My Brain hurts - Wunderman books
My Brain hurts - Wunderman books
My Brain hurts - Wunderman books
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THE DIGITAL<br />
REVOLUTION IS<br />
LEAVING THE<br />
CONSUMER<br />
BEHIND<br />
MY<br />
BRAIN<br />
HURTS
We must help<br />
consumers<br />
understand<br />
technology better.<br />
If we do not, the<br />
digital revolution will<br />
fail.<br />
Our jobs, house<br />
prices, pensions, the<br />
future of our nations<br />
all depend on the<br />
economic growth<br />
that digitization is<br />
bringing.<br />
Helping consumers<br />
to grasp technology<br />
is thus the defining<br />
issue of our time.<br />
By:<br />
Simon Silvester<br />
simon.silvester@wunderman.com<br />
tel: +44 20 7611 6356<br />
For new business enquiries, please<br />
contact:<br />
Deborah Peake<br />
deborah.peake@wunderman.com<br />
tel: +44 20 7611 6522<br />
For press enquiries, please contact:<br />
Bernard Barnett<br />
bernard.barnett@wunderman.com<br />
tel: +44 20 7611 6425<br />
The emailable version of this document is<br />
at pubs.wunderman.com/brain.pdf<br />
MY BRAIN HURTS<br />
‘The new net boom’ announces Fortune.<br />
In California, venture capital is flowing.<br />
After five years in the doldrums, tech is back.<br />
And it’s back big time<br />
Last time it was only dotcoms, telecoms and computers<br />
that boomed.<br />
Today virtually every industry on Earth is experiencing<br />
rapid change.<br />
Hollywood is digitizing.<br />
Airlines are digitizing.<br />
Fast food service is digitizing.<br />
Soon, with the arrival of radio ID chips on every package<br />
in every supermarket, the humble food and drink<br />
industries will digitize too.<br />
But<br />
But as the world again gets excited by all things tech,<br />
perhaps we should pause.<br />
MY BRAIN HURTS 1
And remember how things ended in 1999/2000.<br />
When a trillion dollars of technical development crashed<br />
into a mountain of user indifference, and tech entered a<br />
depression.<br />
Millions of people lost their jobs and their pensions.<br />
And it could happen again.<br />
How could it happen?<br />
Digital technology gets twice as powerful every eighteen<br />
months.<br />
And it’s predicted to keep doing so for the next two<br />
decades.<br />
No industrial change in history has happened as fast as<br />
today’s digital revolution.<br />
As this happens, we tend to forget that there is one part<br />
of the digital world that hasn’t gotten any more powerful.<br />
Not just in the past few years. But in the past ten<br />
thousand.<br />
The mind of its user.<br />
Strain on the brain<br />
Each year, consumers are presented with new, more<br />
complex digital products and services.<br />
But each year, their ability to understand them does not<br />
rise.<br />
Twenty years ago, a phone was a simple device, with one<br />
dial.<br />
Many of today’s phones are packed with complex, badly<br />
understood functions.<br />
Lest we forget the<br />
2000/1 dotcom<br />
bust.<br />
In 1980, televisions had<br />
a few buttons and a<br />
volume knob. No longer.<br />
How many of these commonly used tech symbols do you recognise?<br />
Do you know the precise meaning of any of them?<br />
2 WUNDERMAN
IMAGINE IF ALL MARKETING WAS<br />
LIKE TECH MARKETING:<br />
‘Hi honey, I’m home!’<br />
‘That’s great dear! I’m cooking<br />
XRC-30 tonight.’<br />
‘’Mmmmm – is that with quadband<br />
3G CDMA and a level 2<br />
cache?’<br />
‘Yes indeed – and would you like<br />
a little 802.11g on the side?’<br />
‘I’m licking my lips!’<br />
‘Now you just settle<br />
down with a nice<br />
bottle of XC-L30K<br />
and I’ll have it on<br />
the table shortly.’<br />
‘That’s great<br />
honey, I can’t<br />
wait to taste that<br />
delicious SD-<br />
RAM!’<br />
Twenty years ago a television had one dial and a volume<br />
knob. Today’s AV systems have tens of each.<br />
The technology is leaving its consumer behind.<br />
And it’s getting worse<br />
Meanwhile, technology keeps moving on at high speed.<br />
Digital devices will be ten times faster and more capable<br />
within five years, and perhaps one hundred times within<br />
ten.<br />
There is already a gulf between what technology can do<br />
and what consumers - both young and old - can make it<br />
do.<br />
As technology surges ahead, this gulf can do nothing<br />
else but grow.<br />
Not funny<br />
We may laugh when consumers fail to understand the<br />
full capabilities of their phones, TVs and computers.<br />
But the consumer’s failure to grasp technology is not<br />
trivial.<br />
It leads to the vaporization of venture capital.<br />
It is the issue that is increasingly holding back the whole<br />
digital revolution.<br />
Global growth, and the fate of nations depend on rapid<br />
adoption of new technology.<br />
It is thus the decisive issue of the early 21st century.<br />
Twenty years ago, phones<br />
were simple.<br />
MY BRAIN HURTS 5
THE DARK SECRET OF DIGITIZATION<br />
The human mind’s inability to assimilate technology is<br />
the dark secret of the tech industry:<br />
• Research by consumer electronics manufacturers<br />
reveals that consumers never touch most of the<br />
buttons on the remote controls in their living rooms.<br />
• Washing machine manufacturers report that however<br />
many programs they build into their washing<br />
machines, consumers rarely use more than two of<br />
them.<br />
• Software companies keep building extra commands<br />
into their programs, but quietly concede that<br />
consumers refuse to use more than a small fraction.<br />
• Banks offer a wide choice of funds in online<br />
investment supermarkets, but find that most people<br />
don’t even browse beyond the basic options.<br />
The consumer simply doesn’t use most of what<br />
technologically advanced companies build into their<br />
products.<br />
The consumer holds things back for decades<br />
The inability of consumers to understand a piece of<br />
technology can hold it back not just for years but for<br />
decades.<br />
Today, consumers marvel at how they can collect shows<br />
In the 21st century, you<br />
need a degree in rocket<br />
science just to iron a<br />
shirt.<br />
What does the button with two circles on it<br />
do?<br />
What do ‘SysRq’ and ‘Scroll Lock’ mean?<br />
What exactly does ‘chaos defrost’ do?<br />
Digital devices can get twice as fast - or as<br />
confusing - every eighteen months.<br />
6 WUNDERMAN
Consumers<br />
only use a<br />
couple of<br />
buttons on<br />
their remote<br />
controls.<br />
Even teens have litte idea<br />
what most of the buttons<br />
on their phones,<br />
computers and<br />
audiovisual equipment do.<br />
on their digital video recorder (like TiVo or Sky+) to play<br />
back later.<br />
TV schedules no longer dictate how they use their<br />
leisure time, and they love the freedom.<br />
But this isn’t the first time digital technology has made<br />
this promise.<br />
It was already promising time-shift viewing back in 1980<br />
with the invention of the video cassette recorder.<br />
It’s just that no one over fourteen could program a VCR<br />
to record the right channel at the right time.<br />
It took twenty-five years for the electronics industry to<br />
design a time-shift viewing device that ordinary<br />
consumers could actually use.<br />
This pattern is repeated in many other industries.<br />
It is thus the pace of consumer comprehension, not the<br />
pace of technological change, that will determine the<br />
pace of the digital revolution.<br />
Consumers struggle with new concepts too<br />
Consumer confusion also slows the introduction of new<br />
technological concepts.<br />
Sure, consumers can tell you they prefer HDTV to<br />
ordinary TV, but when it comes to evaluating really new<br />
technological ideas, they struggle:<br />
• When the telephone was first invented, many of its<br />
early users thought its main use would be to<br />
broadcast orchestral concerts.<br />
• When email first became popular in the mid 1990s,<br />
many CEOs responded by putting an email terminal in<br />
their telex room*.<br />
• When television first arrived, early viewers thought its<br />
8 * Telex was a key business telecommunication system before the arrival of fax.<br />
WUNDERMAN<br />
Even since the beginning of the century, digital technology has sped up dramatically.<br />
Computer chip speeds are already ten times faster. Download speeds are already thirty<br />
times faster.
