If a stranger on the street introduced himself as a director and asked you what unmade film you’d like to see, what would you say?
Maybe you would say: I want to talk about how hippies create a commune on a beach in Thailand, but the idyll turns into terror? (Beach)
Maybe about a hacker who receives a strange message, following which he understands that he is the chosen one? (The Matrix)
Or how a petite writer buys an operating system with AI and a whirlwind romance ensues between them? (Her)
I’m sure you wouldn’t say anything like that. And I wouldn’t either. Why?
Let me tell you one more story.
Some friends once suggested that I take part phone number library in the creation of a mobile app with stories. In it, the user would choose the course of the plot and the ending.
It sounded cool back then, like the future was already here. Just imagine: you swipe your finger across the screen and create a customized story.
For context, I run a channel about the non-bohemian writer’s life . I was invited to write stories for a mobile app.
After thinking about it, I refused.
Firstly, it would have taken a lot of time. Instead of one story, I would have had to write five.
Or maybe twenty, if there are three or four forks in history. But the main reason is different.
A person who picks up a book or a smartphone how to take advantage of halloween for business wants to immerse themselves in the world that the author has created for the reader, in the fates of the characters that the author has created from his own, authorial observations. In the conflicts, values and possible conclusions that the author has laid down in this story.
The author, not the reader.
When you buy a chair, you want to sit on it, not assemble it. When you order a burger, you want to eat it, not cook it. This is how the format of a story, a narrative, is polar opposite to the format of a text game, any game.
Here I judge as a reader, not as a writer. I do not want to choose whether to keep Anna Karenina alive. I do not want Leo Tolstoy to please me and adapt history to my taste. I want to know the “real” fate of Karenina.
It only seems that the reader is interested in taking part in co-creation. In fact, it is almost always not. We come to a book, an application, a film, and any product in the broad sense for something else. For a solution to a problem, for satisfying a need. Co-creation consists in the reader’s own interpretation of history, but not in its creation.
Let me return to the question at the beginning.
How to identify customer needs and sell more
The audience doesn’t know what they want. So it’s pointless to ask: what do you want? What should our sausage, book, CRM system be like so that you buy it?
A visionary is someone who senses what the audience wants and gives it to them. And the audience then falls in love with the product and votes for it with their rubles and kopecks.
The audience doesn’t know what it wants. Or rather, it knows in its gut, but can never formulate it.
How to become a visionary and find out what betting data people want? Do you need a natural “nose” or is this skill developed? My text does not set the task of answering these questions. I will only note that they are applied, which means that the answers will be found, you just have to start looking. Now it is important for us to define a fundamental conviction: do not expect the audience to clearly say what they want. They will not say. You will have to research and guess – and this is ok if we want to create a strong, convincing product.