I keep thinking about that catastrophically bad Apple commercial for the new iPad.I can see what they were trying to do, to say that all these tools could exist inside their new, skinnier iPad. But the way it read to people who care about painting with paint and playing tactile instruments was that iPad was literally crushing their creativity. It was bad. And it was bad because the marketing thought about the product they were selling, not the humans they were selling it to.
It’s the easiest mistake in the world to make in marketing. We get paid to tell people how awesome our product is. Our incentives are all about how well we market our product. Of course we want to show that our product is the best, better than all those other products.
But our audiences… they’re people. They’re humans who have a lot of different conflicting impulses going at all times.
- There is the problem they need to solve, and how they’re imagining it.
- There’s who they think they are, and who they think your company/brand is.
- There’s constraints – cost, time, effort.
- There’s inertia and novelty-seeking and pretty much every cognitive bias that exists
One of the best ways I’ve found to do marketing is identify a problem that people didn’t think of as a problem, and then solve it. “What if people don’t know you brush your teeth? Your breath should be minty fresh!”. Oh, gosh! My breath is never minty fresh, I should do something about that. “What if you never had big merge conflicts? Have you considered working entirely in main?” Wow, no I hadn’t, I assumed merge conflicts were normal.
And then there’s identity. If you have to switch your meeting image so it’s not mirrored, how much of the meeting do you spend staring at yourself because you look so weird? We have really strong ideas about who we are. We’re the kind of person who would stop for someone on the side of the road (even if we never have). We’re the kind of person who will use a $100 coffee mug heater (even if our coffee never lasts long enough to get cold). We have this internal brand that we try to match with the brands and products we buy. If a product tells me that it’s For Men, and I think of myself as a mom, why would I buy it? It doesn’t want me, I don’t want it, no big deal, carry on, strangely-large soap. If a product tells me that moms are stupid either I have to reconcile that by pretending to not be a mom, or by getting angry. Why would I ever want to spend money on something that insults me?
People have constraints in how they spend their time, money, attention, and work. If you assume that everyone has the money to upgrade their phone every year, you’re missing a lot of the population. Maybe that’s not a market you care about, but you should decide that on purpose, and not by accident. Of course you design for yourself first, but then you have to go talk to people who aren’t you, so you can find the gaps in your thinking. You’re a pretty small market. Make sure you understand how it feels to use your product from zero. “Just install this using a shell script” is not going to work for everyone, and has a lot of assumptions baked in.
Cognitive biases aren’t good or bad. They just are. Our brains tend to try to conserve energy, so they’ll take the easiest path through something. Most of the time this works in our favor, and the weather today is roughly the same as yesterday, so recency bias has saved us from seasonally-inappropriate clothing triage. We’re saving that energy for things that need our actual thought, like whether we want to buy the same software all our competitors use for HR. As a marketer, though, it’s useful to remember that you’re always fighting through these biases to get your message through.
In short
If your marketing is downplaying, denigrating, or insulting your customers (not your competitors), figure out why that seems like a good idea. Then stop it.
(I think it’s not usually necessary to insult your competitors, either, but there’s no denying it works, by making their image something your customers don’t want. Think of the Mac vs PC commercials, which were hugely effective.)