wii

by jenks

Who The iPad Ads Are For

Ever since Apple started putting a lowercase i in front of its products, their advertisements have been known for basically two things — articulating a visceral, transcendent grace inherent within the Mac product experience:

…and making fun of people who don’t already use Macs:

Which is why the iPad ads — with their exaggeratedly simplistic gestures, their induced first-person perspective, (the people in the photos always seem to be seated in some awkward position in order to give us, the viewers, the perspective of being the “user” in the image), and above all, the blatantly basic depiction of the product experience — just don’t quite fit with the image of what an Apple ad is supposed to be.

If these ads seem like a departure, it’s because they are.

In the 60′s, Everett Rogers broke down the process by which trends, products, and ideas proliferate through culture. There are five basic types of adopter personas in his diffusion of innovation theory:

Innovators are the first to adopt an innovation. They are, by defualt, risk-takers since being on the front lines means they are likely to adopt a technology or an idea which may ultimately fail. Early Adopters are the second fastest category to adopt an innovation. They’re more discrete in their adoption choice than Innovators, but have the highest degree of opinion leadership among the other adopter categories. Individuals in the Early Majority adopt an innovation after having let the Innovators and Early adopters do product-testing for them. The Late Majority approaches an innovation with a high degree of skepticism, and after the majority of society has already adopted the innovation first. And finally, Laggards are the last to get on board with a new innovation. These individuals typically have an aversion to change-agents, tend to be advanced in age, and to be focused on “traditions.”

The thinking in marketing, especially when launching a new product, generally tends to be about aiming at the early adopters over on the left side of the adoption bell-curve. Once the early adopters get into it, the thinking goes, whatever it is will trickle down through all the rest of the early and late majority who make up the vast bulk of the market share. A few years back I wrote about how Nintendo was going for a “late adopter strategy” with its Wii console. At the time (and perhaps still now) the Wii was outselling both Sony’s PlayStation and Microsoft’s X-box combined. The Wii’s uniquely simple controller and intuitive game-play enabled it to appeal to a much broader audience than the more complicated, hardcore-gaming consoles.

From a Time Magazine article on the eve of the Wii release in 2006:

“The one topic we’ve considered and debated at Nintendo for a very long time is, Why do people who don’t play video games not play them?” [Nintendo president Satoru] Iwata has been asking himself, and his employees, that question for the past five years. And what Iwata has noticed is something that most gamers have long ago forgotten: to nongamers, video games are really hard. Like hard as in homework.

The key to the Wii’s success is that it made gaming simple, broadly accessible, and inherently intuitive. Later that year, AdAge wrote that the Wii’s popularity is “part of a growing phenomenon that’s overhauling the video-gaming industry…. Video gaming is beginning to transcend the solitary boy-in-the-basement stereotype with a new generation of gamers including women, older people and younger children.”

Anyone who has bought, or even used, an iPhone at some point during the three years since the first iteration was released, already understands what the iPad is all about without any help from an ad. Indeed, Apple has done such a good  job of making ads aimed at early adopters for the past decade, they no longer need to. An ad is not going to make a difference in whether someone on the left-hand side of Apple’s adopter bell-curve buys an iPad or not. Instead, these ads are targeted straight at the people on the downhill slope.

New results from a Pew Research Center survey tracking 2,252 adults 18 and older show that use of social network sites among older adults has risen dramatically over the past two years:

While overall social networking use by online American adults has grown from 35% in 2008 to 61% in 2010, the increase is even more dramatic among older adults. The rate of online social networking approximately quadrupled among Older Boomers (9% to 43%) and the GI Generation (4% to 16%).

Of course, Millennials still have a healthy lead among all age groups in social network use, with 83% of online adults from 18-33 engaging in social networking, but grandma and grandpa are just catching up. Particularly grandma. Last year, the fastest growing demographic on Facebook was women over 55.

