Regardless of the stage your product/service/business is in, consider its better reality if you want to be successful.
I was reminded of the late HBS professor Theodore Levitt’s principle of marketing myopia again yesterday when reading Dave Caolo’s excellent blog, 52 Tiger.
Speaking of the iPad in his post iPhone gloating, Dave wrote:
It was no accident that when Steve Jobs first demonstrated the iPad, he was sitting, cross-legged, in an easy chair. Anyone who ever tried to do the same with a laptop was struck at how appealing that scene was. The iPad offers the Internet that people want in a cozy, book-like form factor.
In fact, a recent Nielsen study revealed that 7 out of 10 people use a tablet while watching TV. Fifty-seven percent use a tablet in bed.
Haley is thinking like a geek, but we geeks represent a small portion of computer customers. Most shoppers want a computer for the tasks described above. For them, the iPad is a causal device for casual computing, while netbooks never evolved past, “Ooh, look. It’s a tiny laptop.”
Levitt’s principle was essentially to distill your product/service/business down to what your product really did for people or allowed them to do.
People didn’t want a small laptop, as Asus believed, but rather people wanted a better way to interact with Facebook, email, eBay, books and a few Angry Birds.
Apple understood that. That’s why the sales figures in Caolo’s article are unsurprising.
What is your product/service/business really providing? What do people really want that your P/B/S provides?
- People don’t want tires. They want safety and fuel efficiency.
- People don’t want a mattress. They want a killer night sleep.
- People don’t want family pictures. Moms want their mama friends to ooh and ahh.
You see?
In truth, you could peel back more layers of the iPad onion – as Apple does with their television advertisements – and say that people don’t even want to use Facebook – they want to share pictures, stay in touch with family or stalk their ex-girlfriends.
This is not new, but Apple does get it better than about anyone. Last June, Gina Trapani wrote:
That’s the thing about Apple marketing. They don’t talk about how many gigabytes of memory or how many CPU cycles or how many apps (much). They aim for your heart, and show you how technology can make your life better during its most important moments.
Unlike Apple’s recent insipid iPhone ads … I really like their iPad campaign:
Who else does this well?
My partner and brilliant copywriting teacher Jeff Sexton sent me a video from google yesterday that does a fine job of doing the father/daughter thing that he and I both are understanding more and more each day.
None of this is new. Levitt coined the term in 1960.
But isn’t it interesting that perhaps the two most technologically powerful companies in the history of history rely on human emotions to make gazillions from this technology.
How can you apply this to your world? What are you really providing for people?
Write about that. Talk about that. Tell me that story.
I can’t wait to hear it.
Oh, and PS – if you have a little extra time for weekend reading, and you like this kinda stuff, be sure to check out John Gruber’s essay on the chair that he wrote last year after the debut of the iPad 2.
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