iggest audiences would go to the newsreels they<br />
had seen in the movie theater, not to game shows.<br />
• And as Henry Ford put it in 1910, ‘if I’d asked my<br />
customers what they’d wanted, they’d have asked<br />
for a faster horse.’<br />
The consumer absorbs new technological concepts<br />
slowly, and with difficulty.<br />
Even young consumers struggle<br />
‘Don’t worry about complexity’ say some tech<br />
companies, ‘we’re targeting digitally literate 17 year<br />
olds.’<br />
Crap.<br />
Young people may absorb tech concepts faster than<br />
old people over 30, but they still struggle with how to<br />
make things work.<br />
• Y&R’s qualitative research has yet to find a<br />
teenager who knows what all the buttons on their<br />
phone do.<br />
• Few can explain even a quarter of the functions of<br />
their parents’ DVD, TV or VCR.<br />
• And Virgin mobile phones sell because they have<br />
the only pricing plan 17 year olds (or anyone else)<br />
can understand.<br />
Even amongst young people, it is the pace of<br />
consumer comprehension, not the pace of<br />
technological change, that will determine the pace of<br />
the digital revolution.<br />
But the tech industry has failed to acknowledge this.<br />
It needs to rethink its attitude towards its consumers<br />
and do so fast.<br />
10 10 TRANSISTORS<br />
PER DIE: LOG<br />
10 9<br />
SCALE<br />
10 8<br />
10 7<br />
10 6<br />
10 5<br />
10 4<br />
10 3<br />
10 2<br />
SOURCE: INTEL<br />
1970 1980 1990 2000 2010<br />
MOORE’S LAW MEANS DIGITAL<br />
TECHNOLOGY GETS BETTER<br />
FAST<br />
If a technology is digital, that technology<br />
obeys Moore’s Law.<br />
Moore’s Law, first proposed by Gordon<br />
Moore of Intel back in 1968, states that<br />
the number of transistors on a silicon<br />
chip, and therefore the speed and<br />
abilities of computers double every two<br />
years – since revised down to every<br />
eighteen months.<br />
Chips have obeyed that law for the past<br />
thirty-five years – and show all the signs<br />
of continuing to do so for the next twenty.<br />
Put simply, anything digital can get twice<br />
as good, or as fast - or as unintelligible -<br />
every eighteen months.<br />
Time for a change<br />
This booklet challenges the way tech companies<br />
do things.<br />
It argues that they should put the consumer first,<br />
not last.<br />
It uses Y&R’s intensive program of qualitative and<br />
quantitative research, consumer observation and<br />
analysis to set out some of the keys to successful<br />
communication.<br />
None are intuitive.<br />
Few are reflected in current marketing thinking on<br />
the web, in consumer electronics or in telecoms.<br />
The keys reflect the ways in which humans have<br />
responded to technological advance since time<br />
immemorial.<br />
As such, they risk being ridiculed by those within<br />
the technology community who regard any solution<br />
that is more than six months old as being out of<br />
date.<br />
But the eternal is eternal for a reason.<br />
And genuine marketing insights are no more abundant<br />
today than they were in the dotcom boom.<br />
Without an understanding of their consumer,<br />
technologies will struggle.<br />
The companies responsible for them will stumble, and<br />
industries will die.<br />
And they will do so however good their engineers,<br />
however smart their manufacturing - and however much<br />
money they spend on their marketing.<br />
THE BURSTING OF THE<br />
INTERNET BUBBLE<br />
DIDN’T STOP<br />
TECHNOLOGY<br />
Since the internet bubble burst in<br />
1999/2000, technology hasn’t<br />
stopped advancing.<br />
Many digital devices are now ten<br />
times better than they were then:<br />
Typical<br />
processor<br />
speed<br />
Typical home<br />
download<br />
speed<br />
Typical number<br />
of peanuts in a<br />
Snickers*<br />
2000 2006<br />
300KHz<br />
56Kbps<br />
22 22<br />
2000KHz<br />
2000Kbps<br />
* control<br />
10 WUNDERMAN MY BRAIN HURTS 11
Even in high science, good names are<br />
vital. The ‘relativistic gravitationally<br />
collapsed massive object’ was<br />
discovered in 1916. But it<br />
didn’t grab the popular<br />
imagination until<br />
someone<br />
renamed it the<br />
‘black hole’<br />
in 1967.<br />
THE 17 KEYS TO CONSUMER<br />
UNDERSTANDING<br />
Names<br />
need to<br />
work across<br />
cultures: The<br />
1967 worldwide<br />
media frenzy<br />
around black holes<br />
was subdued in France<br />
because ‘trou noir’ was French<br />
slang at the time for ‘asshole’.
1. THINK SIMPLE<br />
‘When I listen to music, I like to hum along<br />
and tap my feet’, they told him. ‘If other<br />
people can’t hear the music I’m doing it<br />
to, they’ll think I’m a psycho.’<br />
To communicate the idea, he needed a product<br />
that could be understood in one way only.<br />
And that meant it had to have one function only. The<br />
record button and radio had to go.<br />
So he overruled the engineers. And his one-function<br />
press and play device went into production.<br />
Because his new product could only be used in one way,<br />
young people were forced to take Morita’s intention<br />
seriously.<br />
Simplicity acts like a<br />
missile into the<br />
consumer<br />
consciousness.<br />
If you want to get inside the<br />
consumer’s head, simplicity<br />
is the key.<br />
In the late 1970s, Sony was developing a new consumer<br />
electronics device.<br />
The device would allow people, for the first time ever, to<br />
carry round music easily and listen to it anywhere<br />
without irritating others.<br />
The device was designed to do this – and nothing else.<br />
‘But they will still want a record function’, said the<br />
engineers, ‘and how about a radio?’<br />
But Akio Morita, the founder of Sony, knew that he had<br />
a serious communication problem on his hands.<br />
At the time, young people always shared music,<br />
wandering around in groups with throbbing ghettoblasters.<br />
He was asking them to wander around listening to<br />
music that no one else could hear. He knew they would<br />
find the concept weird, and would resist the idea.<br />
This forced the Walkman into the public consciousness,<br />
and made it a worldwide hit.<br />
‘The ideal<br />
consumer<br />
electronics<br />
device has only<br />
one button.’<br />
AKIO MORITA,<br />
FOUNDER OF SONY<br />
Which means<br />
A device that does one thing well is a much stronger<br />
consumer proposition than a complex multifunctional<br />
offer, no matter how advanced its specification.<br />
So if you want to get inside the consumer’s head, think<br />
simple.<br />
1. Simplicity gets remembered<br />
In the 1960s, offices flooded with new technology –<br />
duplicating machines, golf-ball typewriters, telexes and<br />
more.<br />
But the only machine in that office with one-button<br />
simplicity was the photocopier.<br />
Most companies that made office equipment in the<br />
1960s are now footnotes in history.<br />
Even government can be<br />
simple. Clinton’s 1992 election<br />
team pinned these words to<br />
their hotel room doors.<br />
14 WUNDERMAN<br />
MY BRAIN HURTS 15
Not so Xerox, the inventor of that photocopier.<br />
2. Simplicity builds loyalty<br />
Most tech products are so difficult to learn, that those<br />
that are easy inspire great loyalty from their users.<br />
Nokia gets the highest loyalty amongst mobile phone<br />
brands because their 2006 models work without your<br />
having to read the instruction manual – and in exactly<br />
the same way as their 1996 models.<br />
Similarly Canon’s Digital<br />
Ixus cameras inspire<br />
loyalty because<br />
their current<br />
seven megapixel<br />
model works in<br />
exactly the same<br />
way as their two<br />
megapixel model<br />
from 2001.<br />
3. Simplicity solves<br />
complex problems<br />
Even when a product is<br />
complex, it still pays to<br />
market it simply.<br />
When Microsoft was launching the<br />
latest Word upgrade a few years back, their engineers<br />
unveiled a product with many new capabilities.<br />
It had amazing mail merge, a 3D text graphics engine<br />
and web integration.<br />
But Microsoft’s marketing didn’t mention any of these.<br />
They focused all their efforts on communicating<br />
A $30,000 car needs an instruction<br />
book no more than 9mm thick. So<br />
why does a wireless router need one<br />
30mm thick?<br />
16 WUNDERMAN<br />
When they rent a car, most people can start<br />
it up and drive it without problem.<br />
Most people who use a computer less than<br />
once a month forget how to use it between<br />
sessions.<br />
But most new tech appliances do not work<br />
without reading an instruction book.<br />
The same is true of camcorders – many<br />
families simply forget how to operate theirs.
something quite simple – its ability to make simple<br />
spelling corrections like ‘ist’ to ‘its’ and ‘hte’ to ‘the’ as you<br />
typed.<br />
And the world went to their IT helpdesk and asked for<br />
the upgrade.<br />
4. You can never be too simple<br />
For years internet search engines prided themselves on<br />
their simplicity.<br />
Whilst other portals added complex offers and<br />
confusing navigation, the search engines stuck to one<br />
page.<br />
But all were trounced by Google with its one fill-in box,<br />
and otherwise blank screen.<br />
So<br />
So if you want your technology to fly, think simple:<br />
• Mobile phones are increasingly easy to make voice<br />
calls on, now their software has been simplified. But<br />
their airtime packages are still complex. Service<br />
providers think they are providing ‘choice’ and<br />
‘freedom’ by offering 25 different price plans. They<br />
might attract more customers if they just offered just<br />
one good one.<br />
• Most online banking sites are simple – security fears<br />
make banks keep the functions to a minimum. Not so<br />
online share dealing sites. Some don’t display vital<br />
information if your monitor isn’t large enough; others<br />
are drenched with obscure finance-speak. If online<br />
dealing is going to break into the mainstream, these<br />
sites need a fundamental rethink.<br />
The MP3 player market was flooded<br />
with multifunction devices that played<br />
FM radio and told the time as well as<br />
played music. Then Apple came in<br />
and took 80% of the market with a<br />
device that did only one thing.<br />
• Most national railway automatic ticketing machines<br />
have simple dialogues – but leave consumers<br />
thinking they could have got a better deal elsewhere<br />
if only they’d known the system better. To satisfy<br />
customers, you have to be transparently simple.<br />
• Moore’s Law means that software can get twice as<br />
complex every eighteen months. Message to<br />
software designers: making it so is a bad idea.<br />
18 WUNDERMAN<br />
MY BRAIN HURTS 19
As mankind’s first lunar<br />
module approached the<br />
moon’s surface in 1969, its<br />
main computer crashed.<br />
2. THINGS THAT DON’T WORK,<br />
DON’T WORK<br />
Today’s electronics consumer<br />
is far less tolerant of failure.<br />
Marketing money is wasted<br />
on unripe technologies.<br />
In 2003, millions of people were captivated by the<br />
picture messaging campaigns of mobile service<br />
providers.<br />
And they upgraded their mobile phone to a camera<br />
phone.<br />
Then they charged up their phone, took a picture, and<br />
sent it to a friend.<br />
Very few of those friends ever saw the picture:<br />
• The majority of the pictures were sent to phones<br />
unable to display pictures.<br />
• The networks hadn’t agreed common technical<br />
standards, so any picture which crossed networks<br />
disappeared.<br />
• Many people who did receive the pictures never saw<br />
them, because they didn’t know how to open them.<br />
20 WUNDERMAN
As a result, picture messaging failed in 2002/3.<br />
