My Brain hurts - Wunderman books

THE DIGITAL
REVOLUTION IS
LEAVING THE
CONSUMER
BEHIND
MY
BRAIN
HURTS

We must help
consumers
understand
technology better.
If we do not, the
digital revolution will
fail.
Our jobs, house
prices, pensions, the
future of our nations
all depend on the
economic growth
that digitization is
bringing.
Helping consumers
to grasp technology
is thus the defining
issue of our time.
By:
Simon Silvester
simon.silvester@wunderman.com
tel: +44 20 7611 6356
For new business enquiries, please
contact:
Deborah Peake
deborah.peake@wunderman.com
tel: +44 20 7611 6522
For press enquiries, please contact:
Bernard Barnett
bernard.barnett@wunderman.com
tel: +44 20 7611 6425
The emailable version of this document is
at pubs.wunderman.com/brain.pdf
MY BRAIN HURTS
‘The new net boom’ announces Fortune.
In California, venture capital is flowing.
After five years in the doldrums, tech is back.
And it’s back big time
Last time it was only dotcoms, telecoms and computers
that boomed.
Today virtually every industry on Earth is experiencing
rapid change.
Hollywood is digitizing.
Airlines are digitizing.
Fast food service is digitizing.
Soon, with the arrival of radio ID chips on every package
in every supermarket, the humble food and drink
industries will digitize too.
But
But as the world again gets excited by all things tech,
perhaps we should pause.
MY BRAIN HURTS 1

And remember how things ended in 1999/2000.
When a trillion dollars of technical development crashed
into a mountain of user indifference, and tech entered a
depression.
Millions of people lost their jobs and their pensions.
And it could happen again.
How could it happen?
Digital technology gets twice as powerful every eighteen
months.
And it’s predicted to keep doing so for the next two
decades.
No industrial change in history has happened as fast as
today’s digital revolution.
As this happens, we tend to forget that there is one part
of the digital world that hasn’t gotten any more powerful.
Not just in the past few years. But in the past ten
thousand.
The mind of its user.
Strain on the brain
Each year, consumers are presented with new, more
complex digital products and services.
But each year, their ability to understand them does not
rise.
Twenty years ago, a phone was a simple device, with one
dial.
Many of today’s phones are packed with complex, badly
understood functions.
Lest we forget the
2000/1 dotcom
bust.
In 1980, televisions had
a few buttons and a
volume knob. No longer.
How many of these commonly used tech symbols do you recognise?
Do you know the precise meaning of any of them?
2 WUNDERMAN

IMAGINE IF ALL MARKETING WAS
LIKE TECH MARKETING:
‘Hi honey, I’m home!’
‘That’s great dear! I’m cooking
XRC-30 tonight.’
‘’Mmmmm – is that with quadband
3G CDMA and a level 2
cache?’
‘Yes indeed – and would you like
a little 802.11g on the side?’
‘I’m licking my lips!’
‘Now you just settle
down with a nice
bottle of XC-L30K
and I’ll have it on
the table shortly.’
‘That’s great
honey, I can’t
wait to taste that
delicious SD-
RAM!’
Twenty years ago a television had one dial and a volume
knob. Today’s AV systems have tens of each.
The technology is leaving its consumer behind.
And it’s getting worse
Meanwhile, technology keeps moving on at high speed.
Digital devices will be ten times faster and more capable
within five years, and perhaps one hundred times within
ten.
There is already a gulf between what technology can do
and what consumers - both young and old - can make it
do.
As technology surges ahead, this gulf can do nothing
else but grow.
Not funny
We may laugh when consumers fail to understand the
full capabilities of their phones, TVs and computers.
But the consumer’s failure to grasp technology is not
trivial.
It leads to the vaporization of venture capital.
It is the issue that is increasingly holding back the whole
digital revolution.
Global growth, and the fate of nations depend on rapid
adoption of new technology.
It is thus the decisive issue of the early 21st century.
Twenty years ago, phones
were simple.
MY BRAIN HURTS 5

THE DARK SECRET OF DIGITIZATION
The human mind’s inability to assimilate technology is
the dark secret of the tech industry:
• Research by consumer electronics manufacturers
reveals that consumers never touch most of the
buttons on the remote controls in their living rooms.
• Washing machine manufacturers report that however
many programs they build into their washing
machines, consumers rarely use more than two of
them.
• Software companies keep building extra commands
into their programs, but quietly concede that
consumers refuse to use more than a small fraction.
• Banks offer a wide choice of funds in online
investment supermarkets, but find that most people
don’t even browse beyond the basic options.
The consumer simply doesn’t use most of what
technologically advanced companies build into their
products.
The consumer holds things back for decades
The inability of consumers to understand a piece of
technology can hold it back not just for years but for
decades.
Today, consumers marvel at how they can collect shows
In the 21st century, you
need a degree in rocket
science just to iron a
shirt.
What does the button with two circles on it
do?
What do ‘SysRq’ and ‘Scroll Lock’ mean?
What exactly does ‘chaos defrost’ do?
Digital devices can get twice as fast - or as
confusing - every eighteen months.
6 WUNDERMAN

Consumers
only use a
couple of
buttons on
their remote
controls.
Even teens have litte idea
what most of the buttons
on their phones,
computers and
audiovisual equipment do.
on their digital video recorder (like TiVo or Sky+) to play
back later.
TV schedules no longer dictate how they use their
leisure time, and they love the freedom.
But this isn’t the first time digital technology has made
this promise.
It was already promising time-shift viewing back in 1980
with the invention of the video cassette recorder.
It’s just that no one over fourteen could program a VCR
to record the right channel at the right time.
It took twenty-five years for the electronics industry to
design a time-shift viewing device that ordinary
consumers could actually use.
This pattern is repeated in many other industries.
It is thus the pace of consumer comprehension, not the
pace of technological change, that will determine the
pace of the digital revolution.
Consumers struggle with new concepts too
Consumer confusion also slows the introduction of new
technological concepts.
Sure, consumers can tell you they prefer HDTV to
ordinary TV, but when it comes to evaluating really new
technological ideas, they struggle:
• When the telephone was first invented, many of its
early users thought its main use would be to
broadcast orchestral concerts.
• When email first became popular in the mid 1990s,
many CEOs responded by putting an email terminal in
their telex room*.
• When television first arrived, early viewers thought its
8 * Telex was a key business telecommunication system before the arrival of fax.
WUNDERMAN
Even since the beginning of the century, digital technology has sped up dramatically.
Computer chip speeds are already ten times faster. Download speeds are already thirty
times faster.

iggest audiences would go to the newsreels they
had seen in the movie theater, not to game shows.
• And as Henry Ford put it in 1910, ‘if I’d asked my
customers what they’d wanted, they’d have asked
for a faster horse.’
The consumer absorbs new technological concepts
slowly, and with difficulty.
Even young consumers struggle
‘Don’t worry about complexity’ say some tech
companies, ‘we’re targeting digitally literate 17 year
olds.’
Crap.
Young people may absorb tech concepts faster than
old people over 30, but they still struggle with how to
make things work.
• Y&R’s qualitative research has yet to find a
teenager who knows what all the buttons on their
phone do.
• Few can explain even a quarter of the functions of
their parents’ DVD, TV or VCR.
• And Virgin mobile phones sell because they have
the only pricing plan 17 year olds (or anyone else)
can understand.
Even amongst young people, it is the pace of
consumer comprehension, not the pace of
technological change, that will determine the pace of
the digital revolution.
But the tech industry has failed to acknowledge this.
It needs to rethink its attitude towards its consumers
and do so fast.
10 10 TRANSISTORS
PER DIE: LOG
10 9
SCALE
10 8
10 7
10 6
10 5
10 4
10 3
10 2
SOURCE: INTEL
1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
MOORE’S LAW MEANS DIGITAL
TECHNOLOGY GETS BETTER
FAST
If a technology is digital, that technology
obeys Moore’s Law.
Moore’s Law, first proposed by Gordon
Moore of Intel back in 1968, states that
the number of transistors on a silicon
chip, and therefore the speed and
abilities of computers double every two
years – since revised down to every
eighteen months.
Chips have obeyed that law for the past
thirty-five years – and show all the signs
of continuing to do so for the next twenty.
Put simply, anything digital can get twice
as good, or as fast - or as unintelligible -
every eighteen months.
Time for a change
This booklet challenges the way tech companies
do things.
It argues that they should put the consumer first,
not last.
It uses Y&R’s intensive program of qualitative and
quantitative research, consumer observation and
analysis to set out some of the keys to successful
communication.
None are intuitive.
Few are reflected in current marketing thinking on
the web, in consumer electronics or in telecoms.
The keys reflect the ways in which humans have
responded to technological advance since time
immemorial.
As such, they risk being ridiculed by those within
the technology community who regard any solution
that is more than six months old as being out of
date.
But the eternal is eternal for a reason.
And genuine marketing insights are no more abundant
today than they were in the dotcom boom.
Without an understanding of their consumer,
technologies will struggle.
The companies responsible for them will stumble, and
industries will die.
And they will do so however good their engineers,
however smart their manufacturing - and however much
money they spend on their marketing.
THE BURSTING OF THE
INTERNET BUBBLE
DIDN’T STOP
TECHNOLOGY
Since the internet bubble burst in
1999/2000, technology hasn’t
stopped advancing.
Many digital devices are now ten
times better than they were then:
Typical
processor
speed
Typical home
download
speed
Typical number
of peanuts in a
Snickers*
2000 2006
300KHz
56Kbps
22 22
2000KHz
2000Kbps
* control
10 WUNDERMAN MY BRAIN HURTS 11

