(9/12/09) There is a wonderful story, with the title Goodbye, Gobbledygook, in today’s NY Times. It’s a perfect example of the kind of Decision EZification that I’ve been talking about for years:
It seems that computer makers are abandoning the complex “fact tags” they have always attached to computers.
As the Times put it (with an assist from my boldface:
Once cherished, the fact tag has turned into an object of scorn as PC makers finally reach a realization that many other industries discovered ages ago: the consumer is truly king.
“We have been stuck in 1995,” said Leslie Sobon, the vice president of product marketing at the chip maker Advanced Micro Devices. “We are basically the laggards.”
Over the last couple of years, the industry has made a slow lurch away from its engineering roots toward a more shopper-friendly strategy that recognizes that if you make your product simpler to understand, more people will buy it.
They are switching instead to what Intel calls “use model marketing.” They are now beginning to label computers according to their intended uses such as web surfing, gaming and entertainment, instead of their technical specifications.
AMD has gone from presenting 220 combinations of chips to See, Share, and Create Systems, and reduced its 40 page salesperson’s manual to two.
My comments:
Most ezification and simplification attempts are aimed at the product itself, usually called product “usability,” more broadly “the customer experience.”
What this article shows is that more attention needs to be paid to the decision process itself. This case illustrates the importance of focusing on the initial information gathering stage of the decision process. Most customers do not understand “DDR2 RAM, 5400 r.p.m. hard drives, Turion benchmark scores and the robust L2 cache sizes of Core 2 Duos. ” The people at the manufacturing and retail levels think, “What’s not to understand? This is important information that differentiates the products.” “Expert blindness” strikes again.
The store visit turns into an intimidating and humiliating experience. If you don’t make the information about your product easy to understand, your customer will be dead in the water. It won’t come up in market research unless it is specifically asked about because people are embarrassed.
When the customer goes, “Huh?” the young geek in the electronics store gets to feel superior. The customer is polite and scratches his/her head all the way to the Apple store, where they will be treated with respect.