Compare that with the previous great mobile messaging<br />
technology, the SMS text:<br />
• Mobile service providers didn’t advertise SMS, as<br />
they saw it as a competitor to their lucrative voice<br />
calls.<br />
• As a result, text messaging grew organically.<br />
• Young people checked whether their friends had 2G<br />
phones or not, and only sent texts to those who did.<br />
• As compatibility grew in the mid 90s, text messaging<br />
exploded all over Europe, Africa and Asia, with<br />
billions of messages a year being sent by 1996.<br />
• Within a few years, texting was providing a new<br />
revenue stream of 7% of revenue for mobile service<br />
providers.<br />
Picture messaging failed, despite hundreds of millions of<br />
dollars of marketing because it wasn’t ready. Text<br />
messaging succeeded, despite any<br />
marketing, because it was ready.<br />
Technology producers need to think<br />
further about this, making sure their<br />
technology is ready before they set<br />
out to market it.<br />
Before a technology is ready, no<br />
amount of marketing will make it<br />
happen.<br />
Afterwards, not even silence can<br />
stop it.<br />
Networking computers<br />
together can still stump<br />
even the geekiest of<br />
consumers.<br />
So<br />
So make sure your technology works before you market<br />
it:<br />
• Is the home wireless network ready for the mass<br />
consumer market yet? Most routers require a PhD in<br />
computing to set them up.<br />
• Internet telephony is also not quite ready for the<br />
ordinary consumer. Congratulations to Skype, who<br />
are continuing to allow their service to spread virally,<br />
rather than pushing it at an unprepared mass market.<br />
• We’re still waiting for it – the video editing application<br />
for the common man.<br />
When home networks break<br />
down, how do you fix them?<br />
Sites like eBay and<br />
Craigslist are hitting<br />
newspaper classifeds<br />
hard in the US.<br />
In Russia though, lower<br />
computer ownership<br />
means that classified<br />
advertising is still going<br />
strong.<br />
22 WUNDERMAN<br />
MY BRAIN HURTS 23
3. WHAT WORKS NO LONGER MATTERS<br />
When a technology finally<br />
delivers on its promises,<br />
marketers should watch out.<br />
The late 19th century was a great time for farmers.<br />
New technology – in the shape of traction engines,<br />
harvesters and milling machines - was arriving on farms,<br />
making them more productive.<br />
Farming journals spoke of a new ‘golden age of farming’,<br />
of new heights of food production and of farming at last<br />
becoming an important, economically vital industry.<br />
But that’s not what happened.<br />
Over this period, agriculture fell from 60% of GDP to<br />
under 3% in some industrial nations.<br />
Farmers lost their power to affect change. Farming<br />
became a small part of the economy.<br />
Once the problem of adequate food production was<br />
solved, it ceased to be an issue.<br />
When watches ran fast and slow<br />
A similar thing happened with timekeeping in the late<br />
1960s.<br />
At the time, everyone had clockwork watches, many of<br />
which lost or gained five minutes a day.<br />
Daily conversations revolved around the correct<br />
time, and adjusting watches and clocks.<br />
‘Do you have the time please?’ was a standard<br />
pick-up line.<br />
Then digital quartz crystal technology arrived,<br />
promising precise timing.<br />
Precise timing caught the popular imagination.<br />
The dialogue of 1960s TV series reflects the<br />
widespread belief at the time that ever more precise<br />
timing was the way of the future:<br />
‘Negative, captain, the shuttle is landing in 24.8<br />
seconds.’<br />
‘You have eight minutes and three seconds to<br />
live Mr. Solo.’<br />
‘Arrival in two point three eight six minutes<br />
affirmative, Virkar.’<br />
But by 1980, everyone had a super-accurate quartz<br />
watch, everyone knew the precise time.<br />
And the timing issue – and with it the craze for precise<br />
timing - disappeared.<br />
The ungrateful consumer<br />
When the main benefit of a technology is delivered,<br />
The accuracy of clocks and<br />
watches was a popular topic<br />
of conversation for the two hundred<br />
years upto the invention of quartz<br />
digital watches. Nowadays, it’s<br />
just not an issue.<br />
24 WUNDERMAN<br />
MY BRAIN HURTS 25
consumers stop being grateful to companies for<br />
providing that benefit.<br />
And simply forget that that benefit exists.<br />
So watch out<br />
Consumers stop being grateful fast:<br />
• Mobile network service providers were the darlings of<br />
Europe in the 1990s as they let consumers talk to<br />
their friends anywhere, any time.<br />
But now that call quality is perfect, and everyone has<br />
a mobile phone, European mobile service providers<br />
are rapidly becoming perceived as little better than<br />
the state landline companies that preceded them.<br />
• In the 1920s, managing a steady flow of electricity<br />
into factories was such a critical issue that most<br />
companies had a main board electricity director.<br />
Once electricity supplies became secure, he<br />
disappeared. Does the same fate await CIOs, now<br />
that corporate PC and email systems all work?<br />
• With 24/7 global email and intranets, information<br />
flow within companies has now become so fast that<br />
information is no longer the critical factor holding<br />
them back. So are we now in the middle of the<br />
information age – or are we watching its end?<br />
Mobile phones which read barcodes on the bottom of ads will shortly be the wonder of the West.<br />
But they are already taken for granted in Japan.<br />
MY BRAIN HURTS 27
4. BEWARE THE COUNSEL OF NERDS<br />
Winning technologies are<br />
those that appeal to ordinary<br />
people, not just geeks.<br />
When Kodak introduced its point-and-shoot Box<br />
Brownie camera in 1900, American photographers<br />
laughed. They wanted better pictures – and that meant<br />
more sophisticated cameras. Kodak’s new offer was<br />
little more than a box with a hole at one end.<br />
But Kodak had inspired the average American to think<br />
that perhaps he could now take photographs all by<br />
himself.<br />
As there were a lot more ordinary Americans than there<br />
were photographers at the time, the brand rapidly came<br />
to dominate its market.<br />
Similarly with AOL in the 1990s<br />
Throughout its early days in the mid 1990s, the online<br />
community laughed at AOL, with its no-brainer sign-up<br />
Tech company employees often<br />
regard mainstreamers as dinosaurs.<br />
Some nerds choose to carry a selection of pens in their shirt pocket. Corporate health and safety<br />
manuals warn that this habit can be lethal in the event of an automobile accident.<br />
28 WUNDERMAN
process, and cutesy low-tech imagery. As an AOL user<br />
you were regarded as pond life in chat rooms. An AOL<br />
email address was social death.<br />
But AOL had inspired the average American to think<br />
that perhaps even he could take the on-ramp to the<br />
cyberactive infobahn thing everyone was talking about.<br />
And as there were many more ordinary Americans out<br />
there than wired people at the time, AOL rapidly became<br />
the main dial-up way of accessing the internet.<br />
Ten years later, AOL remained attractive to many<br />
millions of ordinary Americans – and one of the biggest<br />
money earners on the web.<br />
Your audience loses its brain<br />
What AOL and Kodak understood, and what most tech<br />
brands don’t, is that as a market develops, levels of<br />
understanding, and comfort do not rise. On the contrary,<br />
they fall.<br />
First come the nerds, with love of technology, and their<br />
intuitive sense of how it works.<br />
Then come the early adopters, excited by the<br />
technology, but with slightly less knowledge.<br />
Then the mainstream flood in, with their fears and<br />
ignorance.<br />
Finally come the laggards, who just don’t want to feel left<br />
out.<br />
Over time, as the market floods with new, less tech savvy<br />
consumers, the average level of understanding in the<br />
market falls rather than rises. And amongst advicehungry<br />
new entrants, the level of tech savvy is even<br />
lower.<br />
Not all software is designed by<br />
nerds for other nerds. On the<br />
computer map on Virgin Atlantic<br />
flights, a dancing Elvis appears<br />
as you fly over Greenland.<br />
Jeff Bezos at Amazon focused firmly on the<br />
mainstream.<br />
When he first launched Amazon in 1997, he<br />
included a phone number for people who didn’t feel<br />
confident about transmitting their credit card<br />
details online, together with rapid email<br />
confirmation that an order had been accepted, was<br />
being processed and had been mailed out.<br />
None of the geeks and nerds who were Amazon’s<br />
first customers used the phone number; most<br />
found the emails a nuisance.<br />
But a year later, when online purchasing became<br />
mainstream, suddenly Bezos’s planning bore fruit.<br />
Unlike at most other online retail sites, the<br />
mainstream knew when they had placed an order at<br />
Amazon. They knew they had an alternative if they<br />
didn’t want to transact online. And they knew when<br />
to expect the package.<br />
And so whilst all other online retailers were losing<br />
the mainstream’s trust with their bug-ridden<br />
payment processes and chaotic fulfilment, Amazon<br />
gained it.<br />
30 WUNDERMAN
Companies need to tune their offer to these successive<br />
waves of less and less techy consumers. As time goes<br />
on their marketing has to get more basic, not more<br />
sophisticated.<br />
So:<br />
• Online banking portals worked fine for their first<br />
users in the 90s. But the sort of people who are<br />
trying online banking for the first time now aren’t that<br />
comfortable with software interfaces. They need to be<br />
simplified to cope.<br />
• Similarly with microwave ovens. They worked fine<br />
when they were bought by tech-savvy early-adopter<br />
housewives in the 1990s. But now they’re<br />
mainstream. Brief to microwave designers: come up<br />
with a microwave as idiot-proof as a regular oven.<br />
• Vodafone are currently marketing simplified-interface<br />
mobile phones aimed at mainstream people over<br />
forty. Could such an approach pay off in the digital<br />
camera market too?<br />
Mainstreamers are different:<br />
In the early days of video in the<br />
1970s, cash-strapped mainstreamers<br />
plugged their new VCR into their old<br />
TV set.<br />
And the real benefit of a VCR to them<br />
was that they could, for the first time<br />
in their lives, experience the luxury of<br />
changing channel without getting out<br />
of their armchair.<br />
Are you a mainstreamer or some other type of person?<br />
Find out in our online personality test at http://4cs.yr.com/diys<br />
MY BRAIN HURTS 33
5. THINK INFECTION<br />
How fast a technology<br />
passes from person to<br />
person is decisive to its<br />
success.<br />
Between 2004 and 2007, two new devices appeared in<br />
the living rooms of the world: the flat panel TV, and the<br />
DVR.<br />
The flat panel TV rapidly became a must-have item<br />
across the world, despite its high prices.<br />
But the DVR grew much more slowly over the period -<br />
despite the fact that most DVR owners say that it has<br />
revolutionized their lives, and despite the fact that any<br />
satellite TV subscriber given a DVR never gives the<br />
service up.<br />
The reason flat panels have a much higher consumer-toconsumer<br />
infection rate:<br />
• In 2004, the flat panel TV was the high status item in<br />
early adopter homes. He talked about the amazing<br />
34 WUNDERMAN<br />
The most successful technologies spread virally from person to person.