Even in high science, good names are
vital. The ‘relativistic gravitationally
collapsed massive object’ was
discovered in 1916. But it
didn’t grab the popular
imagination until
someone
renamed it the
‘black hole’
in 1967.
THE 17 KEYS TO CONSUMER
UNDERSTANDING
Names
need to
work across
cultures: The
1967 worldwide
media frenzy
around black holes
was subdued in France
because ‘trou noir’ was French
slang at the time for ‘asshole’.

1. THINK SIMPLE
‘When I listen to music, I like to hum along
and tap my feet’, they told him. ‘If other
people can’t hear the music I’m doing it
to, they’ll think I’m a psycho.’
To communicate the idea, he needed a product
that could be understood in one way only.
And that meant it had to have one function only. The
record button and radio had to go.
So he overruled the engineers. And his one-function
press and play device went into production.
Because his new product could only be used in one way,
young people were forced to take Morita’s intention
seriously.
Simplicity acts like a
missile into the
consumer
consciousness.
If you want to get inside the
consumer’s head, simplicity
is the key.
In the late 1970s, Sony was developing a new consumer
electronics device.
The device would allow people, for the first time ever, to
carry round music easily and listen to it anywhere
without irritating others.
The device was designed to do this – and nothing else.
‘But they will still want a record function’, said the
engineers, ‘and how about a radio?’
But Akio Morita, the founder of Sony, knew that he had
a serious communication problem on his hands.
At the time, young people always shared music,
wandering around in groups with throbbing ghettoblasters.
He was asking them to wander around listening to
music that no one else could hear. He knew they would
find the concept weird, and would resist the idea.
This forced the Walkman into the public consciousness,
and made it a worldwide hit.
‘The ideal
consumer
electronics
device has only
one button.’
AKIO MORITA,
FOUNDER OF SONY
Which means
A device that does one thing well is a much stronger
consumer proposition than a complex multifunctional
offer, no matter how advanced its specification.
So if you want to get inside the consumer’s head, think
simple.
1. Simplicity gets remembered
In the 1960s, offices flooded with new technology –
duplicating machines, golf-ball typewriters, telexes and
more.
But the only machine in that office with one-button
simplicity was the photocopier.
Most companies that made office equipment in the
1960s are now footnotes in history.
Even government can be
simple. Clinton’s 1992 election
team pinned these words to
their hotel room doors.
14 WUNDERMAN
MY BRAIN HURTS 15

Not so Xerox, the inventor of that photocopier.
2. Simplicity builds loyalty
Most tech products are so difficult to learn, that those
that are easy inspire great loyalty from their users.
Nokia gets the highest loyalty amongst mobile phone
brands because their 2006 models work without your
having to read the instruction manual – and in exactly
the same way as their 1996 models.
Similarly Canon’s Digital
Ixus cameras inspire
loyalty because
their current
seven megapixel
model works in
exactly the same
way as their two
megapixel model
from 2001.
3. Simplicity solves
complex problems
Even when a product is
complex, it still pays to
market it simply.
When Microsoft was launching the
latest Word upgrade a few years back, their engineers
unveiled a product with many new capabilities.
It had amazing mail merge, a 3D text graphics engine
and web integration.
But Microsoft’s marketing didn’t mention any of these.
They focused all their efforts on communicating
A $30,000 car needs an instruction
book no more than 9mm thick. So
why does a wireless router need one
30mm thick?
16 WUNDERMAN
When they rent a car, most people can start
it up and drive it without problem.
Most people who use a computer less than
once a month forget how to use it between
sessions.
But most new tech appliances do not work
without reading an instruction book.
The same is true of camcorders – many
families simply forget how to operate theirs.

something quite simple – its ability to make simple
spelling corrections like ‘ist’ to ‘its’ and ‘hte’ to ‘the’ as you
typed.
And the world went to their IT helpdesk and asked for
the upgrade.
4. You can never be too simple
For years internet search engines prided themselves on
their simplicity.
Whilst other portals added complex offers and
confusing navigation, the search engines stuck to one
page.
But all were trounced by Google with its one fill-in box,
and otherwise blank screen.
So
So if you want your technology to fly, think simple:
• Mobile phones are increasingly easy to make voice
calls on, now their software has been simplified. But
their airtime packages are still complex. Service
providers think they are providing ‘choice’ and
‘freedom’ by offering 25 different price plans. They
might attract more customers if they just offered just
one good one.
• Most online banking sites are simple – security fears
make banks keep the functions to a minimum. Not so
online share dealing sites. Some don’t display vital
information if your monitor isn’t large enough; others
are drenched with obscure finance-speak. If online
dealing is going to break into the mainstream, these
sites need a fundamental rethink.
The MP3 player market was flooded
with multifunction devices that played
FM radio and told the time as well as
played music. Then Apple came in
and took 80% of the market with a
device that did only one thing.
• Most national railway automatic ticketing machines
have simple dialogues – but leave consumers
thinking they could have got a better deal elsewhere
if only they’d known the system better. To satisfy
customers, you have to be transparently simple.
• Moore’s Law means that software can get twice as
complex every eighteen months. Message to
software designers: making it so is a bad idea.
18 WUNDERMAN
MY BRAIN HURTS 19

As mankind’s first lunar
module approached the
moon’s surface in 1969, its
main computer crashed.
2. THINGS THAT DON’T WORK,
DON’T WORK
Today’s electronics consumer
is far less tolerant of failure.
Marketing money is wasted
on unripe technologies.
In 2003, millions of people were captivated by the
picture messaging campaigns of mobile service
providers.
And they upgraded their mobile phone to a camera
phone.
Then they charged up their phone, took a picture, and
sent it to a friend.
Very few of those friends ever saw the picture:
• The majority of the pictures were sent to phones
unable to display pictures.
• The networks hadn’t agreed common technical
standards, so any picture which crossed networks
disappeared.
• Many people who did receive the pictures never saw
them, because they didn’t know how to open them.
20 WUNDERMAN

As a result, picture messaging failed in 2002/3.
Compare that with the previous great mobile messaging
technology, the SMS text:
• Mobile service providers didn’t advertise SMS, as
they saw it as a competitor to their lucrative voice
calls.
• As a result, text messaging grew organically.
• Young people checked whether their friends had 2G
phones or not, and only sent texts to those who did.
• As compatibility grew in the mid 90s, text messaging
exploded all over Europe, Africa and Asia, with
billions of messages a year being sent by 1996.
• Within a few years, texting was providing a new
revenue stream of 7% of revenue for mobile service
providers.
Picture messaging failed, despite hundreds of millions of
dollars of marketing because it wasn’t ready. Text
messaging succeeded, despite any
marketing, because it was ready.
Technology producers need to think
further about this, making sure their
technology is ready before they set
out to market it.
Before a technology is ready, no
amount of marketing will make it
happen.
Afterwards, not even silence can
stop it.
Networking computers
together can still stump
even the geekiest of
consumers.
So
So make sure your technology works before you market
it:
• Is the home wireless network ready for the mass
consumer market yet? Most routers require a PhD in
computing to set them up.
• Internet telephony is also not quite ready for the
ordinary consumer. Congratulations to Skype, who
are continuing to allow their service to spread virally,
rather than pushing it at an unprepared mass market.
• We’re still waiting for it – the video editing application
for the common man.
When home networks break
down, how do you fix them?
Sites like eBay and
Craigslist are hitting
newspaper classifeds
hard in the US.
In Russia though, lower
computer ownership
means that classified
advertising is still going
strong.
22 WUNDERMAN
MY BRAIN HURTS 23

