I was sitting by the Seine two days ago, part of a trip to Paris with friends. One of my friends looked up and said, in a kind of mock frustration, “All the buildings around here are so beautiful. Don’t they ever get tired of making beautiful buildings?”
Apparently they do. In fact, that same day, we went to visit something very ugly.
In the middle of Paris, on a square lined by elegant, classical architecture, sits the Pompidou Center.
If you look at the back of your refrigerator, where the coils and pipes and wires collect cobwebs and dust, scale that up to a building the size of a sports stadium, paint the different pipes and coils blue and green and red, then you get the Pompidou.
The Pompidou is a cultural center — exhibition spaces and galleries and stages and a huge public library.
It looks shockingly ugly today. I suspect it looked much worse to the eyes of Parisians who saw it being built in the 1970s. One of them called it the “incinerator absorbing all the cultural energy and devouring it — a bit like the black monolith in 2001.”
And yet, people stream into the Pompidou.
In its first two decades, the place attracted 145 million visitors. Five years ago, in 2017, the last year I could find numbers for, the art museum inside the Pompidou had 3.3 million visitors. Untold millions more rode the free escalators to the top of the building to look at the Eiffel tower and Notre Dame and Montmartre, all nicely visible from the roof.
In other words, the Pompidou, ugly though it may be, is also a full-blown success. It’s doing what it’s designed to do, giving masses of people access to art, serving as a kind of new focal point in the city, renewing Paris as a cultural destination.
All that’s to say, there’s two ways to run your city:
One is to give visitors what they want – what they are expecting and demanding, what they have seen on postcards, what they initially came for.
The other is to do something shocking and new — because you have a new agenda for your city, or simply because you got bored of doing the same stuff you’ve done in the past.
The first of course is the more safe, more proven way. But both can work — as proven by the Pompidou.
As I mentioned above, I’m traveling right now. I’ll be away from home for next couple weeks, until May 19.
When I get back home after my trip, I will most likely open up enrollment for the group coaching on email copywriting I announced last month.
Which brings me to my point for this email. The two ways to run a destination city are also the two ways to run a profitable email newsletter.
One is to give readers more of what they came for, what they say they want, or that your research says they want.
The other is to do what you yourself want, what serves your purposes, your desires.
Both can work. But it’s good to be clear with yourself as to what you specifically are doing. This makes your job easier and makes you more effective over the long term.
When I do open up enrollment for the group coaching, I will only do so to people who have signed up to get (and stay) on the waiting list.
If you’ve done this already, there’s nothing more you need to do right now.
On the other hand, if you are curious about this group email coaching, then the first step is not to get on my waiting list, but to get on my main email list. That’s the first requirement I have for all people enrolled in this coaching. To sign up, click here and fill out the form that appears.