by Freddy J. Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango LLC
How’s white with markings? Is white with markings tasty enough for you? Photo by Bakasama at fr.wikipedia.
True story: A man walks by a pet store and sees rabbits for sale. He tells the clerk that he’ll take one, and she asks him what color he’d like. The man responds, “I don’t think the snake cares”…
I know, I know, not the most heartwarming Easter story ever told. (If it’s any consolation, the clerk refused to sell a rabbit to the man, who replied, “Snake’s gotta eat, too.”) The reason I’m blogging it is that, in classic business literature fashion, any unusual story can be warped into a business lesson. ([intlink id=”3499″ type=”post” target=”_blank”]Seth Godin[/intlink] has made millions doing it, so why not play along?)
And here’s your lesson du jour: The snake is the consumer. (Stay with me now.) And all he wants is lunch — just something to tide him over for a couple of weeks. Yet here comes some know-it-all (the clerk) foisting upon him some features he couldn’t care less about.
As consumers, we’ve all experienced this feature creep: products with capabilities we don’t need or even want…
- “No, I don’t need a TV with 3D…”
- “And when exactly will I use four-wheel drive in Santa Monica?…”
- “This textbook comes with a DVD? Can I get a $100 discount if I just go with the paper version?”
In her highly insightful and engaging book, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd, Harvard Professor YoungMe Moon describes this mad proliferation of features — what she calls “augmentation-by-addition” — as a sign of creative failure. Rather than being truly innovative, companies just cram feature after feature into a product, since piling on commoditized features doesn’t take a lot of money or skill or imagination.
“It used to be that toothpaste offered the singular promise of cavity-free teeth: today, toothpaste offers the additional promises of fresh breath, tartar control, and a whiter smile. It used to be that laundry detergent offered the singular promise of clean clothes; today, there is static elimination, stain protection, and fabric softening.”
Such feature creep makes brands indistinguishable, so, as Moon notes, consumers stop caring about brands at all. Think about the low-end of the computer market: Toshiba, Lenovo, HP, Compaq, Dell, Asus, Acer, Whatever. “What does it matter,” says the snake. “They’re all the same anyway, so give me a deal.” The end result: companies start competing on the basis of price instead of brand in a disastrous race to the bottom.
This trend of imposing unwanted features on consumers is not limited to retail products.
Take Facebook’s timeline, for example. When did people start demanding to know their friends on a chronological basis? It’s even more nonsensical when it comes to business pages. How often do consumers want a year-by-year history of the brands they buy?
In fact, let’s take a step back and point out something that should upset all new-media marketers: most consumers don’t want interactivity in advertising. Video games? Of course they want interactivity. Ads? Not so much. In fact, way less than not so much. The Ad Contrarian points this out in a vicious but oh-so-true rant, “Interactivity: Get Over It”:
“Every experiment with interactive TV (ITV) has been a disaster. Click-through rates on banner ads are below 1 in a thousand. Engagement rates on Facebook are below 1/2 of 1%. It turns out that people on line react to ads the same way people off line react to them — mostly they ignore them. And when they do bother to read them, they overwhelmingly do not interact with them… In the digital world, people are passionate about interacting with each other — not brands, not ads, not you, not me. Get over it.”
And don’t get me started on how much people use QR Codes.
What’s this all mean? It’s simple: we marketers need to think twice – even thrice — before hopping on every tech trend that comes out of the chute. Want to play with something new because it excites y-o-u? By all means, go play. You might get lucky, just as you would with a roulette wheel. Want to use new tech because it excites consumers? Yeah, well hold on there, Buck Rogers, and determine whether your target customers are truly excited, or whether they just want something to tide them over a couple of weeks.
The snake doesn’t care – but he’s hungry. What are you going to do about it?
Response from my friend Ken Osborne: “Bought a Dell laptop yesterday. I needed a computer degree to figure out all the options. Took me two hours to order one. Then there were business vs personal computers. I chose business…then looked at personal. The personal side had much better machines for the same price. Thank GOD the business site was having problems when I pressed ‘buy’. I would have never know about the personal home computer side. I ended up with a better, cheaper computer by accident. I have no idea what I need. I need a computer. That works. And is fast. And basically, all i care about is whether it can handle all my programs. I paid my company computer guy $50 to walk me through the website as I added and deleted parts for the damned computer. I have no idea what the difference is between an i5 and i7 2.4 vs 2.5 GHz thingy is…but I’m guessing the i7 is better since the number is higher. Bigger hard drive? I guess… my main computers I TerraGigs something seems good, but I only use 10% of it….how much do I need and will it run Angry Birds? Primary Optical Device? What the hell is that? Cyberlink Power? Thats a cool name. 8X DVD with Cyberlink. Oh..I recognize the DVD name… I need that. Again, I’ll go with the higher number. 8X sounds better than 4X. 64 bit or 32 bit? How in the hell would I know? Does it run my business software? Which one works? If I get the 64 (which is a higher number so it must be better) will it run my old programs? Noise cancelling microphone? Will it cancel out my voice as I talk? What the hell is noice cancelling? I get frustrated and begin opening up different tabs so I can google search for some of these foreign words. I end up seeing consumer reviews…hmmm. I end up making a big part of my choice based on some idiot that didn’t like the gigomeister optometreter. WTF? Trying to decide on a screen was another nightmare. What the hell is this real touch or whatever it is called? Anyway, to make a long story short, I ended up just buying the standard model and didn’t make any adjustments to the hardware. Dell has at least 6 options for every piece of hardward in the laptop. They are nice enough to tell me how much more for each upgrade. $79..$99, $199….how the hell do I know. They were nice enough to put ‘Dell Recommends’ next to their recommended upgrade. Funny how they always are an extra $79 per upgrade. Do I need an extra 200MB on my hard drive? My phone doesn’t have that much and it seems to work just fine. Thank GOD I don’t have to go through this when I buy a cell phone…..”
this is spot on.
think about what consumers want!!!