BrandsAmongMany

I’m not talking about when it breaks. I understand that things wear out eventually, and that complex things wear out faster. (Though a friend of mine did have a minor crisis when her MyBook external HD holding her last four years of creative work crashed in less than a month.) I don’t know about anyone else, but when a piece of technology that I’ve purchased to make life easier or more enjoyable crashes, I get really frustrated.

Case in point is my Garmin FR305 – a GPS watch designed to help runners track their workouts. I had run with, and was an ardent fan of, a Nike+ setup for quite a while. In fact I was part of a group flown to Nike HQ in Oregon a while back to discuss the future of the system and how it served my needs. But once I realized just how innacurate it was, I stopped running with it. The social draw of the Nike+ just wasn’t enough to keep me as a user. So I “upgraded” to the Garmin.

Unfortunately, it hasn’t served me much better. Sure, it’s GPS based, so the accuracy is there. But the software that Garmin has created to interface with the data is terrible. So much so, in fact, that I put off uploading any runs for about six weeks. Of course, when I went to do so this morning, the process failed repeatedly. No error message. No upgrade prompt. It just sat there, leaving me once again furious that Garmin can’t manage to come up with a simple system that just works.

Which led me to the question…why? Do we get just as angry when our non-technological things fail? Or has the bar simply been set so high by the things that do work, that we assume everything should function with thge same ease? Of course, I purchased my Garmin with the expectation that it would work - with ease. Am I really out of line by getting upset when it doesn’t do exactly what I bought it to do? Would I care as much if it were cheaper?

In thinking about these questions, I’m reminded of a post that I wrote a few months ago that was based around a statement we kicked around here at POKE for a while:

The evolution of digital technology has created expectations in consumers that brands simply don’t live up to.

While the application of this statement is a little different in this post than in the last, the words themselves still ring true - though we could change “brands” to “products”. The good bits of technology that I interact with (and those that I’ve been a part of building) have taught me what’s possible. They’ve created the expectation that everything else should live up to the same standards. Unfortunately, too many products are either rushed to market or just not thought out well enough to begin with.

Jason Baer wrote up a great post a couple of days ago called Are New Customers the Enemy of Success? in which he challenges that brands are ignoring the age-old maxim that it’s cheaper to retain a customer than to attain a new one. While I agree with Jason’s point whole-heartedly, I’d challenge that the same thought should be applied earlier in the process. Before we even consider buying new customers vs. holding onto the old ones, perhaps brands should spend more time creating a product that will attract customers on its own. Something that’s so useful, so well thought-out, that people flock to it without the need for advertising. To borrow from well-known terms build me a Purple Cow people!

If you build it, they will come. Here’s a challenge to Garmin - and anyone else out there: take your 2009 advertising budget - heck take HALF your 2009 ad budget - and hand it to your engineers, developers, and UI team with a simple ultimatum: make it better. Every penny that you roll back into the perfection of your product will do far more for your brand than any print ad you’ll ever make.

Want to do it even better? Take the other half of that ad budget and use it to talk to people. Ask them what you could do better. Share your technology and ask them to help if you have to! People are interested in having something that does what they bought it to do. And if you invest some interest in them, they’ll be more than willing to help you do it.

Noticed a tweet by the crew over at Imperial this morning that stirred some thoughts:

Oddly enough, this short little statement does an excellent job of encompassing much of my interest and my progression through the industry (though slightly out of order). I started as a marketing major in undergrad, moved on to the creative side of advertising, and have now found myself inching closer toward product development as the opportunities have allowed (and hopefully will allow more in the future).

So the question, of course, is “what’s next?”…

As times have changed and the mechanisms for delivery have fragmented and spread, “the industry” has struggled to keep up. In my experience, the connection between strategy and creative is tenuous at best. So is the connection between creative and the medium. Add the prevalence of new technologies – both technologies that help the delivery of a branded message as well as those that help the consumer to avoid those messages – and suddenly it seems that “tenuous” might be a generous offering. Realistically speaking, we haven’t cracked the formula on the first three. But that’s never stopped us from jumping toward something new in the past, has it?

What will that be? I have no idea.
What should it be? How about working to perfect the understanding of what we already have?

The television-driven model is well into its death throes – in fact, it might already be dead if there were more openness toward embracing the future. It’s only our refusal to admit that what we’re used to isn’t necessarily right anymore that’s holding us in the past.

It is changing though. Brands are finally realizing that they don’t have to spend multiple millions of dollars producing television spots to see results.

Don’t believe me? Have a look at Kellogg who’s planning to cut commercial filming by 10-20% next year. For a company that makes 350-400 television commercials a year, that could cut as many as 80 spots from the production schedule in 2009 at a savings of $1M for every 3 commercials.

Product development is an area where most agencies are barely scratching the surface. Case in point: at my last ad agency job, I threw out an idea for a new package design for one of our clients that aligned perfectly with the 10-minute diatribe that the strategy team had just presented. The response:

That’s package design. That’s outside our pervue.

Um…NO. How is anything…ANYTHING…that has to do with the brand we’re working on “outside our pervue”? Until that mentality is shunned by agencies, product development won’t have a place within their walls. Instead, it will be pioneered by the small, seldom-heard-of companies that focus directly on that niche in the market. And they’ll have free reign until someone can step up to challenge them.

So, to answer the question…
Product development is a nearly untapped market for our industry right now. And it will remain that way until the agencies get their own houses in order. Until we can rethink the marketing and advertising sides to align to the realities of the modern market. And who will be king? The one who can do just that and then make product development a serious part of their repertoire. Let’s get now right before we worry about what’s next?