How far does a name get you?

Pretty far, but only far enough to get people's feet through the door. A new sandwich shop opened up around the corner from us called "Nick Varano's Famous Deli." Now there are a dozens of places to grab lunch in Boston's North End - most of which we haven't even tried yet after 3 years living here, but I ended up trying a sandwich at Nick Varano's yesterday, why? Because of his name.

Nick is a star of one of the most overplayed and thus slightly obnoxious local commercials that come on during or after Red Sox games. You know - the ones where the production values suddenly take a nose dive and some guy is screaming at you about his car business. Nick's commercial goes a little something like this:

Hi, I'm Nick Varano, the owner of Strega, which some people say is the best Italian Food in the City [Cut to a bunch of pictures of food which don't make me hungry and probably don't do the place justice]

That commercial has never actually made me want to go Strega, but after hearing this guy's name 50 times over the last couple months, I will say I was intrigued enough when I saw a shiny new eating establishment with his name on it to stop in for a $10 sandwich. And while this isn't meant to be a food review, I do have to say, that was a friggin' good sandwich.

Bottom line - if it weren't for the name Nick Varano, I probably would never have made it in the door. But the actual sandwich is what will most likely keep me coming back. If the sandwich was a overpriced piece of sawdust, no amount of advertising would have gotten me to go again.

I think a lot of industries forget this - the value of advertising dollars can be multiplied exponentially if what you are advertising is worth coming back to. If instead you spend millions of dollars advertising something like a bank that's about to fail (case in point WaMu's obnoxious Whoohoo! commercials) you're just throwing money down the drain.

That's why I've never understood the cell phone industry - and also why I hate the cell phone industry - they spend billions on advertising, and yet they are content to have a churn rate of 33% industrywide (2008 article)
If any of those dollars were sunk into creating a better user experience, whether from a customer service or just a service experience (let users know when they are over their minutes for example, or when there monthly bill is over double the usual, or get a call center in the US) I'm sure they could bring those numbers down substantially.

So, bottom line - advertising is enough to get people to try your service, but there better be something worthwhile otherwise people are going to shrug their shoulder's, say 'Ehh..' and move on.

StackOverflow was able to become a almost overnight success only because it had a user base right from the get-go. Would you bother to post or respond to questions of you were the only person there? It's creators name recognition is what got people there in the first place, but it was easy-to-use user interface that got people to register and kept people coming back.

Could you have written it in a weekend? Probably not, but let's say for the sake of argument that you could - does it matter? Do you have an audience of a couple million that you can direct to your new project so that your site's content will actually have any value? Nope.

As developers a lot of time we discount the marketing and seem to think "it we build it they will come" - but the truth of the matter is that you need to be able to both bring in an audience and keep that audience to be successful. Keeping a non-existent audience isn't enough - there are hundreds of millions of websites and hundreds of thousands of pieces of software out there - so it takes some work to get yourself noticed. On the flip side, spending your entire budget on marketing and then dropping a cow patty of a product onto the marketplace isn't taking you that far either - you need to do both. Now, I do still have indigestion from yesterday's heart-attack-on-a-plate Cubano, but now that I've tasted the goods - Nick Varano or no Nick Varano - chances are I'll be back.