Unlike the Apple ads we’ve become accustomed to in the 2000’s, these iPad ads are no longer touting the product’s “higher resolution experience” to digital natives. That is, they are not emphasizing the ephemeral or smugly superior subtleties that are inaccessible to anyone who does not intuitively “get it.” These ads are, instead, paring the experience down to be as unintimidating as possible. Not only is the iPad a completely new way to experience personal computing, it is as effortless to use this technology, the ads say to you, the viewer, as if you were, yourself, a digital native.

    



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by jenks

taste the difference

…And I can make you wanna buy a product
Movers shakers and producers
Me and my friends understand the future
– The Flobots: “Handlebars”

I’ve been trying to get through Matt Mason’s The Pirate’s Dilemma for a while. It’s an easy read, but between digging up mind-blowing historical discoveries from the cultural strata–Did you know that a nun at the orphanage David Mancuso was raised at is pretty much responsible for modern dance culture? Dude, I know, it’s insane–And so many unconscious ironies and philosophical inconsistencies that I’m tempted to write a post after I finally do finish it called “The Pirate’s Contradiction”…. it’s difficult to read too much of it at a time.

There’s one very interesting section in it, however, that I think can be dealt with outside of the rest of the book. In keeping with the recent theme of musings on contemporary adulthood, here’s an excerpt from a section called “Parents Just Do Understand”:

The hip-hop generation was the first to grow up in a brand-saturated world. Before hip-hop, as Will Smith and DJ Jazzy Jeff once postulated, it was a given that parents just didn’t understand. But now parents who are the age of Smith have the same albums on their iPods as their kids, and the same reissued retro sneakers on their feet. This has serious ramifications for youth culture, commerce, and everything else.

…What does it mean now to “grow up” in a world where we all want a Nintendo Wii for Christmas?

BAM!

And while Mason presents the caveat that younger generations now find the outlet for rebellion through media and technology, that last bastion where parents and kids are still reliably segregated, in general his conclusion is that “The generation gap has become obsolete.”

But I wonder if perhaps it’s not quite that simple. Maybe the generation gap hasn’t gotten filled in and paved over, but has, in fact, gone deeper below the surface. From above, the divisions that would once define a generational cohort and distinguish it from its predecessors would appear to have eroded, but underneath, a different separation is very much intact.

A 2006 Rolling Stone article called “Teens Save Classic Rock” talks about how the genre of Hendrix, Floyd and Zeppelin is experiencing a resurgence among a whole new generation of kids. “We’re now seeing an audience that goes from sixteen to sixty,” said Allman Brothers manager Bert Holman.

The internet made this possible. iTunes means the music we can listen to is no longer determined solely by the offerings of an ever more homogenized radio, or limited to the finite selection of a physical record store. And while we can now instantly get to hear a bigger breadth of music from across genres and ages than was ever possible before, the question remains, as Rolling Stone points out, “Why would kids born in the Nineties turn to timeworn guitar anthems?”

One answer:

For all of the vibrant rock recorded in the past ten years — from pop punk to neogarage to dance rock — no new, dominant sound has emerged since grunge in the early Nineties. “I can’t think of a record recently that blew people’s minds,” says Jeff Peretz, a Manhattan producer and guitar teacher. “And there aren’t really any guitar heroes around anymore. Kids don’t come in and say, ‘I want to play like John Mayer.’”

“There is such a drought that kids are going back and rediscovering the Who and Sabbath,” says Paul Green, who runs the Paul Green School of Rock Music.

But I don’t think it’s a “drought” so much as a glut. Popular, contemporary music is so ominpresent and obvious there’s barely room for kids to even figure out if they like it. By default, it’s what they’re expected to be listening to. The hideaway of classic rock, where no doubt no one expected to find them, is a relished escape. The musical equivalent of disobeying your mom when she tells you “Just stay where I can see you.”

According to Rolling Stone, “9% of kids ages 12-17 listened to classic-rock radio in any given week in 2005 — marking a small but significant increase during the past three years, according to the radio-ratings company Arbitron.” It’s not just a sign of teen taste, it’s a sign of teen distinction. If you’re listening to classic rock in high school, you’re doing something the other 91% of the kids at your high school aren’t into, or onto yet. That’s some indisputable early adopter appeal there.