3. WHAT WORKS NO LONGER MATTERS
When a technology finally
delivers on its promises,
marketers should watch out.
The late 19th century was a great time for farmers.
New technology – in the shape of traction engines,
harvesters and milling machines - was arriving on farms,
making them more productive.
Farming journals spoke of a new ‘golden age of farming’,
of new heights of food production and of farming at last
becoming an important, economically vital industry.
But that’s not what happened.
Over this period, agriculture fell from 60% of GDP to
under 3% in some industrial nations.
Farmers lost their power to affect change. Farming
became a small part of the economy.
Once the problem of adequate food production was
solved, it ceased to be an issue.
When watches ran fast and slow
A similar thing happened with timekeeping in the late
1960s.
At the time, everyone had clockwork watches, many of
which lost or gained five minutes a day.
Daily conversations revolved around the correct
time, and adjusting watches and clocks.
‘Do you have the time please?’ was a standard
pick-up line.
Then digital quartz crystal technology arrived,
promising precise timing.
Precise timing caught the popular imagination.
The dialogue of 1960s TV series reflects the
widespread belief at the time that ever more precise
timing was the way of the future:
‘Negative, captain, the shuttle is landing in 24.8
seconds.’
‘You have eight minutes and three seconds to
live Mr. Solo.’
‘Arrival in two point three eight six minutes
affirmative, Virkar.’
But by 1980, everyone had a super-accurate quartz
watch, everyone knew the precise time.
And the timing issue – and with it the craze for precise
timing - disappeared.
The ungrateful consumer
When the main benefit of a technology is delivered,
The accuracy of clocks and
watches was a popular topic
of conversation for the two hundred
years upto the invention of quartz
digital watches. Nowadays, it’s
just not an issue.
24 WUNDERMAN
MY BRAIN HURTS 25

consumers stop being grateful to companies for
providing that benefit.
And simply forget that that benefit exists.
So watch out
Consumers stop being grateful fast:
• Mobile network service providers were the darlings of
Europe in the 1990s as they let consumers talk to
their friends anywhere, any time.
But now that call quality is perfect, and everyone has
a mobile phone, European mobile service providers
are rapidly becoming perceived as little better than
the state landline companies that preceded them.
• In the 1920s, managing a steady flow of electricity
into factories was such a critical issue that most
companies had a main board electricity director.
Once electricity supplies became secure, he
disappeared. Does the same fate await CIOs, now
that corporate PC and email systems all work?
• With 24/7 global email and intranets, information
flow within companies has now become so fast that
information is no longer the critical factor holding
them back. So are we now in the middle of the
information age – or are we watching its end?
Mobile phones which read barcodes on the bottom of ads will shortly be the wonder of the West.
But they are already taken for granted in Japan.
MY BRAIN HURTS 27

4. BEWARE THE COUNSEL OF NERDS
Winning technologies are
those that appeal to ordinary
people, not just geeks.
When Kodak introduced its point-and-shoot Box
Brownie camera in 1900, American photographers
laughed. They wanted better pictures – and that meant
more sophisticated cameras. Kodak’s new offer was
little more than a box with a hole at one end.
But Kodak had inspired the average American to think
that perhaps he could now take photographs all by
himself.
As there were a lot more ordinary Americans than there
were photographers at the time, the brand rapidly came
to dominate its market.
Similarly with AOL in the 1990s
Throughout its early days in the mid 1990s, the online
community laughed at AOL, with its no-brainer sign-up
Tech company employees often
regard mainstreamers as dinosaurs.
Some nerds choose to carry a selection of pens in their shirt pocket. Corporate health and safety
manuals warn that this habit can be lethal in the event of an automobile accident.
28 WUNDERMAN

process, and cutesy low-tech imagery. As an AOL user
you were regarded as pond life in chat rooms. An AOL
email address was social death.
But AOL had inspired the average American to think
that perhaps even he could take the on-ramp to the
cyberactive infobahn thing everyone was talking about.
And as there were many more ordinary Americans out
there than wired people at the time, AOL rapidly became
the main dial-up way of accessing the internet.
Ten years later, AOL remained attractive to many
millions of ordinary Americans – and one of the biggest
money earners on the web.
Your audience loses its brain
What AOL and Kodak understood, and what most tech
brands don’t, is that as a market develops, levels of
understanding, and comfort do not rise. On the contrary,
they fall.
First come the nerds, with love of technology, and their
intuitive sense of how it works.
Then come the early adopters, excited by the
technology, but with slightly less knowledge.
Then the mainstream flood in, with their fears and
ignorance.
Finally come the laggards, who just don’t want to feel left
out.
Over time, as the market floods with new, less tech savvy
consumers, the average level of understanding in the
market falls rather than rises. And amongst advicehungry
new entrants, the level of tech savvy is even
lower.
Not all software is designed by
nerds for other nerds. On the
computer map on Virgin Atlantic
flights, a dancing Elvis appears
as you fly over Greenland.
Jeff Bezos at Amazon focused firmly on the
mainstream.
When he first launched Amazon in 1997, he
included a phone number for people who didn’t feel
confident about transmitting their credit card
details online, together with rapid email
confirmation that an order had been accepted, was
being processed and had been mailed out.
None of the geeks and nerds who were Amazon’s
first customers used the phone number; most
found the emails a nuisance.
But a year later, when online purchasing became
mainstream, suddenly Bezos’s planning bore fruit.
Unlike at most other online retail sites, the
mainstream knew when they had placed an order at
Amazon. They knew they had an alternative if they
didn’t want to transact online. And they knew when
to expect the package.
And so whilst all other online retailers were losing
the mainstream’s trust with their bug-ridden
payment processes and chaotic fulfilment, Amazon
gained it.
30 WUNDERMAN

Companies need to tune their offer to these successive
waves of less and less techy consumers. As time goes
on their marketing has to get more basic, not more
sophisticated.
So:
• Online banking portals worked fine for their first
users in the 90s. But the sort of people who are
trying online banking for the first time now aren’t that
comfortable with software interfaces. They need to be
simplified to cope.
• Similarly with microwave ovens. They worked fine
when they were bought by tech-savvy early-adopter
housewives in the 1990s. But now they’re
mainstream. Brief to microwave designers: come up
with a microwave as idiot-proof as a regular oven.
• Vodafone are currently marketing simplified-interface
mobile phones aimed at mainstream people over
forty. Could such an approach pay off in the digital
camera market too?
Mainstreamers are different:
In the early days of video in the
1970s, cash-strapped mainstreamers
plugged their new VCR into their old
TV set.
And the real benefit of a VCR to them
was that they could, for the first time
in their lives, experience the luxury of
changing channel without getting out
of their armchair.
Are you a mainstreamer or some other type of person?
Find out in our online personality test at http://4cs.yr.com/diys
MY BRAIN HURTS 33

5. THINK INFECTION
How fast a technology
passes from person to
person is decisive to its
success.
Between 2004 and 2007, two new devices appeared in
the living rooms of the world: the flat panel TV, and the
DVR.
The flat panel TV rapidly became a must-have item
across the world, despite its high prices.
But the DVR grew much more slowly over the period -
despite the fact that most DVR owners say that it has
revolutionized their lives, and despite the fact that any
satellite TV subscriber given a DVR never gives the
service up.
The reason flat panels have a much higher consumer-toconsumer
infection rate:
• In 2004, the flat panel TV was the high status item in
early adopter homes. He talked about the amazing
34 WUNDERMAN
The most successful technologies spread virally from person to person.

