All the journal entries below ,,,
... have been created in 2005 or earlier.
Some of them point to documents that are also available on our website.
Henri Aebischer
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The Customer Focus Trap
Once upon a time marketing was product-centric, supporting mass production, focusing on features & benefits, and aiming at media optimisation to push one-way messages to the market through isolated channels. Then came ‘new’ marketing, customer-centric, focusing on the total customer experience (as in ‘shopping experience’ – the way one enjoys shopping) and aiming at on customer optimisation (reach them one-to-one, at the right time) via two-way, interactive communication through integrated and synchronized channels (think, as an example, of Google ads and blogs).
In plain English: traditional product-centric marketing is about bombarding everybody with print or TV ads that glorify the product and its benefits (why customers are satisfied). New marketing addresses selected classes of people (ideally, selected individuals) with selling arguments revolving around the total experience, style, value, prestige, perception and so on.
Traditional marketing is reason, logic, matter, hard things. New marketing is rather emotions, intuition, mind, soft stuff. The main difference between the two systems (that ‘happily’ coexist in today’s business environment) is, I think, the ‘role’ of the customer. In traditional marketing, the customer is, like the ‘end user’ of IT systems, a fuzzy entity at the end of the supply chain. In new marketing, the customer is king, the centre of the system, the alpha and omega, the person who has to be delighted in all circumstances and … religiously listened to.
We all like to be cajoled, delighted and, especially, listened to; and companies that are good at that tend to be very successful. However, ‘religious’ listening to customers creates a big risk: stifling radical, disruptive innovation and condemning the ‘holy’ customer to lacklustre incremental improvements.
In the early 1980s, if you had asked early PC users what their requirements were, they would probably have answered “better operating system software, larger disks, faster processors and so on”. Nobody would have described anything close to the Apple Macintosh with mouse, graphic display, overlapping windows, pull-down menus, cut & paste, drag & drop and so on. Today, PCs would be blazing hot fast boxes that specialists use to run amazingly complex and powerful programmes with commands like /OPEN, /RUN, /ABORT, etc. And the Internet would be used by only a handful of [rocket] scientists.
There is a quotation that haunts me: “Don’t talk too much to your customers because they’ll end up getting what they want, not what they need”. A friend told me that it came from a famous Italian coachbuilder but even Google can’t help me find its source. (Feedback on who actually said that is truly welcome.)
In other words, customers think incrementally. They can rarely dream of and conceive disruptive technologies. So, if you design new products or services, your challenge is to balance an intense focus on customers with an open mind about other sources for new ideas. Scan research laboratories where the technologies for the next decade already exist. Engage your brain into lateral thinking by adopting radically different points of view. And - when the concept is ripe -gather a team of pioneers to plant the seeds of what could become the next new, highly successful business model. Customers can’t be always right, can they?
Do Car Manufacturers Understand IT?
This post is about another everyday thing (see ‘Is IT Too Complex?’) where IT doesn’t yet necessarily add a lot of value: the sacro-sainte automobile, the holy motorcar, la santa machina, la sainte bagnole, der heilige Wagen.
My first car was a 12-year old 1959 Volkswagen Beetle. I bought it the year Intel introduced the 4004 microprocessor. At that time, a computer was the size of that car and it had only a fraction of the power and capacity of what I have today in my pocket-size Nokia 6230i (and it couldn’t take pictures!). This car was not fast but very sturdy and reliable. And very simple: when you opened the hood/bonnet (actually the trunk/boot ;-) you could actually see … the flat-four engine.
Today, when you open the hood of a modern car you can’t see the engine anymore. It is covered by a huge air filter and practically inaccessible without putting half of the car apart. Some weeks ago, I needed to replace a halogen bulb in one of the headlights of my 12-year old Volvo. I had a spare. I managed to slide my hand between several things and to locate and touch the faulty part. But I almost broke a finger trying to get the blooming bulb out. I called the Automobile Association rescue service and I was embarrassed to tell the guy that I failed. He told me not to worry; he was answering many similar calls in a week; and actually my car was a blessing: he didn’t have to remove half of the paraphernalia around the engine to get to the headlight. But it took him special tools and a solid ten minutes to get the new bulb in.
During that time I had a fresh look at all the things under the hood. Not a cubic centimetre to spare. The whole space is crammed with devices that were added besides the actual engine and, probably, after the initial design: air conditioning compressor, alarm system and so on. And it’s worse with more recent cars. To diagnose a problem, a mechanic needs an electronic box that he plugs into a socked to run some software that checks all the car’s functions. That’s rather good and effective in most of the cases. But, sometimes, it goes wrong and it creates a total mess.
Here is my take of what happened in the last twenty years or so - another case of bloated design. Manufacturers have increasingly stuffed electronics around many functions of a car - most often with excellent intentions including additional safety, passenger protection, comfort and so on – but without fully understanding how all these additions fit and work together as a system. Their culture is mainly about mechanical parts, cylinders and pistons, gear boxes, friction and thermodynamics; not about computers, data buses and software.
That could be why we keep hearing about bizarre phenomena like sudden acceleration. I suspect most of them are kind of urban legends that spread because few people are able to rationally explain what’s going on. The automobile sector hasn’t yet ‘integrated’ electronic technologies into its culture.
And the worst is with software and user interfacing. The other day, a car rental company upgraded me to a top-range piece of German autobahn hardware. The engine was marvellous and the ride super-comfortable. But it took me – a reasonably educated computer user – about ten minutes to tune the radio to my favourite station.
I had to deal with some kind of a joystick surrounded by buttons that set the system and its postcard-size screen into a given mode: radio, navigation, trip control & statistics, etc. For each mode (wink to Larry Tesler), the joystick seemed to have a different behaviour. A nightmare!