picture quality; she endorsed its<br />
minimalist lines and space-saving<br />
ability.<br />
And they repeated their sell to every<br />
visitor to their home.<br />
• By 2005, the world was sold on flat<br />
panel TVs. Mr Average was inviting<br />
his friends round to watch football on<br />
it, and extolling its virtues to them.<br />
Compare that with DVRs over the<br />
period:<br />
• In 2004, the first TiVo and Sky+<br />
owners were amazed by their devices, and found<br />
themselves suddenly no longer watching live<br />
television.<br />
• They tried to communicate their experience to their<br />
friends, but couldn’t. Their friends just thought they<br />
had a digital version of a normal video player.<br />
• In 2005, DVRs had become more mainstream. But<br />
again, owners struggled to rave about them to their<br />
friends. ‘It lets you pause live TV.’ was the best they<br />
could do. ‘How often do I want to pause live TV?’<br />
came the reply.<br />
Today, in 2006, DVR owners continue to struggle to<br />
articulate what the DVR has done for them - despite the<br />
fact that they have moved into a completely new world<br />
of on-demand television.<br />
The flat panel TV succeeded rapidly because consumers<br />
found it easy to infect their friends with the need for one,<br />
At airports, retailers, and<br />
nightclubs plasma<br />
screens are spreading<br />
like wildfire.<br />
The DVR is growing much more slowly because no one<br />
can express quite why it’s so good.<br />
So<br />
If you want the world to accept your device quickly,<br />
concentrate on making it more infectious:<br />
• The iPod spread fast because even if you put yours<br />
inside your jacket pocket, your white headphones<br />
were still visible to everyone around you. Other MP3<br />
player manufacturers need to think up a similar<br />
mechanic.<br />
• It was the ‘my friends are’ section of the homepage<br />
that made <strong>My</strong>Space spread like wildfire through<br />
schools and colleges. Everyone went out and asked<br />
their friends to sign up and link to their page,<br />
because otherwise it would be obvious that they<br />
were simply not popular.<br />
• The Blackberry spread fast because every email it<br />
sent included ‘sent from my wireless BlackBerry<br />
handheld’ by default. Why don’t other<br />
communications systems brand their output?<br />
Photography only took off when<br />
people learned to ask their audience<br />
to pose and say cheese.<br />
36 WUNDERMAN<br />
MY BRAIN HURTS 37
6. BUYING IS ONLY THE BEGINNING<br />
Successful technologies are<br />
those that consumers<br />
rethink their lives around.<br />
Most tech marketers advertise and promote heavily to<br />
get their consumer to buy their products.<br />
Once that consumer has left the shop, they see their job<br />
as done.<br />
But the success of tech products relies massively on<br />
whether consumers adopt the product for everyday use<br />
or not.<br />
No tech product succeeds long term if the consumer<br />
buys the product, takes it home and puts it in a drawer.<br />
Whether they integrate it into their lives is what separates<br />
a successful tech product from the rest.<br />
Integrating the video camera<br />
For instance, most Americans or Europeans using a<br />
video camera will stand motionless, zooming in and out,<br />
producing boring video.<br />
Give that same video camera to a young Japanese<br />
woman, however, and the reaction is completely<br />
38 WUNDERMAN<br />
THERE’S NOT THAT MUCH GOING<br />
ON IN THE WORLD APART FROM<br />
THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION, SAY<br />
ECONOMIC HISTORIANS<br />
We still drive around in automobiles,<br />
invented in 1899, fly around in jumbo jets<br />
from 1968, and worry about atomic<br />
weapons invented in 1945.<br />
Our best scientists spend their time<br />
exploring Einstein’s theory of relativity<br />
from 1915 and the theory of quantum<br />
mechanics from the 1920s.<br />
Because not much else fundamental is<br />
happening in the world today, digital<br />
technology brands are some of the most<br />
energetic brands in the world, when<br />
measured on Y&R’s global BrandAsset<br />
Valuator study.<br />
But not all tech brands are equally<br />
successful.<br />
Some tech brands are less energetic than<br />
others, and the thing that drags the alsorans<br />
down is often consumer confusion.<br />
Imperfect marketing drags tech brands’<br />
energy levels down in three key ways:<br />
• Lack of consumer understanding of<br />
where a tech brand is heading in a<br />
philosophical sense drags down its level<br />
of VISION.<br />
• If consumers do not recognise and<br />
respond to a brand’s innovation<br />
activities, this drags down its level of<br />
INVENTION.<br />
• If the brand doesn’t exude a sense of<br />
buzz, this pulls down its level of<br />
DYNAMISM.<br />
On the right are energy levels for 30<br />
brands in the US.<br />
Google is top of the pile.<br />
BEX TM<br />
Google 99.8<br />
TiVo 99.7<br />
Nike 99.4<br />
iPod 98.6<br />
Starbucks 96.8<br />
PlayStation 92.3<br />
Crate & Barrel 88.0<br />
JetBlue 87.2<br />
Ben and Jerry’s 87.1<br />
Gap 86.7<br />
Subway 85.6<br />
Mini Cooper 85.0<br />
Target 74.7<br />
Louis Vuitton 71.0<br />
Staples 68.4<br />
McDonalds 65.8<br />
Samsung 64.1<br />
BlackBerry 61.2<br />
Banana Republic 59.6<br />
The Body Shop 56.6<br />
Heinz 54.7<br />
MasterCard 52.8<br />
Chipotle 52.0<br />
Domino’s Pizza 51.9<br />
Sierra Mist 43.8<br />
Blockbuster 43.5<br />
Amtrak 41.8<br />
Delta Air Lines 40.1<br />
Tostitos 32.7<br />
J Crew 32.2<br />
Source: BAV USA Jan-Dec 2004
different. Many will start narrating as they use the video<br />
camera, interviewing people as they film them, and<br />
producing their own personal documentary.<br />
The result is much more compelling and shareable.<br />
And so video cameras have become a much more<br />
central part of young Japanese life than they are in the<br />
West.<br />
Integrating the homepage<br />
It’s also the difference between ordinary homepages<br />
and the homepages people create on social<br />
networking sites like FaceBook, Bebo and <strong>My</strong>Space.<br />
The web homepage has been around for years, but<br />
never became a vital part of anyone’s life, because,<br />
after the first few hits, no one’s friends could ever<br />
be bothered looking at it.<br />
It was only when <strong>My</strong>Space decided that<br />
homepages were a social networking tool – and fifty<br />
million teenagers realised that they would never<br />
get another date without looking good on<br />
theirs - that the idea took off.<br />
In Japan, young women<br />
integrate technology<br />
into their lives much<br />
more readily than in the<br />
West.<br />
So<br />
Many tech brands should think harder about how<br />
they want people to use their products.<br />
Then they should publicise their ‘usage<br />
instructions’:<br />
• Computer manufacturers need to<br />
articulate better how their modern<br />
media-centric computers can change<br />
their users’ lives. They currently say<br />
The period 1900 to 1940 saw the appearance<br />
of the automobile, the airplane, electricity,<br />
radio and many other technologies.<br />
These technologies changed our grandparents’<br />
and great-grandparents’ lives out of all<br />
recognition.<br />
In the period 1980-2006 there has been much<br />
less change.<br />
Apart, that is, from the rapid development of<br />
digital technology.<br />
40
‘Store hours of TV’. It’s not enough to persuade nonowners<br />
to buy.<br />
• YouTube.com is attracting a lot of people who<br />
want to share the movies they’ve made with<br />
their webcam or MP4 recorder. But it has not<br />
yet defined how non movie-makers should use<br />
its site. They need to sell the ‘YouTube evening’<br />
as a more compelling alternative to TV.<br />
• Camcorders are getting smaller and more robust.<br />
Congratulations to Samsung on positioning their<br />
latest tiny camcorders as extreme sports recording<br />
devices.<br />
Extreme sports<br />
camcorders:<br />
Cooool.<br />
7. THE SECOND GENERATION USES<br />
DIFFERENTLY<br />
The true impact of<br />
technology on a society may<br />
take a generation.<br />
When mobile phones first became popular in the early<br />
nineties, the first generation of consumers to use them<br />
found they were a very useful part of their social lives.<br />
If they were late for a dinner appointment, they could call<br />
their friends and apologise from their car.<br />
If they made a mistake in an arrangement, they could<br />
call the other person and find them.<br />
The second generation are different<br />
But the next generation to use them do so differently.<br />
They no longer make plans in advance, because they<br />
don’t need to. They know that all their friends can be<br />
contacted at any time because they all have mobile<br />
phones with them.<br />
And so they just arrange their evening by phone on the<br />
go.<br />
42 WUNDERMAN<br />
MY BRAIN HURTS 43
For the first generation of users, mobile phones were a<br />
helpful aid to their existing social lives.<br />
For the second generation, mobile phones have<br />
redefined their social lives.<br />
Similarly with PCs<br />
A similar change happened with PCs.<br />
When the first generation of companies bought PCs in<br />
the 1980s, they regarded them as a better form of<br />
typewriter, and put them on their secretaries’ desks.<br />
But the next generation of executives in the 1990s were<br />
all computer literate.<br />
And so their companies gave them the PCs, and gave<br />
the secretaries pink slips.<br />
Similarly with email<br />
First generation CEOs used email to improve<br />
communications across their management structure.<br />
Next generation CEOs used the improved information<br />
flow to flatten command structures, cutting out the<br />
layers of management that were no longer necessary.<br />
With both PCs and email, the first generation of<br />
companies used them to make their existing structures<br />
work better.<br />
The second generation redefined their structures around<br />
the new technology.<br />
So<br />
Watch the way the second generation use technology<br />
for the way it will really impact the world:<br />
• Current TiVo users still do most of their viewing live,<br />
First generation corporations used<br />
email to allow their managers to<br />
communicate better.<br />
Second generation corporations<br />
eliminated the managers.<br />
When digitization hit, first generation<br />
musicians called their lawyers.<br />
But then Britain’s Arctic Monkeys made<br />
themselves famous through MP3 downloads.<br />
And singer Sandi Thom made it through<br />
webcasts.<br />
Today, savvy record companies use CDs as a<br />
medium for selling ringtones.<br />
44 WUNDERMAN
as they have TV schedules etched into<br />
their brains.<br />
But no one will remember TV schedules if<br />
they don’t have to. And so the next<br />