picture quality; she endorsed its
minimalist lines and space-saving
ability.
And they repeated their sell to every
visitor to their home.
• By 2005, the world was sold on flat
panel TVs. Mr Average was inviting
his friends round to watch football on
it, and extolling its virtues to them.
Compare that with DVRs over the
period:
• In 2004, the first TiVo and Sky+
owners were amazed by their devices, and found
themselves suddenly no longer watching live
television.
• They tried to communicate their experience to their
friends, but couldn’t. Their friends just thought they
had a digital version of a normal video player.
• In 2005, DVRs had become more mainstream. But
again, owners struggled to rave about them to their
friends. ‘It lets you pause live TV.’ was the best they
could do. ‘How often do I want to pause live TV?’
came the reply.
Today, in 2006, DVR owners continue to struggle to
articulate what the DVR has done for them - despite the
fact that they have moved into a completely new world
of on-demand television.
The flat panel TV succeeded rapidly because consumers
found it easy to infect their friends with the need for one,
At airports, retailers, and
nightclubs plasma
screens are spreading
like wildfire.
The DVR is growing much more slowly because no one
can express quite why it’s so good.
So
If you want the world to accept your device quickly,
concentrate on making it more infectious:
• The iPod spread fast because even if you put yours
inside your jacket pocket, your white headphones
were still visible to everyone around you. Other MP3
player manufacturers need to think up a similar
mechanic.
• It was the ‘my friends are’ section of the homepage
that made MySpace spread like wildfire through
schools and colleges. Everyone went out and asked
their friends to sign up and link to their page,
because otherwise it would be obvious that they
were simply not popular.
• The Blackberry spread fast because every email it
sent included ‘sent from my wireless BlackBerry
handheld’ by default. Why don’t other
communications systems brand their output?
Photography only took off when
people learned to ask their audience
to pose and say cheese.
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6. BUYING IS ONLY THE BEGINNING
Successful technologies are
those that consumers
rethink their lives around.
Most tech marketers advertise and promote heavily to
get their consumer to buy their products.
Once that consumer has left the shop, they see their job
as done.
But the success of tech products relies massively on
whether consumers adopt the product for everyday use
or not.
No tech product succeeds long term if the consumer
buys the product, takes it home and puts it in a drawer.
Whether they integrate it into their lives is what separates
a successful tech product from the rest.
Integrating the video camera
For instance, most Americans or Europeans using a
video camera will stand motionless, zooming in and out,
producing boring video.
Give that same video camera to a young Japanese
woman, however, and the reaction is completely
38 WUNDERMAN
THERE’S NOT THAT MUCH GOING
ON IN THE WORLD APART FROM
THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION, SAY
ECONOMIC HISTORIANS
We still drive around in automobiles,
invented in 1899, fly around in jumbo jets
from 1968, and worry about atomic
weapons invented in 1945.
Our best scientists spend their time
exploring Einstein’s theory of relativity
from 1915 and the theory of quantum
mechanics from the 1920s.
Because not much else fundamental is
happening in the world today, digital
technology brands are some of the most
energetic brands in the world, when
measured on Y&R’s global BrandAsset
Valuator study.
But not all tech brands are equally
successful.
Some tech brands are less energetic than
others, and the thing that drags the alsorans
down is often consumer confusion.
Imperfect marketing drags tech brands’
energy levels down in three key ways:
• Lack of consumer understanding of
where a tech brand is heading in a
philosophical sense drags down its level
of VISION.
• If consumers do not recognise and
respond to a brand’s innovation
activities, this drags down its level of
INVENTION.
• If the brand doesn’t exude a sense of
buzz, this pulls down its level of
DYNAMISM.
On the right are energy levels for 30
brands in the US.
Google is top of the pile.
BEX TM
Google 99.8
TiVo 99.7
Nike 99.4
iPod 98.6
Starbucks 96.8
PlayStation 92.3
Crate & Barrel 88.0
JetBlue 87.2
Ben and Jerry’s 87.1
Gap 86.7
Subway 85.6
Mini Cooper 85.0
Target 74.7
Louis Vuitton 71.0
Staples 68.4
McDonalds 65.8
Samsung 64.1
BlackBerry 61.2
Banana Republic 59.6
The Body Shop 56.6
Heinz 54.7
MasterCard 52.8
Chipotle 52.0
Domino’s Pizza 51.9
Sierra Mist 43.8
Blockbuster 43.5
Amtrak 41.8
Delta Air Lines 40.1
Tostitos 32.7
J Crew 32.2
Source: BAV USA Jan-Dec 2004

different. Many will start narrating as they use the video
camera, interviewing people as they film them, and
producing their own personal documentary.
The result is much more compelling and shareable.
And so video cameras have become a much more
central part of young Japanese life than they are in the
West.
Integrating the homepage
It’s also the difference between ordinary homepages
and the homepages people create on social
networking sites like FaceBook, Bebo and MySpace.
The web homepage has been around for years, but
never became a vital part of anyone’s life, because,
after the first few hits, no one’s friends could ever
be bothered looking at it.
It was only when MySpace decided that
homepages were a social networking tool – and fifty
million teenagers realised that they would never
get another date without looking good on
theirs - that the idea took off.
In Japan, young women
integrate technology
into their lives much
more readily than in the
West.
So
Many tech brands should think harder about how
they want people to use their products.
Then they should publicise their ‘usage
instructions’:
• Computer manufacturers need to
articulate better how their modern
media-centric computers can change
their users’ lives. They currently say
The period 1900 to 1940 saw the appearance
of the automobile, the airplane, electricity,
radio and many other technologies.
These technologies changed our grandparents’
and great-grandparents’ lives out of all
recognition.
In the period 1980-2006 there has been much
less change.
Apart, that is, from the rapid development of
digital technology.
40

‘Store hours of TV’. It’s not enough to persuade nonowners
to buy.
• YouTube.com is attracting a lot of people who
want to share the movies they’ve made with
their webcam or MP4 recorder. But it has not
yet defined how non movie-makers should use
its site. They need to sell the ‘YouTube evening’
as a more compelling alternative to TV.
• Camcorders are getting smaller and more robust.
Congratulations to Samsung on positioning their
latest tiny camcorders as extreme sports recording
devices.
Extreme sports
camcorders:
Cooool.
7. THE SECOND GENERATION USES
DIFFERENTLY
The true impact of
technology on a society may
take a generation.
When mobile phones first became popular in the early
nineties, the first generation of consumers to use them
found they were a very useful part of their social lives.
If they were late for a dinner appointment, they could call
their friends and apologise from their car.
If they made a mistake in an arrangement, they could
call the other person and find them.
The second generation are different
But the next generation to use them do so differently.
They no longer make plans in advance, because they
don’t need to. They know that all their friends can be
contacted at any time because they all have mobile
phones with them.
And so they just arrange their evening by phone on the
go.
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For the first generation of users, mobile phones were a
helpful aid to their existing social lives.
For the second generation, mobile phones have
redefined their social lives.
Similarly with PCs
A similar change happened with PCs.
When the first generation of companies bought PCs in
the 1980s, they regarded them as a better form of
typewriter, and put them on their secretaries’ desks.
But the next generation of executives in the 1990s were
all computer literate.
And so their companies gave them the PCs, and gave
the secretaries pink slips.
Similarly with email
First generation CEOs used email to improve
communications across their management structure.
Next generation CEOs used the improved information
flow to flatten command structures, cutting out the
layers of management that were no longer necessary.
With both PCs and email, the first generation of
companies used them to make their existing structures
work better.
The second generation redefined their structures around
the new technology.
So
Watch the way the second generation use technology
for the way it will really impact the world:
• Current TiVo users still do most of their viewing live,
First generation corporations used
email to allow their managers to
communicate better.
Second generation corporations
eliminated the managers.
When digitization hit, first generation
musicians called their lawyers.
But then Britain’s Arctic Monkeys made
themselves famous through MP3 downloads.
And singer Sandi Thom made it through
webcasts.
Today, savvy record companies use CDs as a
medium for selling ringtones.
44 WUNDERMAN

