Re: Iltharan Ghost In The Machine
Not sure if anyone else in in the Traveller RPG Facebook group but you might like it.
“Marketing 101” By Mark Suszko 12/30/21
The first rule of marketing is, you are not the market.
This was true before Cleon, before the Vilani, before the Ancients.
Yet, people forget this every day. Then I have to come in and clean up the mess.
Like last month. Megacorp. I won’t say which one, but really, you know it doesn’t matter: they’re interchangeable as a Hiver’s…whatever they call them. All the tentacles, doing the work, and one big sphincter, right in the center... Anyway, they brought me in. The Sphincter, er, the Big Man, lays it out to me:
“Bosko, the Aslan aren’t interested in our stuff. We want to lease access to mine in one of their belts, but none of our trade goods interest them. We make 489 distinct products and not a one gets them excited. We tried money. Even worse. The trade rep came back in several bags. Naturally, you came to mind. Will you consult with us?”
I told the Big Man he was looking at the problem all wrong. You gotta understand what a customer WANTS, sure… but you can learn just as much by finding out what they DON’T WANT.
I’m not a social scientist. I’m not a philosopher. I’m not a scholar or a diplomat. I’m a merchant and negotiator.
“Their values are not yours. Why would you assume they were?” I asked him to show me a map of the areas in question. A sector map…
Next, I had them get me the best statistics they had on the local Aslan, just raw data, no assumptions. I looked over the stuff while Big Guy had meals brought in. Gourmet stuff, Vilani Gourmet stuff… I had the answer by the second dinner course, but damn if I was going to miss dessert and drinks after, just to give it away early.
I illustrated the play using the detritus on the dinner table.
“This plate here is the local Aslan clan HQ; a decent enough little world, but limited land area, mostly ocean and ice. These crumbs are the belt in question. Aslan have to keep expanding with every generation. The new males gotta go out and earn some territory of their own, or they fight each other in useless wars. The females make the business moves: they gotta make bank to fund it and run it. You were making your offers to their males, and all that will do is bore them if you’re lucky, piss them off if you’re not lucky. You’ve gotta pitch the females, without the males knowing about it. They make the play to the males on your behalf. If there's a profit in it for them.”
The territory they HOLD… your mining belt - is mostly vacuum. Daddy Cats can’t chase game and act lordly over vacuum and rock. No matter how shiny it is. He doesn’t want products. He doesn’t need money. He wants dirt and sky and blood. Land. Even crappy land.
“Now look at the rest of the table: that plate there; that’s another system you dominate commercially, two parsecs away. It’s under-developed, low population, because it’s agriculturally a bust, full of hostile life forms, tough terrain, and the raw material wealth there is low, compared to that belt. For you, it's a tax write-off.”
I started moving the plates around in a circular relationship.
“You don’t need it, you don’t want it… you could let them buy into it now. Gives the males their relief valve. Keeps the sector peaceful. That’s good for business. Occupies all their energy, just getting it into shape and squabbling over it. Divvy it up into tiny, tiny plots to start; DIY ranches and quote, game preserves. Over time, let the males take over more and more, it should cover… ten-twenty generations of inheritance cycles, easy, on just the one continent. It has three more. "
I made a triangle of plates.
"Pitch the females that they could incorporate a subsidiary of your corp, administrate it, take rents on one continent, you keep the rest for now. Trade rents for the belt access; it becomes an in-house paper-shuffling game on the rents. You lose nothing, the females make investments against the rents as collateral, but you make the bigger money on the mining. Three-way win."
“Instead of trading assets, trade the -liabilities-. Each of you own something you DON’T want. Help them get rid of a problem, and they'll fix yours.”
I took my fee in cash and high passage tickets, and a ground floor advance buy-in on the real estate stocks and mining futures. The knighthood for diplomatic genius came later.