generation are likely to use their TiVos<br />
differently, collecting most of their viewing<br />
to watch when they want. Classical ad<br />
industry watch out.<br />
• Current drivers use satnav as an aid to the<br />
mental maps they already have in their<br />
heads. But who will bother to memorise a<br />
map if they don’t need to?<br />
Like the generation of schoolkids who forgot how to<br />
add one and one to get two because they were<br />
allowed calculators in their math exams, expect the<br />
next generation of motorists to be completely lost<br />
when their satnav breaks down.<br />
Expect the next<br />
generation of motorists to<br />
be completely lost when<br />
their satnav breaks down.<br />
8. CONSUMERS LEARN ONLY<br />
THROUGH DOING<br />
Every tech device or service today comes with an<br />
instruction manual, which can be up to five centimetres<br />
thick.<br />
Tech manuals are so incomprehensible that some<br />
manufacturers pray silently that someone will write a ‘for<br />
Dummies’ book to explain how to use their new device.<br />
But the problem goes beyond this.<br />
Observations show that most consumers never read the<br />
instruction book, no matter how well written.<br />
The only way most consumers learn is by handling a<br />
device and trying to make it work. The only way most<br />
consumers learn is by doing.<br />
‘Plug and play’ was therefore never a manufacturer<br />
strategy. It is just a consumer reality.<br />
Instructions for using<br />
payphones in South Africa<br />
are visual, because South<br />
Africans speak eleven<br />
different languages. Other<br />
telecoms companies could<br />
learn from this.<br />
46 WUNDERMAN<br />
MY BRAIN HURTS 47
Consumers fear the confusing<br />
What’s more, consumers know they don’t read<br />
instruction <strong>books</strong>.<br />
So when they look at a new device and they don’t<br />
understand how it works, they tend not to buy it.<br />
This means that one of the most useful roles of<br />
technology marketing is to explain what a thing does in<br />
advance. If consumers feel they understand a device<br />
before they buy it, one of the biggest fears they have is<br />
removed.<br />
This is why tech stores like CompUSA and Germany’s<br />
Saturn chain allow consumers to ‘play’ with their wares<br />
so freely.<br />
Consumers aren’t just playing with them – they are<br />
working out how to use them – and thus significantly<br />
increasing their likelihood to buy.<br />
Similarly with games – giving away the first few levels<br />
for free creates a huge market of hooked users, who<br />
simply have to finish.<br />
So:<br />
• The vogue for ‘usability testing’ – rooms full of<br />
students surfing to websites and exploring the userfriendliness<br />
of their navigation and payment systems<br />
happened too late in the internet boom to make a<br />
difference to the companies that used it. Usability<br />
testing needs a revival.<br />
• Most DV camcorders have a ‘demo mode’ for use by<br />
retailers. The camcorder cycles through<br />
demonstrations of its main features to the delight of<br />
browsing customers. All well and good – but a demo<br />
48 WUNDERMAN
mode for use by forgetful owners would also be<br />
useful.<br />
• And not just in audiovisual equipment - a demo mode<br />
would be massively helpful in office phone systems<br />
too.<br />
• The latest camcorders have ‘easy’ mode buttons that<br />
allow users who have never read the manual to use<br />
them. More consumer electronics devices, from<br />
satellite receivers to microwave ovens need such a<br />
button.<br />
9. PRICE DICTATES PERCEPTION<br />
Consumers value things<br />
according to their price.<br />
‘If the car had developed at the same speed as the<br />
computer’, say Silicon Valley geeks, ‘Today you’d be<br />
driving from Los Angeles to New York in under four<br />
minutes. And the car would cost you less than twenty<br />
cents.’<br />
The boast reflects the flipside of Moore’s Law: that<br />
digital technology tends to halve in price every couple of<br />
years or so, and keep doing so for decades:<br />
• $3000 plasma panels from 2003 sell for $500 today<br />
in 2006.<br />
• $1000 camcorders from 2003 now sell for $300.<br />
• $300 DVD players from 2002 now sell for less than<br />
the cost of the cable that connects them to the TV.<br />
Coping with such price falls, and resulting changes in<br />
consumer expectations and perceptions are amongst<br />
the most difficult issues in tech marketing:<br />
• Consumers who bought a state-of-the-art computer<br />
As PCs become cheaper, they are<br />
increasingly being sold by hard<br />
discount food outlets.<br />
50 WUNDERMAN<br />
MY BRAIN HURTS
in 2002 have difficulty accepting that their machine<br />
today is virtually obsolete.<br />
• Indeed, consumer expectations of price falls<br />
are often the biggest barrier to sales today:<br />
many consumers say they didn’t buy a 42 inch<br />
plasma to watch the 2006 World Cup on<br />
because they thought that plasma screens<br />
would halve in price by Christmas.<br />
• On the other hand, consumers are often so<br />
good at finding uses for cut-price technology<br />
that marketers need to be careful:<br />
The Mercury 1-2-1 mobile phone company thought<br />
they were doing their customers a small favour<br />
when they offered them unlimited free evening calls<br />
between their mobiles in the late nineties.<br />
What they didn’t expect was for their network to be<br />
jammed by customers who chose to go out drinking<br />
for the evening, leaving one phone permanently on<br />
in their baby’s cot at home as a baby monitor.<br />
In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner,<br />
2019 Los Angeles detective<br />
Harrison Ford interviews an exotic<br />
dancer who performs with a snake.<br />
‘Is that a real snake?’ asks Ford.<br />
The snake is an artificial living<br />
copy.<br />
‘If I could afford a real snake,’<br />
replies the dancer, ‘would I be<br />
dancing here?’<br />
75% of the cost of running a newspaper lies in its distribution: printing, delivering and chopping down trees.<br />
Digitization is allowing newspaper proprietors to cut all of these costs - but the indications are that<br />
consumers value news they receive for free less.<br />
So<br />
The speed of falling prices are of massive importance<br />
to any tech based marketer:<br />
• Lexus built its reputation around the many<br />
electronic devices and features which were<br />
fitted as standard in its vehicles. Today though,<br />
the cost of these features has fallen dramatically, and<br />
many are now fitted as standard on mid range<br />
saloons. Lexus needs to develop new reputations –<br />
and to do so fast.<br />
Airtime is so<br />
cheap in 2006<br />
that mobile phone<br />
companies can<br />
offer free airtime to<br />
couples without risk.<br />
MY BRAIN HURTS 53
• As average voice revenue per user continues to fall<br />
for mobile phone companies, they need to encourage<br />
people to spend more time on the phone. Young<br />
women already rate their boyfriends by how<br />
frequently they call and text them; Perhaps marketers<br />
should start to suggest to them that the ultimate sign<br />
of commitment is the always-on relationship – where<br />
an (exceptionally besotted) couple agree to sleep,<br />
eat and work with an always-on phone connection<br />
between them.<br />
• ‘Information wants to be free’, said internet<br />
visionaries in the nineties. They may as well have said<br />
‘Information wants to be worthless.’<br />
‘Talk for hours,<br />
not minutes.’<br />
HEADLINE,<br />
HUTCHINSON WHAMPOA<br />
‘3’ MOBILE PHONE AD<br />
10. THE VISIBLE WINS<br />
Consumers place little value<br />
on things they can’t see.<br />
When Karl Benz’s first automobile hit the roads in 1889,<br />
people called it ‘the horseless carriage’. Every previous<br />
form of road transportation they had seen had horses in<br />
front. The striking thing about this one was that it didn’t.<br />
Similarly when the radio first appeared. Unlike<br />
gramophones and telephones, it had no wires attached.<br />
So people called it the ‘wireless’.<br />
But the names didn’t last.<br />
After a while, the lack of horses and wires faded from<br />
the public memory.<br />
And people started calling the wireless a radio.<br />
And the horseless carriage an automobile.<br />
Over time, consumers stop valuing, and eventually don’t<br />
even remember, things they can’t see.<br />
It’s a lesson technology-based companies have often<br />
failed to heed. If consumers can’t see your product or<br />
As wireless devices<br />
become commonplace,<br />
consumers will forget<br />
that wires ever existed.<br />
54 WUNDERMAN<br />
MY BRAIN HURTS 55
service, it stands a much lower chance of long-term<br />
success:<br />
• Consumers can’t see satellites. So they failed to get<br />
hooked by satellite phone technology. In the late<br />
1990s, the Iridium consortium had a network of forty<br />
satellites orbiting the earth, allowing phone coverage<br />
across the whole planet. It was a pretty cool idea. But<br />
the consumer didn’t buy - because all they saw was<br />
a handset the size of a brick.<br />
• Mobile network service providers suffer from being<br />
invisible. As a result, mobile handset manufacturers<br />
became stronger brands than mobile service<br />
providers across the world.<br />
The smart mobile service providers in the nineties<br />
were Orange and Vodafone, who insisted on putting<br />
their logos on phones connected to their networks.<br />
France Telecom paid $45 billion for Orange in 2001.<br />
That’s how much that brand was worth.<br />
• The Blackberry wireless handheld device took the<br />
corporate world by storm in 2003. But the<br />
Blackberry’s marketers were careful not to market<br />
their device as a ‘wireless network technology’. They<br />
simply sold it as a handheld device called a<br />
Blackberry. And the question on the lips of owners of<br />
all other PDAs was not ‘How do I get my PDA to<br />
connect?’ but ‘Why can’t I have a Blackberry?’<br />
Harman/Kardon took an<br />
invisible ingredient brand -<br />
the computer speaker -<br />
and turned it into a<br />
desirable object in its own<br />
right.<br />
So make yourself visible<br />
Digital marketers need to work out how to make their<br />
activity visible to the consumer, and then brand it:<br />
Breaking into your neighbour’s unsecured WiFi network is the yuppy game of the mid 2000s.<br />
But WiFi is invisible. As it becomes more widespread and more reliable, people will forget that it exists.<br />
MY BRAIN HURTS 57
• Can you see WiFi, GPS and BlueTooth? Don’t bank<br />
on these brand names being in perfect health in<br />
2010.<br />
• Congratulations to Dolby Labs for getting their logo<br />
on every piece of hi-fi equipment for the past thirty<br />
years. But surely they could have done more with<br />
such a famous brand?<br />
• Digital technology means consumers use ATM<br />
