Two articles I read today drive home this powerful point:
Consumers must be involved in everything you do. If you’re not talking to them, you should be keeping them at the forefront of everything you’re doing. When planning a new product, ask yourself these three questions:
- How will this help consumers?
- Will they believe it’s helping them?
- Does the price justify the perceived value? It doesn’t matter what you think the value is. It only matters what your potential customers perceive it to be.
So, the two articles:
This Advertising Age piece talks about how most of the award winning 2009 ads involved consumers. It included this terrific quote from Patrick Collister:
“We’ve had 100 years of business-to-consumer advertising, now the web has enabled us to get people actively involved and talking to each other. If the idea is interesting enough, consumers will do the work for you.”
If the idea is interesting enough, consumers will do the work for you.
This has been Apple’s key to success for years.
The other article? The Wall Street Journal’s piece on 10 new gadgets being debuted at CES right now. These new products make it painfully clear that many manufacturers are still making products that they, not consumers, think are groundbreaking and interesting. A sampling from the list — my take in italics:
A laptop that doesn’t run Windows, but it’s always connected to a cell network. Cost: $499. Consumers can buy fully functioning laptops that run Windows for $300 or less today.
An Internet radio that costs $349. The major draw of Internet radio is that at it’s free and at the computer where people work. This new generation of stand-alone Web radio devices eliminate both of those upsides and replace them with high cost and an extra device to bring into the home.
A 7-inch touch-screen Web tablet that must be plugged in to function. Really? It’s tethered to an outlet? Isn’t that what desktop computers are for? PCs get the Internet too!
“Amazingly thin TVs” that are less than one-inch thick, but 20 percent to 50 percent higher in price. These ultra-thin TVs, along with the recent industry focus on 3D television technology are advances most consumers aren’t terribly interested in. Today, I believe both devices will go the way of the smart appliance. If they get affordable enough, these devices may find a niche audience among consumers. But I’d be surprised to see them hit the mainstream.
A long-life flashlight that can be unused for 20 years and still turn on. Cost? $289. That’s all that needs to be said.
That’s half of the 10 products listed in the article, with little chance of mainstream consumer acceptance. All are examples of manufacturers spending millions of dollars to create products that consumers don’t really need, and probably won’t buy. Why do we keep doing this in our industry?