as they have TV schedules etched into
their brains.
But no one will remember TV schedules if
they don’t have to. And so the next
generation are likely to use their TiVos
differently, collecting most of their viewing
to watch when they want. Classical ad
industry watch out.
• Current drivers use satnav as an aid to the
mental maps they already have in their
heads. But who will bother to memorise a
map if they don’t need to?
Like the generation of schoolkids who forgot how to
add one and one to get two because they were
allowed calculators in their math exams, expect the
next generation of motorists to be completely lost
when their satnav breaks down.
Expect the next
generation of motorists to
be completely lost when
their satnav breaks down.
8. CONSUMERS LEARN ONLY
THROUGH DOING
Every tech device or service today comes with an
instruction manual, which can be up to five centimetres
thick.
Tech manuals are so incomprehensible that some
manufacturers pray silently that someone will write a ‘for
Dummies’ book to explain how to use their new device.
But the problem goes beyond this.
Observations show that most consumers never read the
instruction book, no matter how well written.
The only way most consumers learn is by handling a
device and trying to make it work. The only way most
consumers learn is by doing.
‘Plug and play’ was therefore never a manufacturer
strategy. It is just a consumer reality.
Instructions for using
payphones in South Africa
are visual, because South
Africans speak eleven
different languages. Other
telecoms companies could
learn from this.
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Consumers fear the confusing
What’s more, consumers know they don’t read
instruction books.
So when they look at a new device and they don’t
understand how it works, they tend not to buy it.
This means that one of the most useful roles of
technology marketing is to explain what a thing does in
advance. If consumers feel they understand a device
before they buy it, one of the biggest fears they have is
removed.
This is why tech stores like CompUSA and Germany’s
Saturn chain allow consumers to ‘play’ with their wares
so freely.
Consumers aren’t just playing with them – they are
working out how to use them – and thus significantly
increasing their likelihood to buy.
Similarly with games – giving away the first few levels
for free creates a huge market of hooked users, who
simply have to finish.
So:
• The vogue for ‘usability testing’ – rooms full of
students surfing to websites and exploring the userfriendliness
of their navigation and payment systems
happened too late in the internet boom to make a
difference to the companies that used it. Usability
testing needs a revival.
• Most DV camcorders have a ‘demo mode’ for use by
retailers. The camcorder cycles through
demonstrations of its main features to the delight of
browsing customers. All well and good – but a demo
48 WUNDERMAN

mode for use by forgetful owners would also be
useful.
• And not just in audiovisual equipment - a demo mode
would be massively helpful in office phone systems
too.
• The latest camcorders have ‘easy’ mode buttons that
allow users who have never read the manual to use
them. More consumer electronics devices, from
satellite receivers to microwave ovens need such a
button.
9. PRICE DICTATES PERCEPTION
Consumers value things
according to their price.
‘If the car had developed at the same speed as the
computer’, say Silicon Valley geeks, ‘Today you’d be
driving from Los Angeles to New York in under four
minutes. And the car would cost you less than twenty
cents.’
The boast reflects the flipside of Moore’s Law: that
digital technology tends to halve in price every couple of
years or so, and keep doing so for decades:
• $3000 plasma panels from 2003 sell for $500 today
in 2006.
• $1000 camcorders from 2003 now sell for $300.
• $300 DVD players from 2002 now sell for less than
the cost of the cable that connects them to the TV.
Coping with such price falls, and resulting changes in
consumer expectations and perceptions are amongst
the most difficult issues in tech marketing:
• Consumers who bought a state-of-the-art computer
As PCs become cheaper, they are
increasingly being sold by hard
discount food outlets.
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MY BRAIN HURTS

in 2002 have difficulty accepting that their machine
today is virtually obsolete.
• Indeed, consumer expectations of price falls
are often the biggest barrier to sales today:
many consumers say they didn’t buy a 42 inch
plasma to watch the 2006 World Cup on
because they thought that plasma screens
would halve in price by Christmas.
• On the other hand, consumers are often so
good at finding uses for cut-price technology
that marketers need to be careful:
The Mercury 1-2-1 mobile phone company thought
they were doing their customers a small favour
when they offered them unlimited free evening calls
between their mobiles in the late nineties.
What they didn’t expect was for their network to be
jammed by customers who chose to go out drinking
for the evening, leaving one phone permanently on
in their baby’s cot at home as a baby monitor.
In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner,
2019 Los Angeles detective
Harrison Ford interviews an exotic
dancer who performs with a snake.
‘Is that a real snake?’ asks Ford.
The snake is an artificial living
copy.
‘If I could afford a real snake,’
replies the dancer, ‘would I be
dancing here?’
75% of the cost of running a newspaper lies in its distribution: printing, delivering and chopping down trees.
Digitization is allowing newspaper proprietors to cut all of these costs - but the indications are that
consumers value news they receive for free less.
So
The speed of falling prices are of massive importance
to any tech based marketer:
• Lexus built its reputation around the many
electronic devices and features which were
fitted as standard in its vehicles. Today though,
the cost of these features has fallen dramatically, and
many are now fitted as standard on mid range
saloons. Lexus needs to develop new reputations –
and to do so fast.
Airtime is so
cheap in 2006
that mobile phone
companies can
offer free airtime to
couples without risk.
MY BRAIN HURTS 53

• As average voice revenue per user continues to fall
for mobile phone companies, they need to encourage
people to spend more time on the phone. Young
women already rate their boyfriends by how
frequently they call and text them; Perhaps marketers
should start to suggest to them that the ultimate sign
of commitment is the always-on relationship – where
an (exceptionally besotted) couple agree to sleep,
eat and work with an always-on phone connection
between them.
• ‘Information wants to be free’, said internet
visionaries in the nineties. They may as well have said
‘Information wants to be worthless.’
‘Talk for hours,
not minutes.’
HEADLINE,
HUTCHINSON WHAMPOA
‘3’ MOBILE PHONE AD
10. THE VISIBLE WINS
Consumers place little value
on things they can’t see.
When Karl Benz’s first automobile hit the roads in 1889,
people called it ‘the horseless carriage’. Every previous
form of road transportation they had seen had horses in
front. The striking thing about this one was that it didn’t.
Similarly when the radio first appeared. Unlike
gramophones and telephones, it had no wires attached.
So people called it the ‘wireless’.
But the names didn’t last.
After a while, the lack of horses and wires faded from
the public memory.
And people started calling the wireless a radio.
And the horseless carriage an automobile.
Over time, consumers stop valuing, and eventually don’t
even remember, things they can’t see.
It’s a lesson technology-based companies have often
failed to heed. If consumers can’t see your product or
As wireless devices
become commonplace,
consumers will forget
that wires ever existed.
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service, it stands a much lower chance of long-term
success:
• Consumers can’t see satellites. So they failed to get
hooked by satellite phone technology. In the late
1990s, the Iridium consortium had a network of forty
satellites orbiting the earth, allowing phone coverage
across the whole planet. It was a pretty cool idea. But
the consumer didn’t buy - because all they saw was
a handset the size of a brick.
• Mobile network service providers suffer from being
invisible. As a result, mobile handset manufacturers
became stronger brands than mobile service
providers across the world.
The smart mobile service providers in the nineties
were Orange and Vodafone, who insisted on putting
their logos on phones connected to their networks.
France Telecom paid $45 billion for Orange in 2001.
That’s how much that brand was worth.
• The Blackberry wireless handheld device took the
corporate world by storm in 2003. But the
Blackberry’s marketers were careful not to market
their device as a ‘wireless network technology’. They
simply sold it as a handheld device called a
Blackberry. And the question on the lips of owners of
all other PDAs was not ‘How do I get my PDA to
connect?’ but ‘Why can’t I have a Blackberry?’
Harman/Kardon took an
invisible ingredient brand -
the computer speaker -
and turned it into a
desirable object in its own
right.
So make yourself visible
Digital marketers need to work out how to make their
activity visible to the consumer, and then brand it:
Breaking into your neighbour’s unsecured WiFi network is the yuppy game of the mid 2000s.
But WiFi is invisible. As it becomes more widespread and more reliable, people will forget that it exists.
MY BRAIN HURTS 57

