My Brain hurts - Wunderman books

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.
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