppose, after blinking away the sleep from her eyes and moving the tangled hair out of her face, she reads the text message and realizes that it’s a serious marriage proposal.

At risk of making generalizations, I think it’s safe to say that this message will not have the desired effect.

In fact, it will almost certainly have the opposite of the desired effect, no matter how eloquently the words in the text message are phrased or how long the couple has been together.

Now, if we take the exact same words from that beautiful text message but we imagine they are spoken by our hypothetical boyfriend to his hypothetical girlfriend in the confines of a dimly lit booth at her favorite upscale restaurant, we can hope that the chances of a favorable response increase dramatically.

Obviously.

What’s the point?

We should be just as careful in the choosing of the context and form of our messaging as we are about its actual content.

Even in less dramatic circumstances, it makes a difference.

Yesterday we looked at the difference between two different content development strategies:

high r: create a lot of content with minimal planning and production time

high K: spend lots of time developing each piece of content, but produce fewer overall

You know what? For our purposes and future reference I’m going to rebrand these as the “little q” (quantity) and “big Q” (quality) content strategies.

Anyway, here are a few more considerations you can think about related to this topic:

• Quality is not necessarily associated with length. It’s associated with invested time to nurture and develop. You can take the time to make it shorter.
• You can think of the content “offspring” as either individual content items, like a single blog post or a video, or you could think of it as a whole stream of content, e.g. you could see the whole channel of a weekly podcast as one item.
• These strategies are not necessarily mutually exclusive. You could have a little q content stream which is used to gauge what resonates and then choose which items you want to spend the time nurturing and maturing into a more focused form. Get creative!

But no matter how you go about it, remember:

1. Both strategies result in species that survive

and

2. The ultimate goal of your content should be to provide something of value to the customer while reducing the amount of excess time they have to spend on it

In biology there is a theory known as the r/K selection theory which relates to two different general methods that species appear to use to ensure their offspring mature to adulthood.

In simplified terms, high r animals prioritize quantity, i.e. have a lot of babies and send them out on their own and a few of them will probably figure it out and survive to adulthood.

For example, think of fish or rodents.

While high K animals focus on quality, i.e. have a small number of babies but invest a lot of time into making sure that most, if not all, of them survive to adulthood.

Think of humans or bears or elephants.

This is pretty easy to see translated to different strategies for content creators as well.

A high r content creator might produce a ton of content that is mostly off-the-cuff in hopes that something resonates with someone.

Meanwhile a high K content creator would spend a lot of time making sure that each piece of content was as impactful as it could be, therefore the total amount of content would be less due to longer planning and production times.

So, based on the quantity of your outputs and your time investment in each one, where do you fall on the spectrum from high r to high K content creator?

~ ~ ~

P.S. Apparently biologists refer to these two reproductive strategies as “cheap” and “expensive” respectively, which also seems relevant to the corresponding content creation strategy.

P.P.S. I think this concept would make an interesting pairing with last week’s linear vs circular media idea in your next content strategy conversation.

As soon as your content starts providing intrinsic value, it becomes its own offering, or product, of your business.

Therefore, you should treat your content like a business offering, and everything that goes along with that.

This means R&D, manufacturing, QC, fulfillment, customer support, etc.

Even marketing and advertising.

You have spent a lot of time and effort building good business practices and systems around the product or service that you went into business to offer;

don’t forget that those business practices apply to anything of value that you offer, including your content.

When you start thinking about what kinds of content to create, one of the first avenues you’ll likely consider is showcasing the details of the way you do what you do.

This is natural especially if you are very experienced and take a lot of pride in your product or service.

While this kind of content can be very useful for the guided discovery phase, there are a few things to consider.

Technique content is usually extrinsic value

Unless your customers happen to be peers in some way, getting into the weeds about how you work under the hood probably won’t have very much actionable information for them, although it might still be interesting or entertaining.

answer the right question

What technique content does provide to your customers is a sense that you take your job seriously, know the nuances of the work, and can get the job done.

This is definitely important, but this sense of confidence in you is not necessarily the same as confidence in your offering.

The question that customers really need answered is not “can this person get the job done?”

It’s actually:

Can this product or service solve my specific problem or improve my life somehow?

So next time you go to show off your gorgeous soldering skills or explain how you source your all-natural ingredients, be sure to connect it back to the ultimate benefit to the customer.