Transactionalism vs Respect#
Consider these two statements:
Can I ask you for your help?
If you help me I’ll pay you back.
Which would you rather hear?
I like the first. It makes me feel like a person who helps people, rather than a person who’s trading favors.
Context#
This has come up recently in sales and marketing conversations. Often, we want something from people:
We want them to visit our booth at a conference
We want them to participate in a survey or customer interview
We want them to tell their friends about us
A typical marketing approach here is to incentivize the behavior we want with some object of value in return. This might be a bit of swag, or an entry to win a prize in a raffle, or an Amazon gift card.
It makes sense. People like getting stuff.
Reaction#
But these incentives never feel right to me. They feel transactional.
As a developer this transactional relationship isn’t what I want with users, like I’m trying to buy respect. As a user it make me feel cheap, like my time is being bought.
Instead, I’m often quite happy to help out with a project under the right conditions:
Is the project interesting?
Is it something I care about?
Is it important to me?
Am I important to it?
Yes? Then of course I’d be delighted to help. Helping to build something great is all the incentive I need.
When to Incentivize#
You should incentivize if you’re building something that people don’t care much about. Conversely you should instead foster a spirit of collaboration when you’re building something great that the people you need care about a great deal.
If you’re building something great that people care about, then don’t act like you need to buy their time. What’s more, trying to buy their time cheapens the relationship.
More than swag, people like respect.
And Give when Possible#
It’s still great to give stuff away though!
For example, at conferences we’ve been giving out this awesome Dask shirt:
I love this shirt. Good design. Excellent pun, at least for those who were coming of age during Daft Punk. I want everyone to have one! So we made thousands and gave them away at conferences. We didn’t ask people to give us their e-mail or have a conversation with us to get one or anything (indeed, some people were confused by this). We just did it because we thought it was an awesome shirt and relatively cheap to do.
People loved these shirts. I’d reliably see people the second day walking around in them proudly. Seeing that made me so happy.
This is the world I want to live in. A world in which we avoid extraction and instead collaboratively build great things.