Marketing on the Bleeding Edge

I’ve seen too many discussions lately about leveraging bleeding-edge technologies as a means to get “first mover advantage” by being the first brand to reach customers with the vary latest gizmos, features, and functions.   This seems to come along every time that device manufacturers release a fresh batch of R&D on the market, and it never fails to drive me nuts.   I thought, or perhaps hoped in vain, that marketers would have learned their lesson by now.

I have to concede that latching on to the latest technology fad makes a very good impression on technology enthusiasts.  They seem quite amazed at companies that leverage the latest capabilities of their newest technology toys and give them a great deal of attention and praise.   But I’ve never seen any statistics that suggest that this is a sizable market, or if the attention and praise translates into dollars at the register to a significant and sustainable degree.

Meanwhile, the rest of the market doesn’t notice at all – or at least that’s the best possible outcome, as the alternative is for the “new” features to be incompatible with the technology that they see no point in upgrading just yet.   Statistics on the size of the standard, non-technophile market are varied and unreliable (likely skewed by the publisher’s desire to suggest people upgrade faster/slower based on the reality they wish to project), but even the most aggressive statisticians concede that most consumers wait to upgrade until their service provider allows it, or about once every two years if it’s on their own dime.

In all, I am left with the sense that the cost of missing out on marketing opportunities by being on the leading edge is far outweighed by the cost of alienating customers by being too far ahead of them.   Unless an application, site, or service is high-impact and high-value, customers see little need to catch up to the latest technology in order to use them – and it is extremely rare for marketing-oriented services that push products to be considered vital to daily life.

With that in mind, the sensible approach is to take a step backward, as there really is no telling which technologies will become accepted and which will be abandoned as soon as the novelty wears off.   So instead of attempting to predict the next fad, simply pay attention to what customers are actually using and be aggressive (but not spastic) in building to suit.

Marketing strategy in digital channels must align to the capabilities and habits of the market – customers will not hurry up to do business at your speed.   And while the folksy wisdom of “skate to where the puck is going to be” makes perfect sense, it assumes that you know its future location.   Most don’t, and those who claim to have that sort of wisdom are most often proven by time to be fools.

Fundamentally, technology is just a new (and hopefully improved) method of doing the same tasks to solve the same problems and achieve the same goals as people did before the specific technology existed.   The conversations people have on smartphones are essentially the same as they used to have on pay phones – though the convenience of having a phone handy at any time likely means there are a lot more pointless and insipid conversations that wouldn’t have happened if they required the effort to find a phone and drop a dime.   That’s not altogether a good thing.

The point is: if your service provides genuine value, customers will not abandon it as soon as someone has a slightly spiffier user interface: they will continue to use your “outdated” applications and devices until they are replaced with newer versions, and they will be just as delighted when you upgrade, even if it’s not within a week of the release of the newest features and functions.

Ultimately, successful marketing strategy for the technology must align the goals of the business to the ways that consumers use the channel.   This is not the same as the way in which the technology enthusiasts and business executives wished that consumers would use the channel.   The vast majority of the market will ignore the very latest capabilities unless they deliver genuine value – and assuming otherwise is where the vast majority of markets go horribly wrong.

Cool is Perishable

I saw a demonstration today of a kinetic user interface - a technology that is presently being used in video games to enable the user to control their in-game character without a physical device, by means of a sensor that detects their body movement. It's an idea that has been around for years, but I'd never seen a demonstration. I was impressed.

Then the question arose of putting this same technology to practical use. Wouldn't it be cool if you could use this kind of interface to buy stocks? The problem-solving part of my brain went to work on it immediately: each of your positions could be represented by an object that you could touch and move, zoom in on, bring up relevant information, all by physical motions that would be entirely natural and intuitive. It could definitely be done, and it would definitely be cool.

But before I had chased the butterfly too far, the analytical part of my brain went to work: what could you do with this new technology that really is new? What can you do with it that can't already be done? Aside of the novelty factor, how could such a thing deliver a unique value that would make it compelling in the long run, after the novelty had worn off?

And at that point, I was stuck for an answer.

Certainly, you could have access to more information - but only by virtue of it being a larger screen. A computer with a large monitor could do the same. And certainly, you could visualize information differently - but the same method of visualization could be presented on a two-dimensional screen regardless of whether you used a kinetic interface or mouse-and-keyboard.

And, as a matter of fact, a keyboard is much more useful for dealing with that kind of data. It takes between two and five keystrokes to enter most exchange symbols and click "enter" - much easier than having to use your whole body to try to spell out the words, or find them in a long list of options, or hunt through a virtual toy box of brightly colored three-dimensional objects. And it likewise takes a few taps to enter a number of shares to buy or sell.

All things considered, the kinetic interface doesn't add anything of value to the transaction. It doesn't make it easier - in fact, it would take a lot more time and physical energy to perform a task that can be done quite simply using the existing keyboard interface. And as to making that same interface accessible to someone in a wheelchair ... probably not going to happen.

I won't discount the possibility that there may be something I'm not seeing - that in a few days or weeks or months, I will be roused from sleep by a "eureka" moment when I realize something that hadn't occurred to me before. But for now, putting my creative and analytical skills to the task, I've come up empty.

At least for this purpose, the kinetic interface offers nothing of value that would make it a better way to do the same task. It would be different, and it would be cool ... but "cool" is quite perishable, and as soon as the novelty wore off, the user would realize that the "old" way of doing things was less difficult and time consuming.

I have the sense that this is a common problem when it comes to new technology, and the very thing that fueled the dot-com boom and led to the subsequent crash. New, different, and cool are certainly wondrous - but in the long run, useful, simple, and straightforward will win out.

Customer Relationship Management

I've recently added study notes on an article about customer relationship management. It's nothing new, but more recent than previous material I had read on the same topic, and the article is very brief compared to the books that have been written on the topic - but it is also very matter-of fact and largely devoid of hype.

CRM was a popular notion about fifteen years ago, and like many popular notions, there was a flash of interest, but little understanding. As a result, there were many vendors that offered quick-and-dirty solutions that did little good, the net result of which was that many were led to dismiss CRM as a fad with no inherent value.

But now that the glimmer of novelty has faded, the companies that have been left standing are those who took more methodical approach and have gained ground slowly, and the potential for CRM to create competitive advantage in markets in which there has been no effective first-mover remains, making the concept worth re-consideration.