• Can you see WiFi, GPS and BlueTooth? Don’t bank
on these brand names being in perfect health in
2010.
• Congratulations to Dolby Labs for getting their logo
on every piece of hi-fi equipment for the past thirty
years. But surely they could have done more with
such a famous brand?
• Digital technology means consumers use ATM
networks to withdraw money from banks nowadays,
so no one goes into their branches any more.
In the 19th Century, banks spent a fortune on a good
visual appearance, decorating their branches with
marble and other fine stones. Today, they need to
spend some money making their ATMs look a little
more special.
• In today’s online world, the one visible thing a bank
offers is a credit card. And the logo that guarantees
acceptability of these cards is that of Visa, not the
bank.
Visa is thus the world’s strongest financial brand, and
could play a powerful role in cross-selling the
insurance and investment products banks are
currently struggling with.
ATMs are banks’ sole point of
contact with their customer
nowadays. They need a design
upgrade.
Airlines make their frequent flyer schemes visible through cards and luggage tags. Tech companies need to
consider how to make their offerings more visible too.
MY BRAIN HURTS

11. CONVERGE WITH CARE
Today, analysts, consultants and engineers have
convinced themselves that consumers want
‘convergence’.
By which they mean any device that has aspects of
television, computing and telephony built into it.
But do consumers want convergence?
Convergence devices usually offer a range of benefits.
And consumers gravitate not to those that offer a range
of benefits, but those who promise just one good one:
• Most business executives choose to carry both a
mobile phone and a mobile email device – when each
device can both make voice calls and send email.
• Most people also continue to wear a wristwatch,
when their phone tells the time perfectly well.
• They also continue to buy separate VCR players,
DVD players and TVs, when combination devices are
widely available and cheap.
Convergence isn’t good marketing
Indeed the history of marketing is the opposite of
convergence.
With converged cameras and camcorders, you either get a good camera or you get a good camcorder.
Rarely both.
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When scientists invented synthetic detergent in the
1940s, they saw it as an amazing product that would
clean clothes, hair, floors and cars.
But smart marketers recognized that consumers want
different products for different needs, and launched
separate shampoos, laundry detergents, floor cleaners
and automotive foams based on synthetic detergent.
Still think convergence is a good idea?
Try washing your hair in laundry detergent.
Convergence failed in the past
It’s an idea has been with us for a very long time.
In the 1920s, manufacturers put optional small nozzles
and a reverse switch on to their vacuum cleaners so that
you could also use them as a hair dryer too.
The basic principle of convergence wasn’t attractive to
consumers then, and it is no more attractive now.
Where consumers are buying videophones and portable
email devices, they are buying them because they offer
them real, tangible benefits, not because they offer
convergence.
So
So tech companies beware. You need to ensure your
convergence concepts are driven by consumer need, not
technological dreaming:
• Do consumers really want a converged digital hub in
their living room? Parents may like the idea of
controlling all digital feeds in their home from the
living room – but the last thing most sons want is
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In the late 1990s, mobile service providers invested upwards of $100 billion dollars in 3G phone
licences. The research said that everyone wanted to see the person they were talking to. But the
research forgot to ask whether they wanted the other person to see them.

parental oversight of the online sleaze they’re looking
at in their bedroom.
• At the time of writing, telecoms companies across
are excited by the concept of triple and quadruple
play – they idea of bundling broadband, landline,
mobile and other services into one package and
selling them to the consumer. There is a clear benefit
to the telcos – they get to sell more. But what exactly
is the benefit to the consumer?
• Mobile telecoms companies have been bitterly
disappointed over the past few years by the low takeup
of all their new 3G technologies. Perhaps they
would have done better to think better about the core
need mobile phones deliver to their core 16-24
consumers – social networking – and work out how
to enhance that instead.
In South Korea, SK Telecom has done that, by linking
social networking webspace to users’ mobile phone
accounts. And the users are paying real money to
furnish their virtual living room, or ‘minihompy’ to
impress their friends and dates.
If she really wanted convergence,
she’d be washing her hair in laundry
detergent.
12. CONSUMERS DON’T ALWAYS
WANT VERSION 2.0
They may want what they
had yesterday.
From the 1920s to the 1960s, the aviation industry
focussed on producing better, faster, more comfortable
passenger aircraft.
First came the twin-propeller planes, then the seaplanes,
then the jets.
Transatlantic flights ceased refuelling in Newfoundland
and Ireland, and flew direct to Paris and London.
Then in 1968, Boeing launched the 747.
The 747 flew 400 people from New York to Europe in
about seven hours.
And then…
And then nothing.
The 1920’s aviation
industry was driven by the
dream of ‘an airplane in
every driveway’. Most
consumers were happy with a car.
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Faster, better competitors failed.
1977’s supersonic Concorde today no longer flies.
Other concept planes never left the drawing board.
38 years later, in 2006, the main vehicle for crossing the
world remains the 747.
As the futurist Tom Morton put it in the Financial Times,
‘The assumption is that because tech companies live for
change, their customers should do also.’
Many tech companies’ sales depend on there being a
version 2.0.
The consumer is often happy with version
1.0.
So
• Phone handset manufacturers should be
careful with the assumption that the
consumer always wants the latest phone
handset. Today in 2006, many are happy
with the one they already have.
• The digital camera industry has already
reached this point: the mainstream
consumer appears to be perfectly happy
with a six megapixel sensor on their
digital camera, and struggles to find
a reason to upgrade to a ten
megapixel model, or a digital
SLR.
In 1840, trains carried you at 30
miles per hour, and covered you
in soot and rain in open
carriages.
But by 1890, the train could
take you at almost 100mph in
elegant surroundings whilst you
enjoyed fine food and wine.
They haven’t gotten much better
since.
Not every technological rainbow has a pot of gold at its end.
MY BRAIN HURTS 67

In the digital revolution,
technology develops so fast
that even industry insiders
find their visions surpassed.
The history of computing is
littered with overcautious
predictions from producers:
‘The world market for
computers’, said Thomas
Watson of IBM in 1943, ‘will
be about five units.’
The photographic industry is heading for a slump.
• Desktop publishing software needs a new big idea
because the publishing industry remains comfortable
with ten-year-old software releases.
Surely such software ought now to be taking
advantage of the amazing flexibility modern
commercial digital printing now offers?
• What can the consumer do with four gigabytes of
RAM and a terabyte of memory on their laptop? The
PC industry needs an answer fast.
‘Everyone’ said Bill Gates in
1982, ‘should be happy with
640K of RAM’
But the rule still stands.
Consumer needs do not
follow Moore’s
Law.
MY BRAIN HURTS 69

13. EVERYTHING NEEDS A KILLER
APP
Industries are an illusion.
Consumer needs are what
matter.
In his 1960 article that defined the word ‘marketing’,
Professor Theodore Levitt of the Harvard Business
School argued that the oil industry didn’t actually exist.
All there was, he said, was a series of overlapping
consumer needs:
In the 1890s, people need to light their homes. That
meant kerosene lamps. The kerosene came from oil.
But then electric light replaced kerosene lamps, and
the market for lamp fuel collapsed.
Fortunately for oil companies, a new need – of
personal transportation – took over. The new
automobiles needed gasoline, and gasoline too came
from oil.
70 WUNDERMAN
Industries are an illusion, argued Professor Levitt.
Consumer needs are what are real.