Which is perhaps the complete opposite of what appeals to adults about listening to the music of their own youth.

In a 2004 USA Today article about how Kids Are Listening To Their Parents’ Music, Jeremy Hammond, head of artist development at Sanctuary Records noted, “There’s not so much peer pressure to identify with a particular genre or even generation of music,” says “Back then, you had to choose a lifestyle associated with a genre. In England, you were in a gang of rockers or skinheads or Mods. Potheads wanted psychedelic music. Those boundaries are gone. [Now] It’s much more about defining one’s own unique tastes.”

The way a modern identity is constructed has changed. It’s no longer something as simple as how old we are that determines what is or is not “for us” to buy, or listen to, or dress like. The mechanics of taste is the next marketing frontier.

“I think the rebellion is that kids aren’t rebelling,” Says Rana Reeves, creative director of Shine Communications in The Pirate’s Dilemma. “They aren’t rebelling against the marketers; they want to be marketers.”

    



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by jenks

late-adopter strategy

like a true teenage product of the 90’s i blame video games.

last week i caught the tail end of an npr bit about the nintendo wii which mentioned that the console was currently outselling both sony’s playstation and microsoft’s xbox combined. the explanation for this seems to be that because of its uniquely simple controller the wii is able to appeal to a much broader audience than the other more complicated consoles. the implications of that on the dynamics of adoption is what’s inspired this recent investigation on the subject.

about a year and a half ago i was busily dashing all over L.A. on a quest for sneakerheads. while scouring undefeated, kicks, sportieLA, kendo, greyone, and generally cruising melrose ave. like a freakin pimp (in the traditional sense of the word), i was actually on a black ops consumer insight mission. i was working with an agency that was preparing to pitch pony, and so we wanted to glean from these kicks connoisseurs info on the current state of shoedom. now, sneakerheads are folks with an average of like, oh…. say 80-180 pairs of sneakers (i don’t know if maybe you do, but i don’t think i own 180 pairs of anything), and i was on a quest to find these experts and offer them the opportunity to get to talk about their #1 favorite subject: shoez.

yet uniquely suited to aiding and abetting the process of marketing research with their undisputed ability to distill meaningful patterns out of that which to the layperson is just chaos, though they may be, these kinds of experts hanging out on the knuckles of the s-curve arm have a very obvious shortcoming. that very same expertise skews their particular perspective. these VERY early adopters, who get up while all the rest of us are still sleeping, typically represent a demographic whose expectations and predispositions are colored by the standards of what kathy sierra calls the “higher resolution experience,” an experience that by its very eliteness does not translate to the majority.

from sierra’s keynote speech at sxsw this year:

“For example, some of you may be going to the music festival [portion of sxsw]. There may be some of you who are going to get laid or for beer. Some of you may actually understand something about the kind of music, and you may have some deep appreciation for some aspects of the music. You’ll hear different notes; you’ll hear more notes; you’ll hear things the rest of us don’t hear. I’m not a music expert, but I have a little bit of experience with mixing boards, so it kinda sucks, because I’ll go to a concert, and I’ll be like, “Oh, if I could just get my hands on those faders”– so it’s a little bit of a higher-resolution experience for me.”

the funny thing is that only an expert would even TALK about the “higher resolution experience.” everyone else doesn’t have any clue that such a concept even exists or what the hell it means. so think about what that implies about the resonance of a campaign (or product) that stringently emphasizes the “higher resolution experience.” there is a whole population of people that aren’t simply “not going to get it,” but rather what they ARE going to get is the message that “this here is not for me.”

which brings us back to the subject of the wii.

before the wii, the video game industry had become mired in a sort of stagnation. newer consoles were coming out, but there was nothing actually new emerging at all (guitar-hero not withstanding for the moment). as each iteration seemed to only up the complexity (i.e “resolution”), of the same sort of staid video game experience, their appeal was becoming more and more narrowed.

