My Brain hurts - Wunderman books

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