Then in the 1950s, consumers wanted to fly. Planes
needed aviation fuel, and guess where aviation fuel
came from.
And as aviation matured, the plastics
industry became more important, and that
too depended on oil.
There was no oil industry, said Levitt. There
was just a series of growing and declining
consumer needs, and oil just happened to
meet them.
And the fortunes of oil companies lay not in
their drilling, refining or pumping, but in their
ability, or the ability of others, to find uses - or
‘killer apps’ for their product.
Killer apps are vital in all technological
products:
• When CD players went mainstream in the
mid 1980s, their killer app was the Dire
Straits CD Brothers in Arms. Music aficionados all
bought a copy to check out their new digital sound
capabilities.
• In 1999, large numbers of consumers went out and
bought a copy of The Matrix to marvel at its high
definition computer graphics. It was the killer app for
that year’s new DVD players.
• Apple’s success from 1987 through to the mid
1990s was driven by a killer app: desktop publishing.
As the publishing industry moved from pasteboard
and glue to PageMaker, QuarkXpress and Adobe
LCD panels are used for both
information and TV in this
Tokyo subway carriage. Expect
many more uses for them to
appear in coming years.
72 WUNDERMAN
Your next camera may well embed GPS satellite information into every picture you take.
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
were designed for: the Apple Macintosh.
Many more technologies and devices languish because
no one has yet found them a killer app.
So:
The most important role of marketing in the digital world
is finding and defining that killer app:
• If the mobile phone industry had recognized before
the 2000 3G licence auctions that the killer app for
the mobile phone was voice, it could have saved itself
a hundred billion dollars in licence fees.
• What’s the point of having a GPS positioning chip on
a laptop? The computer industry need an answer
quick.
• And what’s the point of having a GPS chip on a digital
camera? The engineers are already starting to build
them in. Is there anything more to it than reminding
you where you went on holiday?
• If you can’t find a killer app for your existing product
or service, spend a lot of time with your consumers,
and see what uses they’ve discovered for it. They may
surprise you with their ingenuity.
14. CONSUMERS HAVE THEIR OWN
AGENDA
‘48-hour internet outage plunges nation into
productivity’ screamed satirical online weekly The Onion
in the late nineties.
The observation reflected reality. The internet had made
employees more productive – but at shopping, banking,
gossiping and flirting at their desk more than working at
it.
And none of these new productivities showed up in
Department of Labor productivity statistics.
Similarly, much of the additional RAM capacity in the
1990s was eaten up, not by better office
productivity software, but by screensavers
and instant messaging programs.
And the pressure on IT
departments in 2000-3 to upgrade
corporate networks was driven less by
the size of spreadsheets circulating
around those networks and more by
employees trading illegal MP3s.
Put simply, consumers use technology the way they
Patients rarely
take their pills exactly
the way their doctor tells them
to. Should we expect them to
operate digital home medical
devices correctly either?
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want to use it, not how its manufacturers - or their
employers - intend it to be used.
The selfish consumer
What’s more, consumers are relentless in their selfinterest.
Electrical retailers moan that they can’t sell single region
DVD players any more – because consumers want
multi-region ones so they can watch the DVDs they buy
on market stalls.
And legitimate DVD producers find they can’t sell their
legitimate DVDs in Asia. Not just because the pirates are
releasing blockbusters faster – but also because the
pirates are creating and including valuable extras like
Chinese language commentaries in their versions.
So
Smart manufacturers and services must recognize that
consumers act in this way:
• In the 1990s, mobile
phone
manufacturers
recognised that
they needed to
give their users a
choice of
ringtones so that
consumers would
know when their
phone was
ringing, rather
than someone
else’s.
Videophones allow
British teenagers to
share their
unprovoked ‘happy
slapping’ attacks on
strangers with their
friends.
‘The streetcar is the future: it is clean, safe and available to
everyone.’ proclaimed civic leaders in the 1910s.
Many rich families put their entire fortunes into streetcar
stocks.
But the consumer wanted wheels of their own.
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But why did mobile service providers not offer to
extend that range through downloads?
Today the ringtone market is larger than the CD
singles market –and is dominated by independent
companies like Jamba and their Crazy Frog ringtone
range, not by Verizon or Vodafone. Mobile service
providers have sacrificed a vital revenue stream.
• The test of a good corporate intranet is: are
employees still using pinboards to sell their
car/announce a baby shower/run their sideline
businesses? If they are still using the pinboard, the
intranet isn’t working properly.
• Many phones today are equipped for video
downloads, but few people are interested in the
boring ones offered by mobile service providers. They
ought to partner with the innovative two-minute video
producers showcased on YouTube before someone
else does.
• Electronic home medical appliances is a huge new
area for digital technology.
Our experience working with pharmaceutical
companies though is that patients rarely comply fully
with treatment regimes once they leave hospital, and
sometimes stop taking prescribed pills completely.
Electronics companies entering the medical area
need to take on board the complex issues of patient
psychology if they want their devices to be used
effectively.
How many baby
showers are
advertised on your
intranet?
15. THE AWESOME POWER OF
VIDEOGAMES
Recently, murder suspects in several countries have
defended themselves by arguing that when they killed
they thought they were in a video game - and therefore
should not be held liable for their actions.
The ‘Matrix Defense’, as it is called, is not accepted in
most parts of the world.
But that’s because judges in most countries are old, and
have therefore never played video games.
Today’s video games can be powerful, mind-altering
experiences.
The fear you experience as a ruthless and methodical
SWAT team hunt you down can be real.
So if provocation from the real world - perhaps from
finding your lover in bed with someone else - is an
accepted defense, perhaps provocation from the virtual
world ought to be too.
Awesome power
Videogames are so compelling that they are eating
Television is losing its young male
audience to videogames because
videogames are much more
compelling than TV.
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heavily into the time young men spend watching
television.
Why watch the opening sequence of ‘Saving Private
Ryan’ over and over again the way young men used to
do in the nineties, when you can experience landing on
Omaha Beach yourself in ‘Medal of Honor’?
And indeed, why watch an action-adventure movie,
when you can hunt down terrorists yourself in Tom
Clancy’s Splinter Cell?
Connect with the
almighty through
your Nintendo.
So
Innovators in other fields should think further about
exploiting the intense immersive power of videogames:
• Many people like to read books on philosophy or
religion to guide them through life. But wouldn’t this
role be much better performed by software? Armed
with a smart mobile phone, they could receive
situation-specific twenty-four-seven spiritual
guidance.
• A prediction: the next big religion to impact the world
will be software, not book based.
• Guidance in other areas could also be better done by
game-like software than by a book. A diet that read
the RFID chips on the food you ate, and told you what
to eat and what exercise to do next could be ten
times more compelling than any conventional diet
program.
Expect electronic entertainment to become increasingly immersive.
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16. TO COMMUNICATE IS FEMALE
‘You can ball my wife if she wants you to, Ralph,’ says Al
Pacino in the gangster classic Heat.
‘You can lounge around here on her sofa in her exhusband’s
dead-tech post-modernistic bullshit house if
you want to.’
‘But you do NOT get to watch MY television set.’
Men can develop very strong attachments to the tech
devices they own. This is rarely the case with women.
On the other hand the average woman has more friends,
and communicates with them more often:
• As many shocked girlfriends have found, the address
book of most men’s mobile phones usually contains
more than 50% women, whereas their own contains
far fewer than 50% men. This is not (always)
because their boyfriends are being unfaithful to them.
It is because women have greater social networks
than men.
• ‘The typical woman spends three times as much time
Men are obsessed by machines
and always have been.
Women are more attracted
to the communications
possibilities of
technology.
on the telephone as men’ say landline telecoms
execs. ‘They are our core customer.’
• Observational research shows that women also like
to communicate in media-rich ways, using their eyes
and hands.
This means that long term, women are likely to be better
customers for all technologies driven by
communications.
This vital observation is lying in wait for mobile service
providers, who, facing stagnating average revenue per
user are desperate for ways to stimulate calls. As fixed
line companies have discovered in the past, the key lies
with women, and female behaviour patterns.
It’s also important for picture messaging. At a dollar a
pop, it’s currently expensive for many women. But
women will be the eventual main users of it. If men want
to celebrate a football score, they will happily do it with
a one-line text. When a woman wants her friends to see
her new hair, only a picture will do.
And for the future of mobile communications, check out
the Japanese school girl and her i-mode phone. Mail
broadcast services allow them to wish their entire class
at school goodnight, and waves of goodnight texts flash
across Osaka and Tokyo every night.
Network effects
Because women are more focused on communication
than men are, the way they adopt technology is different:
If you are the first person in the world with a video
camera, no problem. It doesn’t matter that no one
else has one.
Medical researchers are
starting to regard autism as an
extreme form of maleness.
Communications devices are
therefore skewed female.
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MY BRAIN HURTS 83

But if you are the first
person in the world with a
fax machine, you have an
issue.
A fax machine is only
useful if there is at least
one other fax machine in the world, and
even then it’s not very useful. The usefulness
of a fax machine only rises as large numbers of
other people buy them too. (an effect known
as Metcalfe’s Law)
As women are about communication, their
use of technology is similar. The
attractiveness of a technology rises as
more people they know adopt it.
Women therefore adopt later than men,
but then adopt in crowds.
So:
• Social interaction between
groups of young men in bars
can be so perfunctory that
there is little quality
difference between
their
conversation in
that bar and
their
conversation within
broadband network games. So in the future, expect
many to put on a headset and rest a can of beer on
their keyboard instead.
Some games
manufacturers
worked out
some time ago
that women
didn’t get off on
killing things the
way men do. But
most still have not
worked out how to
connect with women.
Phone calls initiated by women last three times as long as phone calls initiated by men in some
cultures. Women should therefore be regarded as the key consumer of mobile telecoms.
MY BRAIN HURTS 85