from an article in TIME last may on the eve of the wii release:

“The one topic we’ve considered and debated at Nintendo for a very long time is, Why do people who don’t play video games not play them?” [Nintendo president Satoru] Iwata has been asking himself, and his employees, that question for the past five years. And what Iwata has noticed is something that most gamers have long ago forgotten: to nongamers, video games are really hard. Like hard as in homework.

not only were novice users turned off by the intimidating (read: not fun) learning curve, but this wasn’t so good even for the people who could see the hi-res stuff, as many hardcore gamers were getting bored by the substitution of complicatedness for innovativeness.

and then along comes the wii to breathe simple, accessible, fun, new life into the world of the video game console.

Nintendo has grasped [an] important notion that [has] eluded its competitors. Don’t listen to your customers. The hard-core gaming community is extremely vocal–they blog a lot–but if Nintendo kept listening to them, hard-core gamers would be the only audience it ever had. “[Wii] was unimaginable for them,” Iwata says. “And because it was unimaginable, they could not say that they wanted it. If you are simply listening to requests from the customer, you can satisfy their needs, but you can never surprise them.”

and you also can’t necessarily rely on them to show you how to appeal to new KINDS of customers. particularly, customers at a different point on the adoption curve. a year after that time article came out, advertising age reports that the wii’s popularity is “part of a growing phenomenon that’s overhauling the video-gaming industry…. Video gaming is beginning to transcend the solitary boy-in-the-basement stereotype with a new generation of gamers including women, older people and younger children who want to play in a more social atmosphere.” (like, who knew, right?)

by deliberately pursuing a strategy to appeal to the majority, nintendo not only managed to bypass the bottleneck at the left elbow of the gamer bell-curve, but, in fact, to actually expand the very scope of what is a “gamer” identity.

another great example of this is what lexus did in the process of developing the strategy for their certified pre-owned (CPO) car program. CPO cars offer an array of late model, low-mileage vehicles, passing or meeting stringent manufacturer’s inspections, and backed by manufacturers’ warranties.

initially the auto industry lumped CPO customers in with the used car buyers, until a whole lot of research revealed that CPO vehicles actually appeal to their own unique kind of luxury car consumer, a demo that exists in a distinct category between “new” and “used.”

from the book Using Market Research to Create Effective Advertising:
(das what the man said)

The auto industry approach to marketing CPO vehicles was completely discordant with the consumers’ real needs and shopping patterns…..

People interested in a CPO vehicle begin with a consideration of what brands and models are right for them. Status, image, and the more emotional elements of a car purchase are at play. Pricing and budgeting decisions, which drive the used-car buyers’ purchase process from the beginning, do not factor into the CPO car buyers’ process until much later.

These findings were critical in leading Lexus and Team-One to the conclusion that CPO buyers actually mirror new car buyers’ shopping patterns and behaviors, rather than used car ones.

much like nintendo’s strategy with the wii, by focusing on the particular needs of consumers that exist beyond the early adopters Lexus’s CPO strategy expanded not only their understanding of their own brand’s adoption, but the scope of the entire class of luxury car consumers.

an interesting thing to also mention here is that while the wii has gained huge popularity in the majority, it has likewise engaged the curiosity and the desire for something new and fresh from seasoned gamers. likewise the success of lexus’s CPO campaign is no doubt an added incentive to the new car purchasers’ in the sense of increased security about the car’s resale value.

rather than a strategy developed to appeal to early adopters with the expectation that it will eventually transcend to everyone else, these are two examples that represent an approach that appeals directly to groups situated further along the adoption curve. distinct and viable markets do indeed exist beyond the early adopter, and not every strategy can or needs to be designed to specifically suit that one first group. understanding the differing needs and tastes of consumers along the various stages of the adoption curve, and developing strategies to address these groups’ expectations in targeted, relevant ways is key.

    



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