Your business has two options: join the block where people expect you or build your own block.
If you’re looking for quick results, do the first. If you’re looking for long-term success, do the latter.
New York’s Secret Garden
Wander to West 28th Street next time you are in New York City, and you’ll stumble into a hidden oasis. Suddenly the sidewalks are filled with flowers, the street (and noise) are masked by huge shrubs, flowers and plants. It seems as if every floral shop in New York is on one single block.
Why? Why would 25+ stores all selling the same product set-up shop right next door to their competitors?
The answer is the “swerve.”
Businesses want to place themselves in the paths of potential customers. When someone is on their normal route from the office to the coffee shop, something across the street might catch their eye and make them swerve.
This swerve takes them into new territory. Suddenly they visit a new business, and while looking could swerve again to shops or stores nearby. If you’re a floral shop and want to swerve customers to you, opening next to another floral shop guarantees that the people who will see you are looking for flowers. This trend continues and soon there is convergence of all the floral shops to one block.
According to the New York Times, this phenomena happened on West 28th Street over the course of a century. In the 1870’s, immigrants from Germany, Italy, Eastern Europe and especially Greece would take the ferry from Long Island and sell flowers on carts near the ferry landing on 34th Street.
Over the following decades, they wanted to be close to the wealthy department store shoppers and also the theatre district, so they started consolidating their sales to between 26th and 29th Streets. Soon, if someone wanted flowers they would just go to those streets, so other flower merchants moved in, hoping to swerve new customers into their shops.
Opening your doors next to your competitors is the quick way to gain visibility and potentially customers. However, someone has to be first. It’s not easy to blaze the trail, but those who do, establish themselves as leaders and become the center of the swerve.
HubSpot’s Flag-Planting
HubSpot is an inbound marketing software platform that we use for ourselves and our clients. When HubSpot started in 2006, they could have called themselves marketing automation, enterprise software or a marketing tool. Doing so would have set their shop up next to competitors. It would have led to quicker recognition because people looking for marketing automation would see them as an alternative to the other platforms.
Instead, HubSpot created a new term and planted their flag: inbound marketing. With a widely-shared article (and later book), Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah created the new term and in doing so created a new “block,” the inbound marketing block. Over time, more people moved to their block and adopted the term. They, however, were the trailblazers. It took incredible effort and resources to create their own category, but now every time someone uses or searches for inbound marketing, more people visit their block.
Digital Swerves
Just as brick and mortar stores look to swerve customers from competitors, online businesses do the same. If someone is searching for a term like flowers, a business can provide an interesting article about flowers, a video or a website that is relevant. Everything on a Google search page is an attempt to get the searcher to swerve.
The competition is just as fierce in the digital world as in the physical world. There can only be so many flower shops on one block, and there can be only 10 results on the first page of Google.
There is one difference however, property prices don’t go up on Google.
In the physical world, you need a big budget to pay rent. In New York, the flower shops that have been there for over a century are now getting pushed out due to skyrocketing property values.
Online, if you can create the best information or the most appealing content, you get to be on the block. It doesn’t matter how big your budget is. That’s why the digital block is often the best option for businesses with limited resources.
If you take a big leap and create the block yourself, like HubSpot did, you will dominate the street. Not only will you be first, but you will also have the chance to fill the block long before competitors try to claim their space. As the block fills up, more people will potentially swerve to your business.
Digital Window Displays
There isn’t a right answer for a business. You might choose to gain quick visibility by joining someone else’s block or you might create your own block in hopes of long-term dominance.
Whatever you choose, know that claiming the perfect location in the digital age does not require a centuries-old history like West 28th Street. Rather, creating a digital swerve requires relevant and helpful information.
That is the new window disply.
Before you go, let me invite you to join our band of digital homesteaders. We send one essay each weekend. Subscribe to get our weekly email.
There are a few links I wanted to share related to this article and 9 Clouds:
- Radiolab is a great podcast, and they did a segment on “Emergence” and the story of West 28th Street. Click here and jump ahead to 17:37 to hear it or check out Steven Johnson’s book Emergence which talks about the swerve in the context of cities.
- We help a lot of automotive dealers stand out on their digital block. We launched a new website to explain what we do for auto dealers. Let me know what you think and share it with anyone you think we could help.
- We’re hiring! Join our team or tell someone else to apply.
- Photo: Fellowship of the Rich
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