networks to withdraw money from banks nowadays,<br />
so no one goes into their branches any more.<br />
In the 19th Century, banks spent a fortune on a good<br />
visual appearance, decorating their branches with<br />
marble and other fine stones. Today, they need to<br />
spend some money making their ATMs look a little<br />
more special.<br />
• In today’s online world, the one visible thing a bank<br />
offers is a credit card. And the logo that guarantees<br />
acceptability of these cards is that of Visa, not the<br />
bank.<br />
Visa is thus the world’s strongest financial brand, and<br />
could play a powerful role in cross-selling the<br />
insurance and investment products banks are<br />
currently struggling with.<br />
ATMs are banks’ sole point of<br />
contact with their customer<br />
nowadays. They need a design<br />
upgrade.<br />
Airlines make their frequent flyer schemes visible through cards and luggage tags. Tech companies need to<br />
consider how to make their offerings more visible too.<br />
MY BRAIN HURTS
11. CONVERGE WITH CARE<br />
Today, analysts, consultants and engineers have<br />
convinced themselves that consumers want<br />
‘convergence’.<br />
By which they mean any device that has aspects of<br />
television, computing and telephony built into it.<br />
But do consumers want convergence?<br />
Convergence devices usually offer a range of benefits.<br />
And consumers gravitate not to those that offer a range<br />
of benefits, but those who promise just one good one:<br />
• Most business executives choose to carry both a<br />
mobile phone and a mobile email device – when each<br />
device can both make voice calls and send email.<br />
• Most people also continue to wear a wristwatch,<br />
when their phone tells the time perfectly well.<br />
• They also continue to buy separate VCR players,<br />
DVD players and TVs, when combination devices are<br />
widely available and cheap.<br />
Convergence isn’t good marketing<br />
Indeed the history of marketing is the opposite of<br />
convergence.<br />
With converged cameras and camcorders, you either get a good camera or you get a good camcorder.<br />
Rarely both.<br />
60 WUNDERMAN
When scientists invented synthetic detergent in the<br />
1940s, they saw it as an amazing product that would<br />
clean clothes, hair, floors and cars.<br />
But smart marketers recognized that consumers want<br />
different products for different needs, and launched<br />
separate shampoos, laundry detergents, floor cleaners<br />
and automotive foams based on synthetic detergent.<br />
Still think convergence is a good idea?<br />
Try washing your hair in laundry detergent.<br />
Convergence failed in the past<br />
It’s an idea has been with us for a very long time.<br />
In the 1920s, manufacturers put optional small nozzles<br />
and a reverse switch on to their vacuum cleaners so that<br />
you could also use them as a hair dryer too.<br />
The basic principle of convergence wasn’t attractive to<br />
consumers then, and it is no more attractive now.<br />
Where consumers are buying videophones and portable<br />
email devices, they are buying them because they offer<br />
them real, tangible benefits, not because they offer<br />
convergence.<br />
So<br />
So tech companies beware. You need to ensure your<br />
convergence concepts are driven by consumer need, not<br />
technological dreaming:<br />
• Do consumers really want a converged digital hub in<br />
their living room? Parents may like the idea of<br />
controlling all digital feeds in their home from the<br />
living room – but the last thing most sons want is<br />
62 WUNDERMAN<br />
In the late 1990s, mobile service providers invested upwards of $100 billion dollars in 3G phone<br />
licences. The research said that everyone wanted to see the person they were talking to. But the<br />
research forgot to ask whether they wanted the other person to see them.
parental oversight of the online sleaze they’re looking<br />
at in their bedroom.<br />
• At the time of writing, telecoms companies across<br />
are excited by the concept of triple and quadruple<br />
play – they idea of bundling broadband, landline,<br />
mobile and other services into one package and<br />
selling them to the consumer. There is a clear benefit<br />
to the telcos – they get to sell more. But what exactly<br />
is the benefit to the consumer?<br />
• Mobile telecoms companies have been bitterly<br />
disappointed over the past few years by the low takeup<br />
of all their new 3G technologies. Perhaps they<br />
would have done better to think better about the core<br />
need mobile phones deliver to their core 16-24<br />
consumers – social networking – and work out how<br />
to enhance that instead.<br />
In South Korea, SK Telecom has done that, by linking<br />
social networking webspace to users’ mobile phone<br />
accounts. And the users are paying real money to<br />
furnish their virtual living room, or ‘minihompy’ to<br />
impress their friends and dates.<br />
If she really wanted convergence,<br />
she’d be washing her hair in laundry<br />
detergent.<br />
12. CONSUMERS DON’T ALWAYS<br />
WANT VERSION 2.0<br />
They may want what they<br />
had yesterday.<br />
From the 1920s to the 1960s, the aviation industry<br />
focussed on producing better, faster, more comfortable<br />
passenger aircraft.<br />
First came the twin-propeller planes, then the seaplanes,<br />
then the jets.<br />
Transatlantic flights ceased refuelling in Newfoundland<br />
and Ireland, and flew direct to Paris and London.<br />
Then in 1968, Boeing launched the 747.<br />
The 747 flew 400 people from New York to Europe in<br />
about seven hours.<br />
And then…<br />
And then nothing.<br />
The 1920’s aviation<br />
industry was driven by the<br />
dream of ‘an airplane in<br />
every driveway’. Most<br />
consumers were happy with a car.<br />
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MY BRAIN HURTS 65
Faster, better competitors failed.<br />
1977’s supersonic Concorde today no longer flies.<br />
Other concept planes never left the drawing board.<br />
38 years later, in 2006, the main vehicle for crossing the<br />
world remains the 747.<br />
As the futurist Tom Morton put it in the Financial Times,<br />
‘The assumption is that because tech companies live for<br />
change, their customers should do also.’<br />
Many tech companies’ sales depend on there being a<br />
version 2.0.<br />
The consumer is often happy with version<br />
1.0.<br />
So<br />
• Phone handset manufacturers should be<br />
careful with the assumption that the<br />
consumer always wants the latest phone<br />
handset. Today in 2006, many are happy<br />
with the one they already have.<br />
• The digital camera industry has already<br />
reached this point: the mainstream<br />
consumer appears to be perfectly happy<br />
with a six megapixel sensor on their<br />
digital camera, and struggles to find<br />
a reason to upgrade to a ten<br />
megapixel model, or a digital<br />
SLR.<br />
In 1840, trains carried you at 30<br />
miles per hour, and covered you<br />
in soot and rain in open<br />
carriages.<br />
But by 1890, the train could<br />
take you at almost 100mph in<br />
elegant surroundings whilst you<br />
enjoyed fine food and wine.<br />
They haven’t gotten much better<br />
since.<br />
Not every technological rainbow has a pot of gold at its end.<br />
MY BRAIN HURTS 67
In the digital revolution,<br />
technology develops so fast<br />
that even industry insiders<br />
find their visions surpassed.<br />
The history of computing is<br />
littered with overcautious<br />
predictions from producers:<br />
‘The world market for<br />
computers’, said Thomas<br />
Watson of IBM in 1943, ‘will<br />
be about five units.’<br />
The photographic industry is heading for a slump.<br />
• Desktop publishing software needs a new big idea<br />
because the publishing industry remains comfortable<br />
with ten-year-old software releases.<br />
Surely such software ought now to be taking<br />
advantage of the amazing flexibility modern<br />
commercial digital printing now offers?<br />
• What can the consumer do with four gigabytes of<br />
RAM and a terabyte of memory on their laptop? The<br />
PC industry needs an answer fast.<br />
‘Everyone’ said Bill Gates in<br />
1982, ‘should be happy with<br />
640K of RAM’<br />
But the rule still stands.<br />
Consumer needs do not<br />
follow Moore’s<br />
Law.<br />
MY BRAIN HURTS 69
13. EVERYTHING NEEDS A KILLER<br />
APP<br />
Industries are an illusion.<br />
Consumer needs are what<br />
matter.<br />
In his 1960 article that defined the word ‘marketing’,<br />
Professor Theodore Levitt of the Harvard Business<br />
School argued that the oil industry didn’t actually exist.<br />
All there was, he said, was a series of overlapping<br />
consumer needs:<br />
In the 1890s, people need to light their homes. That<br />
meant kerosene lamps. The kerosene came from oil.<br />
But then electric light replaced kerosene lamps, and<br />
the market for lamp fuel collapsed.<br />
Fortunately for oil companies, a new need – of<br />
personal transportation – took over. The new<br />
automobiles needed gasoline, and gasoline too came<br />
from oil.<br />
70 WUNDERMAN<br />
Industries are an illusion, argued Professor Levitt.<br />
Consumer needs are what are real.
Then in the 1950s, consumers wanted to fly. Planes<br />
needed aviation fuel, and guess where aviation fuel<br />
came from.<br />
And as aviation matured, the plastics<br />
industry became more important, and that<br />
too depended on oil.<br />
There was no oil industry, said Levitt. There<br />
was just a series of growing and declining<br />
consumer needs, and oil just happened to<br />
meet them.<br />
And the fortunes of oil companies lay not in<br />
their drilling, refining or pumping, but in their<br />
ability, or the ability of others, to find uses - or<br />
‘killer apps’ for their product.<br />
Killer apps are vital in all technological<br />
products:<br />
• When CD players went mainstream in the<br />
mid 1980s, their killer app was the Dire<br />
Straits CD Brothers in Arms. Music aficionados all<br />
bought a copy to check out their new digital sound<br />
capabilities.<br />
• In 1999, large numbers of consumers went out and<br />
bought a copy of The Matrix to marvel at its high<br />
definition computer graphics. It was the killer app for<br />
that year’s new DVD players.<br />
• Apple’s success from 1987 through to the mid<br />
1990s was driven by a killer app: desktop publishing.<br />
As the publishing industry moved from pasteboard<br />
and glue to PageMaker, QuarkXpress and Adobe<br />
LCD panels are used for both<br />
information and TV in this<br />
Tokyo subway carriage. Expect<br />
many more uses for them to<br />
appear in coming years.<br />
72 WUNDERMAN<br />
Your next camera may well embed GPS satellite information into every picture you take.<br />
It’ll tell you where you went on holiday - in case you forgot - but what exactly is the killer app?
