What Are You Buying?

If you're one of the lucky few people that have actually spoken to me in person, then you've probably heard my "story" daitribe (badly paraphrased from Seth Godin, I'm afraid).

It goes fairly simply; Every product, every construction, every experience is a part of a story. This story can be incidental ("Hey, I'm a kid on a bike. I'm having fun!") or it can be entirely manufactured ("Chanel smells good, and will make you attractive."). The "Eureka!" moment comes when you realise just how many products in our lives are a part of a manufactured story. How many? All of them.

There's the obvious ones, of course, like "Coke adds life!", and "BMW means you pay more in tax than most people earn." However, there's also the more insidious ones, like the two dollar shop, or ipods (Stories about value for money, and image, respectively.)

Unfortunately, what most people don't realise is that often there isn't much more than the story in what you're buying. Coke doesn't actually add life, it just provides a sense of comfort and familiarity. Driving a BMW isn't about impressing your neighbours, it's about impressing yourself. You want to make yourself feel special, feel part of a particular story, you buy the product.

I recently shopped at ALDI, a discount supermarket. Although many products were actually quite similarly priced to a regular supermarket, the design and experience of shopping there makes you feel like you're getting a bargain. Products are stacked on pallets, there are no plastic shopping bags, and many classes of product are actually unavailable. The story? Shop here to save money. Whether or not you save anything is immaterial, you already feel a sense of satisfaction at being a part of a story.

You're buying the story.

To most people, it doesn't matter what's in the can, just that "coke" is on the label.

And, as Seth said long before me, The path to success is in telling a story that's compelling and honest.

Generic Branding.

There are a few people in my office with a handheld computer similar to the one pictured, and the vast majority refer to it as their "Palm Pilot". The only problem is that it's not a palm pilot. It's a "Pocket PC". In fact, there hasn't been a "Palm Pilot" on the market for several years.

This device is not just a little different to a Palm Pilot, it is remarkably different. It runs different software, it operates in a different way, it's manufactured by a different company. It is an entirely different product.

Of course, this is all quite academic. Hoover, Xerox, Elevator, Refrigerator, and Google were once entirely different products, but have all since been subsumed into the English language as placeholders for the concepts they represent. Corporations mostly love this sort of thing, as it gives their particular brand de-facto product placement every time the product is mentioned. Lucky them.

There are dangers here, of course, for both the consumer and the brand. For the consumer, there is a danger of product confusion. If one of my colleagues goes out to buy some "Palm Pilot" software, they'd be particularly disappointed when they discover that it won't run on their Pocket PC handheld.

The second (less obvious) danger is to the brand. If it becomes too generic, too commonly used, then it is no longer a brand, it's a noun. And no-one can sell a noun. When was the last time you shopped around for a couch made by "Couch Inc."?

Does this seem ridiculous? Sure. But remember, owning a Westinghouse Refrigerator would once have sounded as ridiculous as Googling on Yahoo.

In With The Old, And In With The New.

Whenever a new technology comes along, it has a tendency to be tacked on to to anything existing in the field, regardless of whether or not it is vastly superior and revolutionary. There's always a part of the population that prefers things "The old Way". The big question, then, is whether or not you'll accommodate for these traditionalists, or force your new, revolutionary worldview on them.

Digital projectors may be far more versatile and effective, but how much effort does it take to leave an old overhead projector at the front of the class to keep a few old lecturers happy? Is it worthwhile? How amenable will these lecturers be to being told to do things a different way?

Planning The Experience.

The kettle in the photo was taken in a room in a fairly expensive, exclusive hotel in Sydney. The hotel provides each room with a gourmet selection of complementary teas, replenished daily. So what's the problem?

Firstly, the kettle and cable were wrapped up and packed away in an unmarked cupboard on the opposite side of the room to the tea. Second, there were no spare power points available in a convenient place in the room to actually plug in the kettle (I ended up unplugging a lamp). And finally, the power cable for the kettle was precisely long enough so that - once plugged in - you couldn't actually lift it up off the table to pour a cup of tea, you had to unplug it first.

I didn't have a major problem working any of this out, except it wasn't my room (I'm not the target audience for the hotel) - it was for my 76-year old grandmother. How was she supposed to crawl under a table to make a cup of tea?

I can think of two possible options; Either little or no thought has actually been put into the guest experience at this hotel (where the nightly rate is more than many people earn in a week), or there has been a concious effort to discourage guests from entertaining themselves as an alternative to room service or the restaurant.

I'm not sure which is worse.

Why Are Lecturers Bad Presenters?

If the image to the left doesn't strike fear into you, then you've either spent far too much time at university or you've never seen a decent presentation.

54 words on a single slide, 32-point font, no images, and just leaving the slide open in the application rather than actually displaying it full-screen. For 20 minutes.

This is a typical example of what happens when poor skills are combined with poor tools. Excellent skills can often compensate for poor tools (or vice versa), but the lack of both is disastrous. In this case, Powerpoint (the application used) has not provided the presenter with any clues that the slide may be just a *tad* poorly conceived.

If you're slide is just a copy of the handout notes, then what's the point of displaying it? Why not just talk? Or why not take advantage of the medium and show something that engages the audience in the topic?

(For the record, this lecturer was very well spoken, intelligent, verbally engaging, and had been teaching for over 20 years.)

If you still can't spot the problem then I'd hazard a guess that you've never actually seen a good presentation, and I urge you to go watch just what presentations are capable of (that's one of my favourites). When you're done there, go poke around a few of the excellent presentations that can be found on the web sites of people that know more about these things than I do.

Don't fall into the same trap that many academic types do, and assume that a "teaching" presentation is so far removed from a "normal" presentation. Whether you're in a boardroom or a classroom, you're still expecting to learn.

It's a shame that presentations skills aren't required learning for university lecturers. I've had dozens of lecturers over the course of my academic career, most of them intelligent, well spoken, enthusiastic, and many were even quite witty.

But none of them knew how to give a decent presentation.

What Good Is A Big Ad....

...if no-one can read it?

You may have spent a fortune on a giant banner in front of a great deal of traffic, but it won't do much good if it's illegible and easily ignored.