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.
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