InDesign, they needed the computer these apps<br />
were designed for: the Apple Macintosh.<br />
Many more technologies and devices languish because<br />
no one has yet found them a killer app.<br />
So:<br />
The most important role of marketing in the digital world<br />
is finding and defining that killer app:<br />
• If the mobile phone industry had recognized before<br />
the 2000 3G licence auctions that the killer app for<br />
the mobile phone was voice, it could have saved itself<br />
a hundred billion dollars in licence fees.<br />
• What’s the point of having a GPS positioning chip on<br />
a laptop? The computer industry need an answer<br />
quick.<br />
• And what’s the point of having a GPS chip on a digital<br />
camera? The engineers are already starting to build<br />
them in. Is there anything more to it than reminding<br />
you where you went on holiday?<br />
• If you can’t find a killer app for your existing product<br />
or service, spend a lot of time with your consumers,<br />
and see what uses they’ve discovered for it. They may<br />
surprise you with their ingenuity.<br />
14. CONSUMERS HAVE THEIR OWN<br />
AGENDA<br />
‘48-hour internet outage plunges nation into<br />
productivity’ screamed satirical online weekly The Onion<br />
in the late nineties.<br />
The observation reflected reality. The internet had made<br />
employees more productive – but at shopping, banking,<br />
gossiping and flirting at their desk more than working at<br />
it.<br />
And none of these new productivities showed up in<br />
Department of Labor productivity statistics.<br />
Similarly, much of the additional RAM capacity in the<br />
1990s was eaten up, not by better office<br />
productivity software, but by screensavers<br />
and instant messaging programs.<br />
And the pressure on IT<br />
departments in 2000-3 to upgrade<br />
corporate networks was driven less by<br />
the size of spreadsheets circulating<br />
around those networks and more by<br />
employees trading illegal MP3s.<br />
Put simply, consumers use technology the way they<br />
Patients rarely<br />
take their pills exactly<br />
the way their doctor tells them<br />
to. Should we expect them to<br />
operate digital home medical<br />
devices correctly either?<br />
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MY BRAIN HURTS 75
want to use it, not how its manufacturers - or their<br />
employers - intend it to be used.<br />
The selfish consumer<br />
What’s more, consumers are relentless in their selfinterest.<br />
Electrical retailers moan that they can’t sell single region<br />
DVD players any more – because consumers want<br />
multi-region ones so they can watch the DVDs they buy<br />
on market stalls.<br />
And legitimate DVD producers find they can’t sell their<br />
legitimate DVDs in Asia. Not just because the pirates are<br />
releasing blockbusters faster – but also because the<br />
pirates are creating and including valuable extras like<br />
Chinese language commentaries in their versions.<br />
So<br />
Smart manufacturers and services must recognize that<br />
consumers act in this way:<br />
• In the 1990s, mobile<br />
phone<br />
manufacturers<br />
recognised that<br />
they needed to<br />
give their users a<br />
choice of<br />
ringtones so that<br />
consumers would<br />
know when their<br />
phone was<br />
ringing, rather<br />
than someone<br />
else’s.<br />
Videophones allow<br />
British teenagers to<br />
share their<br />
unprovoked ‘happy<br />
slapping’ attacks on<br />
strangers with their<br />
friends.<br />
‘The streetcar is the future: it is clean, safe and available to<br />
everyone.’ proclaimed civic leaders in the 1910s.<br />
Many rich families put their entire fortunes into streetcar<br />
stocks.<br />
But the consumer wanted wheels of their own.<br />
76 WUNDERMAN
But why did mobile service providers not offer to<br />
extend that range through downloads?<br />
Today the ringtone market is larger than the CD<br />
singles market –and is dominated by independent<br />
companies like Jamba and their Crazy Frog ringtone<br />
range, not by Verizon or Vodafone. Mobile service<br />
providers have sacrificed a vital revenue stream.<br />
• The test of a good corporate intranet is: are<br />
employees still using pinboards to sell their<br />
car/announce a baby shower/run their sideline<br />
businesses? If they are still using the pinboard, the<br />
intranet isn’t working properly.<br />
• Many phones today are equipped for video<br />
downloads, but few people are interested in the<br />
boring ones offered by mobile service providers. They<br />
ought to partner with the innovative two-minute video<br />
producers showcased on YouTube before someone<br />
else does.<br />
• Electronic home medical appliances is a huge new<br />
area for digital technology.<br />
Our experience working with pharmaceutical<br />
companies though is that patients rarely comply fully<br />
with treatment regimes once they leave hospital, and<br />
sometimes stop taking prescribed pills completely.<br />
Electronics companies entering the medical area<br />
need to take on board the complex issues of patient<br />
psychology if they want their devices to be used<br />
effectively.<br />
How many baby<br />
showers are<br />
advertised on your<br />
intranet?<br />
15. THE AWESOME POWER OF<br />
VIDEOGAMES<br />
Recently, murder suspects in several countries have<br />
defended themselves by arguing that when they killed<br />
they thought they were in a video game - and therefore<br />
should not be held liable for their actions.<br />
The ‘Matrix Defense’, as it is called, is not accepted in<br />
most parts of the world.<br />
But that’s because judges in most countries are old, and<br />
have therefore never played video games.<br />
Today’s video games can be powerful, mind-altering<br />
experiences.<br />
The fear you experience as a ruthless and methodical<br />
SWAT team hunt you down can be real.<br />
So if provocation from the real world - perhaps from<br />
finding your lover in bed with someone else - is an<br />
accepted defense, perhaps provocation from the virtual<br />
world ought to be too.<br />
Awesome power<br />
Videogames are so compelling that they are eating<br />
Television is losing its young male<br />
audience to videogames because<br />
videogames are much more<br />
compelling than TV.<br />
78 WUNDERMAN<br />
MY BRAIN HURTS 79
heavily into the time young men spend watching<br />
television.<br />
Why watch the opening sequence of ‘Saving Private<br />
Ryan’ over and over again the way young men used to<br />
do in the nineties, when you can experience landing on<br />
Omaha Beach yourself in ‘Medal of Honor’?<br />
And indeed, why watch an action-adventure movie,<br />
when you can hunt down terrorists yourself in Tom<br />
Clancy’s Splinter Cell?<br />
Connect with the<br />
almighty through<br />
your Nintendo.<br />
So<br />
Innovators in other fields should think further about<br />
exploiting the intense immersive power of videogames:<br />
• Many people like to read <strong>books</strong> on philosophy or<br />
religion to guide them through life. But wouldn’t this<br />
role be much better performed by software? Armed<br />
with a smart mobile phone, they could receive<br />
situation-specific twenty-four-seven spiritual<br />
guidance.<br />
• A prediction: the next big religion to impact the world<br />
will be software, not book based.<br />
• Guidance in other areas could also be better done by<br />
game-like software than by a book. A diet that read<br />
the RFID chips on the food you ate, and told you what<br />
to eat and what exercise to do next could be ten<br />
times more compelling than any conventional diet<br />
program.<br />
Expect electronic entertainment to become increasingly immersive.<br />
MY BRAIN HURTS 81
16. TO COMMUNICATE IS FEMALE<br />
‘You can ball my wife if she wants you to, Ralph,’ says Al<br />
Pacino in the gangster classic Heat.<br />
‘You can lounge around here on her sofa in her exhusband’s<br />
dead-tech post-modernistic bullshit house if<br />
you want to.’<br />
‘But you do NOT get to watch MY television set.’<br />
Men can develop very strong attachments to the tech<br />
devices they own. This is rarely the case with women.<br />
On the other hand the average woman has more friends,<br />
and communicates with them more often:<br />
• As many shocked girlfriends have found, the address<br />
book of most men’s mobile phones usually contains<br />
more than 50% women, whereas their own contains<br />
far fewer than 50% men. This is not (always)<br />
because their boyfriends are being unfaithful to them.<br />
It is because women have greater social networks<br />
than men.<br />
• ‘The typical woman spends three times as much time<br />
Men are obsessed by machines<br />
and always have been.<br />
Women are more attracted<br />
to the communications<br />
possibilities of<br />
technology.<br />
on the telephone as men’ say landline telecoms<br />
execs. ‘They are our core customer.’<br />
• Observational research shows that women also like<br />
to communicate in media-rich ways, using their eyes<br />
and hands.<br />
This means that long term, women are likely to be better<br />
customers for all technologies driven by<br />
communications.<br />
This vital observation is lying in wait for mobile service<br />
providers, who, facing stagnating average revenue per<br />
user are desperate for ways to stimulate calls. As fixed<br />
line companies have discovered in the past, the key lies<br />
with women, and female behaviour patterns.<br />
It’s also important for picture messaging. At a dollar a<br />
pop, it’s currently expensive for many women. But<br />
women will be the eventual main users of it. If men want<br />
to celebrate a football score, they will happily do it with<br />
a one-line text. When a woman wants her friends to see<br />
her new hair, only a picture will do.<br />
And for the future of mobile communications, check out<br />
the Japanese school girl and her i-mode phone. Mail<br />
broadcast services allow them to wish their entire class<br />
at school goodnight, and waves of goodnight texts flash<br />
across Osaka and Tokyo every night.<br />
Network effects<br />
Because women are more focused on communication<br />
than men are, the way they adopt technology is different:<br />
If you are the first person in the world with a video<br />
camera, no problem. It doesn’t matter that no one<br />
else has one.<br />
Medical researchers are<br />
starting to regard autism as an<br />
extreme form of maleness.<br />
Communications devices are<br />
therefore skewed female.<br />
82<br />
MY BRAIN HURTS 83
But if you are the first<br />
person in the world with a<br />
fax machine, you have an<br />
issue.<br />
A fax machine is only<br />
useful if there is at least<br />
one other fax machine in the world, and<br />
even then it’s not very useful. The usefulness<br />
of a fax machine only rises as large numbers of<br />
other people buy them too. (an effect known<br />
as Metcalfe’s Law)<br />
As women are about communication, their<br />
use of technology is similar. The<br />
attractiveness of a technology rises as<br />
more people they know adopt it.<br />
Women therefore adopt later than men,<br />
but then adopt in crowds.<br />
So:<br />
• Social interaction between<br />
groups of young men in bars<br />
can be so perfunctory that<br />
there is little quality<br />
difference between<br />
their<br />
conversation in<br />
that bar and<br />
