the audience is never wrong

"An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark - that is critical genius."

- Billy Wilder -

That is what I found on the backside of Chris Hyam's business card.

A German Cowboy knows without the acknowledgment of the audience/ the customer he is nothing. It is more like the audience creates the performer. In Germany we have the saying: Applause is the artists bread. Now lets apply this old artists wisdom to business. What the customer hears, experiences, that's what counts. Not what we say and what we demonstrate.

I remember my father talking about advertising and marketing more than 30 years ago: "Their biggest mistake is, they think the mass market is stupid. People are not stupid, they are not easy to manipulate. Maybe it looks like that on the surface." My father had a decent job as an employed technician at the city of Stuttgart, in his heart he was an entertainer, studying great musicians, actors and their relationship to their audience.

Chris Hyams is the founder and CEO of Bside. Watch out! This company is applying web2.0 technology and the principals of the long tail economy to independent films. That can become a revolution, even influencing Hollywood. I heard him talking about their business model and the film industry. Totally inspiring, I wanna start film making again.

In the middle of the night I am writing this post while I am finishing a project for one of my clients. It is not his or my fault for this late night shift. I already had prepared my collection of good reasons why I could not deliver in time, and he would have had to accept it. Than I started to finish the project at 9pm and now it is after 4am. Not a big deal, that's what business people do, I thought.

But it is not normal business practice. That is what they call "going the extra mile for your customer".

A German Cowboy realizes going-the-extra-mile. Discover when you are going the extra mile, it is easy to over look those "normal business practices"!