• The games industry has always struggled to attract
women to their product. The insight some companies
are still missing is that unlike men, women don’t like
killing things:
Those gaming products that take this insight on
board, like PS2’s SingStar, where singers get rated
for pitch and accuracy do well amongst women.
Watch also women’s choices in video arcades. In
Japan and in China, it’s not the shoot-em-ups, but the
ski machines that are popular.
• Check out also the games that swept East Asian
nightclubs a few years ago, where participants gain
points for dancing on pressure-sensitive dance mats.
Young women like technology when it does stuff they
want.
17. THE FUTURE LIES IN EMERGING
MARKETS
Technology isn’t just a rich country thing:
• Wander into a village shop in Pakistan, and the
shopkeeper will add your bill up using an electronic
calculator.
• Documentary crews working in the last unexplored
parts of the Amazon basin are sure to take AA
batteries with them. Because the young people in
those villages demand batteries for their Walkmans
in return for being filmed.
• Go to any poor, remote village anywhere in the world,
and the one piece of modern equipment they are
guaranteed to have is a TV connected to a satellite
dish.
• Economic research shows that high mobile phone
ownership can push up the GDP growth rate of poor
rural areas by upwards of 1% a year.
The poor like technology just as much as the rich do.
And as a technology saturates rich countries, and its
Increasing
numbers of global
corporations run
their global
computer systems
from Malaysia.
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price continues to fall, it becomes more and more
affordable to ordinary people in emerging markets.
By 2010, that Pakistani village shopkeeper will also have
a $5 mobile phone.
The inflight computer displays on aircraft from Islamic
countries show you how to face Mecca at prayer.
The internet has now reached the remotest places on
Earth: Siberian Airlines bookings are now mainly webdriven.
So
Marketers of technology who look to the future need
above all to understand better the way poorer people live
and think.
The poor are not just rich people with less money:
• Incomes are rising so fast in China that ordinary
home appliances have become fashion items. In small
towns, the fashion item of today is the air conditioner.
Next comes the VCD karaoke machine.
• Why are people in Asia flocking to buy plasma and
LCD panel TVs as fast as rich Americans? Because
their homes are one quarter the size and house
thirteen family members, that’s why.
• What’s the appeal of the web to teen Tunisian girls?
It’s the breakout from parental control. In Tunisia,
neighbourhood internet cafes allow teenage girls to
listen to the Arabic language stars that their fathers
stop them listening to at home. They also get to flirt
with boys without going through the strict process of
parental approval.
• Throughout the emerging world, most people’s first
and only phone is a digital mobile. Why don’t they
have a landline? Because thieves keep digging up
the wires for the copper content, so there aren’t any.
MOBILE PHONE
USERS
177M
363M
USA
CHINA
Source: Morgan Stanley 2005
‘The future of the computer is
the mobile phone.’ says The
Economist. And that future is
happening in China more
than in the United States.
GameBoys are a vital teen male accessory - even for
monks, and even in Tibet.
A mobile phone airtime vendor in Kerala, India.
MY BRAIN HURTS 89

Above all
The most important issue is that
poor people don’t follow the same
upgrade path through technologies
that the West experienced:
• Western European companies
slipped up in the early 1990s
when they tried to sell their
obsolescent Windows 286 and
286 machines to companies in
Central and Eastern Europe.
Poles and Hungarians weren’t
buying - they went out and
bought the latest kit instead.
• Similarly, most emerging market
bank customers go straight to
the smart debit card, missing
out the paper check book and
pen.
• And most mainland Chinese accountants went
straight from a wooden abacus in the nineties to
Excel today.
SatNav is arguably of more
use on the chaotic road
systems of India and China
than in the West.
of interest: that the bank will actually pay them for
looking after their money.
• Producers of photographic film watch out: many
emerging countries will go straight to digital.
• Similarly with TV: as prices fall, most of the rural Third
World is going straight to satellite.
Europe’s most advanced e-
government is in Estonia. Rich,
technically literate countries like
Germany are years behind.
So
When projecting the future of a digital technology brand,
think poor:
• Most of the words banks use: credit, debit, mortgage,
withdrawal - are used only by banks. When you’re
marketing to new emerging market people,
remember they may never have heard of the concept
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electrifying effect on consumer mentality, clearing
minds, and changing the way consumers think.
8. But a technology must work for it to be able to do
this. So many - like mobile phone picture messaging
- were launched when they didn’t.
9. We must also be conscious of the fact that
consumers are rarely grateful for the changes tech
brings to their lives. Once something works, they
forget it exists.
10. We must also be careful not to listen too closely to
nerds - the early adopters who buy tech when it first
comes out. Their thoughts are not those of the
general population.
11. We should think more about how technology
spreads from person to person in the population.
The resulting infection rate will determine how fast
a technology takes off.
12. We must recognize that whether consumers fit a
technology into their lives or not is the true measure
of success - and that the real impact of a new
technology on a society may take a generation.
13. Consumers do not read instruction books. Period.
Tomorrow’s tech launches need to recognise this.
14. Digital equipment also can get twice as cheap every
two years. For the consumer, price is a positioning
tool - and something that costs next to nothing can
also be perceived as being worth next to nothing.
15. Consumers are also visual creatures: after a while,
they forget that invisible technologies - like WiFi -
exist.
SUMMARY
1. Digital technology gets twice as fast, and as
capable, and as powerful every eighteen months.
2. Meanwhile the mind of its user has not gotten any
more sophisticated in the past ten thousand years.
3. One result is a widening gap between what
technology can do, and what its users - both young
and old - understand it can do.
4. The other result is a growing confusion amongst
consumers, as they lose touch with how their
phones, computers, DVRs, VCRs, TVs, SatNavs,
GPSs, home medical equipment and MP3 players
work.
5. As consumers and technology diverge, there is a
growing risk of a crash. And as digitization is now
critical in all industries and all parts of the economy,
that crash would be economy-wide.
6. Helping consumers understand technology is not
easy. They struggle with the demands modern
devices and software make of them, and fail to
absorb new tech-based concepts.
7. The key need is for simplicity. Simple devices and
software that do one thing, not several can have an
Podcasts discussing
issues covered by ‘My
Brain Hurts’ are at
pubs.yr.com/podcasts
Successful technologies
are simple technologies.
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MY BRAIN HURTS 93

16. At the moment, the tech world is buzzing with words
like ‘convergence’. But beware: convergence
devices do not necessarily contain a strong
consumer benefit.
17. Beware also of the conviction within tech
companies that all technologies need to keep
developing. True for the company that makes them.
Not necessarily true for the consumer.
18. For a tech device to fly, it needs a valuable use, a
‘killer app’. Watch out for consumers developing
their own - unexpected and often unwanted - uses
for a technology.
19. Study videogames carefully - they are taking
consumer time away from television because they
are much more compelling than television - just as
compelling television took share away from passive
radio and press in the 1950s.
20. Watch out particularly for women. They are
increasingly the key consumer of communications
technologies.
21. Watch out also for people in emerging markets.
There are four billion of them, and they often use
technology more effectively than people in richer
countries.
Consumers struggle
to connect with new
concepts:
‘If I’d asked the
consumer what they
wanted,’ said Henry
Ford, ‘they’d have
asked for a faster
horse.’
‘A rose’ said William Shakespeare, ‘by any other name would smell as sweet.’
But call it an XTY 667 J35 version 1.2 firmware 5.6, and who would care?
MY BRAIN HURTS 95

CONCLUSION
As digitization proceeds, technologies that humans do
not understand will fail.
Software that humans do not understand will fail.
If humans fail to understand and want the capabilities of
their next generation phones, the telecoms industry will
fail too.
Our choice is to follow where technology leads, and
leave the consumer behind.
Or to make technology work for humans, not against
them.
Choosing the second path is not easy for any company.
It means going against the tide of the industry.
And it is hazardous, because the consumer is a fickle
friend.
But it the only sure way to long term success.
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