their<br />
conversation within<br />
broadband network games. So in the future, expect<br />
many to put on a headset and rest a can of beer on<br />
their keyboard instead.<br />
Some games<br />
manufacturers<br />
worked out<br />
some time ago<br />
that women<br />
didn’t get off on<br />
killing things the<br />
way men do. But<br />
most still have not<br />
worked out how to<br />
connect with women.<br />
Phone calls initiated by women last three times as long as phone calls initiated by men in some<br />
cultures. Women should therefore be regarded as the key consumer of mobile telecoms.<br />
MY BRAIN HURTS 85
• The games industry has always struggled to attract<br />
women to their product. The insight some companies<br />
are still missing is that unlike men, women don’t like<br />
killing things:<br />
Those gaming products that take this insight on<br />
board, like PS2’s SingStar, where singers get rated<br />
for pitch and accuracy do well amongst women.<br />
Watch also women’s choices in video arcades. In<br />
Japan and in China, it’s not the shoot-em-ups, but the<br />
ski machines that are popular.<br />
• Check out also the games that swept East Asian<br />
nightclubs a few years ago, where participants gain<br />
points for dancing on pressure-sensitive dance mats.<br />
Young women like technology when it does stuff they<br />
want.<br />
17. THE FUTURE LIES IN EMERGING<br />
MARKETS<br />
Technology isn’t just a rich country thing:<br />
• Wander into a village shop in Pakistan, and the<br />
shopkeeper will add your bill up using an electronic<br />
calculator.<br />
• Documentary crews working in the last unexplored<br />
parts of the Amazon basin are sure to take AA<br />
batteries with them. Because the young people in<br />
those villages demand batteries for their Walkmans<br />
in return for being filmed.<br />
• Go to any poor, remote village anywhere in the world,<br />
and the one piece of modern equipment they are<br />
guaranteed to have is a TV connected to a satellite<br />
dish.<br />
• Economic research shows that high mobile phone<br />
ownership can push up the GDP growth rate of poor<br />
rural areas by upwards of 1% a year.<br />
The poor like technology just as much as the rich do.<br />
And as a technology saturates rich countries, and its<br />
Increasing<br />
numbers of global<br />
corporations run<br />
their global<br />
computer systems<br />
from Malaysia.<br />
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MY BRAIN HURTS 87
price continues to fall, it becomes more and more<br />
affordable to ordinary people in emerging markets.<br />
By 2010, that Pakistani village shopkeeper will also have<br />
a $5 mobile phone.<br />
The inflight computer displays on aircraft from Islamic<br />
countries show you how to face Mecca at prayer.<br />
The internet has now reached the remotest places on<br />
Earth: Siberian Airlines bookings are now mainly webdriven.<br />
So<br />
Marketers of technology who look to the future need<br />
above all to understand better the way poorer people live<br />
and think.<br />
The poor are not just rich people with less money:<br />
• Incomes are rising so fast in China that ordinary<br />
home appliances have become fashion items. In small<br />
towns, the fashion item of today is the air conditioner.<br />
Next comes the VCD karaoke machine.<br />
• Why are people in Asia flocking to buy plasma and<br />
LCD panel TVs as fast as rich Americans? Because<br />
their homes are one quarter the size and house<br />
thirteen family members, that’s why.<br />
• What’s the appeal of the web to teen Tunisian girls?<br />
It’s the breakout from parental control. In Tunisia,<br />
neighbourhood internet cafes allow teenage girls to<br />
listen to the Arabic language stars that their fathers<br />
stop them listening to at home. They also get to flirt<br />
with boys without going through the strict process of<br />
parental approval.<br />
• Throughout the emerging world, most people’s first<br />
and only phone is a digital mobile. Why don’t they<br />
have a landline? Because thieves keep digging up<br />
the wires for the copper content, so there aren’t any.<br />
MOBILE PHONE<br />
USERS<br />
177M<br />
363M<br />
USA<br />
CHINA<br />
Source: Morgan Stanley 2005<br />
‘The future of the computer is<br />
the mobile phone.’ says The<br />
Economist. And that future is<br />
happening in China more<br />
than in the United States.<br />
GameBoys are a vital teen male accessory - even for<br />
monks, and even in Tibet.<br />
A mobile phone airtime vendor in Kerala, India.<br />
MY BRAIN HURTS 89
Above all<br />
The most important issue is that<br />
poor people don’t follow the same<br />
upgrade path through technologies<br />
that the West experienced:<br />
• Western European companies<br />
slipped up in the early 1990s<br />
when they tried to sell their<br />
obsolescent Windows 286 and<br />
286 machines to companies in<br />
Central and Eastern Europe.<br />
Poles and Hungarians weren’t<br />
buying - they went out and<br />
bought the latest kit instead.<br />
• Similarly, most emerging market<br />
bank customers go straight to<br />
the smart debit card, missing<br />
out the paper check book and<br />
pen.<br />
• And most mainland Chinese accountants went<br />
straight from a wooden abacus in the nineties to<br />
Excel today.<br />
SatNav is arguably of more<br />
use on the chaotic road<br />
systems of India and China<br />
than in the West.<br />
of interest: that the bank will actually pay them for<br />
looking after their money.<br />
• Producers of photographic film watch out: many<br />
emerging countries will go straight to digital.<br />
• Similarly with TV: as prices fall, most of the rural Third<br />
World is going straight to satellite.<br />
Europe’s most advanced e-<br />
government is in Estonia. Rich,<br />
technically literate countries like<br />
Germany are years behind.<br />
So<br />
When projecting the future of a digital technology brand,<br />
think poor:<br />
• Most of the words banks use: credit, debit, mortgage,<br />
withdrawal - are used only by banks. When you’re<br />
marketing to new emerging market people,<br />
remember they may never have heard of the concept<br />
90 WUNDERMAN<br />
MY BRAIN HURTS 91
electrifying effect on consumer mentality, clearing<br />
minds, and changing the way consumers think.<br />
8. But a technology must work for it to be able to do<br />
this. So many - like mobile phone picture messaging<br />
- were launched when they didn’t.<br />
9. We must also be conscious of the fact that<br />
consumers are rarely grateful for the changes tech<br />
brings to their lives. Once something works, they<br />
forget it exists.<br />
10. We must also be careful not to listen too closely to<br />
nerds - the early adopters who buy tech when it first<br />
comes out. Their thoughts are not those of the<br />
general population.<br />
11. We should think more about how technology<br />
spreads from person to person in the population.<br />
The resulting infection rate will determine how fast<br />
a technology takes off.<br />
12. We must recognize that whether consumers fit a<br />
technology into their lives or not is the true measure<br />
of success - and that the real impact of a new<br />
technology on a society may take a generation.<br />
13. Consumers do not read instruction <strong>books</strong>. Period.<br />
Tomorrow’s tech launches need to recognise this.<br />
14. Digital equipment also can get twice as cheap every<br />
two years. For the consumer, price is a positioning<br />
tool - and something that costs next to nothing can<br />
also be perceived as being worth next to nothing.<br />
15. Consumers are also visual creatures: after a while,<br />
they forget that invisible technologies - like WiFi -<br />
exist.<br />
SUMMARY<br />
1. Digital technology gets twice as fast, and as<br />
capable, and as powerful every eighteen months.<br />
2. Meanwhile the mind of its user has not gotten any<br />
more sophisticated in the past ten thousand years.<br />
3. One result is a widening gap between what<br />
technology can do, and what its users - both young<br />
and old - understand it can do.<br />
4. The other result is a growing confusion amongst<br />
consumers, as they lose touch with how their<br />
phones, computers, DVRs, VCRs, TVs, SatNavs,<br />
GPSs, home medical equipment and MP3 players<br />
work.<br />
5. As consumers and technology diverge, there is a<br />
growing risk of a crash. And as digitization is now<br />
critical in all industries and all parts of the economy,<br />
that crash would be economy-wide.<br />
6. Helping consumers understand technology is not<br />
easy. They struggle with the demands modern<br />
devices and software make of them, and fail to<br />
absorb new tech-based concepts.<br />
7. The key need is for simplicity. Simple devices and<br />
software that do one thing, not several can have an<br />
Podcasts discussing<br />
issues covered by ‘<strong>My</strong><br />
<strong>Brain</strong> Hurts’ are at<br />
pubs.yr.com/podcasts<br />
Successful technologies<br />
are simple technologies.<br />
92 WUNDERMAN<br />
MY BRAIN HURTS 93
16. At the moment, the tech world is buzzing with words<br />
like ‘convergence’. But beware: convergence<br />
devices do not necessarily contain a strong<br />
consumer benefit.<br />
17. Beware also of the conviction within tech<br />
companies that all technologies need to keep<br />
developing. True for the company that makes them.<br />
Not necessarily true for the consumer.<br />
18. For a tech device to fly, it needs a valuable use, a<br />
‘killer app’. Watch out for consumers developing<br />
their own - unexpected and often unwanted - uses<br />
for a technology.<br />
19. Study videogames carefully - they are taking<br />
consumer time away from television because they<br />
are much more compelling than television - just as<br />
compelling television took share away from passive<br />
radio and press in the 1950s.<br />
20. Watch out particularly for women. They are<br />
increasingly the key consumer of communications<br />
technologies.<br />
21. Watch out also for people in emerging markets.<br />
There are four billion of them, and they often use<br />
technology more effectively than people in richer<br />
countries.<br />
Consumers struggle<br />
to connect with new<br />
concepts:<br />
‘If I’d asked the<br />
consumer what they<br />
wanted,’ said Henry<br />
Ford, ‘they’d have<br />
asked for a faster<br />
horse.’<br />
‘A rose’ said William Shakespeare, ‘by any other name would smell as sweet.’<br />
But call it an XTY 667 J35 version 1.2 firmware 5.6, and who would care?<br />
MY BRAIN HURTS 95
CONCLUSION<br />
As digitization proceeds, technologies that humans do<br />
not understand will fail.<br />
Software that humans do not understand will fail.<br />
If humans fail to understand and want the capabilities of<br />
their next generation phones, the telecoms industry will<br />
fail too.<br />
Our choice is to follow where technology leads, and<br />
leave the consumer behind.<br />
Or to make technology work for humans, not against<br />
them.<br />
Choosing the second path is not easy for any company.<br />
It means going against the tide of the industry.<br />
And it is hazardous, because the consumer is a fickle<br />
friend.<br />
But it the only sure way to long term success.<br />
The emailable version of this document is at<br />
pubs.wunderman.com/brain.pdf<br />
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