Then I pressed a button by mistake (about not skidding in snow, I think) and the damned car kept talking to me to warn me that I had a problem with the gearbox and that I should stop at an Audi garage (oh dear! I let the brand name escape) as soon as possible. It was just a question of knowing which button to push again but it wasn’t obvious, even for the mechanic. I think that the car industry still has a long way to go to really understand IT, don’t you?
Is IT Too Complex?
Tribute to Don Norman
An article in the November 2005 issue of the Harvard Business Review [Innovation Versus Complexity: What Is Too Much of a Good Thing?] shows how excessively complex product or service offerings can be counter-productive. It explains how to find the right balance between a single product offering (e.g. Ford Model T) and extensive product lines that companies develop to compete for shelf space, to protect market share or to counter competitive assaults.
However, there is a domain where the punishment for excessive complexity is less visible on the bottom line: software. Upstream, software complexity increases development costs (but these are on-time expenses) and, downstream, the support costs (but these are proportional to sales and, therefore, they don’t impact the profit ratio after a critical mass is reached). Compared with a simple software program, a complex package doesn’t cost (much) more to manufacture, to stock and to distribute. Where bits are more important than atoms, such costs are marginal. So, the penalty for software complexity is minimal, isn’t it?
I think this is one of the main reasons why we, ‘end-users’, are getting bloated things to communicate, organize our work and manage information. Quick test: what percent of the features of your favorite word processor, mobile phone, PDA and other similar things do you use on a regular basis?
What are the functions enjoyed by a majority of users and what are the intricate features understood only by a minority? We’re probably in one of the situations where 80% or more of the users need 20% or less of the functions.
The word processor I ‘m using right now offers 19 different toolbars. I use only three of them (16%) and yet my application window looks like the cockpit of a jumbo jet with close to 100 pictograms, buttons and symbols, without counting the nine pull-down menus in the upper bar, each with about ten commands: another 100 items. Over 200 items to choose from just to write a memo and, sometimes, add a little drawing. That’s insane!
My keyboard is a big as an aircraft carrier and contains about 50 keys that I never ever use (I don’t know what most of them do). Do the test with your own keyboard.
My mobile phone features 11 menus, each with about ten functions: that’s again over 100 items. Compared with a plain old telephone, the only extra functions I use are the address book, text messaging (mainly inbound because I hate having to use a numeric keyboard to write text) and taking the occasional picture.
Why do we have to schlep all this functional overweight that clutters our things’ screens and memories? About 10 … 15 years ago, leaders of the IT industry dreamt up concepts and standards to enable ‘component software’, i.e. the possibility for a user to buy a lightweight basic application (such as a simple word processor) and to attach to it just the additional functions that are needed (e.g. a spelling checker, a drawing utility, and so on). The problem was that such a scheme assumed that small software publishers could focus on a few functional areas (e.g. develop really intuitive spelling checkers), excel in them (pun intended) and carve market niches in coexistence with the big vendors. Guess what happened (apart from a few exceptions). The big guys preferred to create bloated applications including the above mentioned overweight (and the proverbial kitchen sink) rather than opening the door to small competitors.
The problem is that the technologies for processors, memories and other semiconductor products evolve much faster than the industry’s ability to harness them with software. Unfortunately, today, software complexity is proportional to hardware power. While using an Apple II of the early 1980s was like riding a bicycle, mastering a PC, 25 years later, requires the training of an aircraft pilot (see post “Wings for the Mind” in this blog).
Unfortunately, today, the term ‘easy to use’ is overused. Find me an ad where a company presents a product as ‘hard to use’. The main objective of software designers should be to make an application’s usage really intuitive rather than adding obscure functions that few people want and even fewer need.
A ray of hope: Apple’s iTunes is much better than the average software I have had on my PC for years. Only six main menu items that you don’t really need to pull down to run the application. Only 13 buttons, of which six are absolutely intuitive. A fantastic product that I enjoy everyday. I hope Mr Gates uses iTunes and gets inspired by it. Does Apple still have the magic touch or do we need a new seed?
Wings for the Mind
Tribute to Steve Jobs
Marketers who have to create and harness new markets by introducing radically new products or services face an extra challenge: market ‘education’. How do you explain something that never existed before? This happens quite often in the high-tech domain where we talk about disruptive technologies that revolutionise ways things are done and, of course, engender new paradigms.
And, as technologies become increasingly sophisticated, the ‘education’ requirements become more complex. In the late 1800s, the automobile was introduced as a ‘horseless carriage’ and it had less than ten ‘commands’ - on/off, accelerate, brake, clutch, change gear, petrol/air mix (automatic and computerised nowadays). Today, many hi-tech products are fairly complex and rather hard to use. And marketers struggle to describe the benefits of a growing number of new ’things’ such as broadband Internet, WiFi, 3G, MMS, video streaming, digital TV, satellite radio and so on. Are analogies adequate to explain basic principles?
As part of the team that created Apple Computer Europe in the early 1980s, I had the privilege to witness the results of an ad campaign we ran in Europe’s main business newspapers. The ad featured a picture of a bicycle illustrating the concept of “wheels for the mind” Apple was using in 1981 to explain the benefits of a personal computer (the Apple II). The analogy was quite powerful … and successful.
If you live in the middle of nowhere, in a house providing shelter and food, and if you have a bicycle, you can, in one day, explore more territory around the house than if you do it on foot. With a computer, by analogy, you can analyse much more data within a given time, or handle a fixed amount of data much faster. So, the personal computer gives you ‘wheels for the mind’.
In the present context, this PC-bicycle analogy suggests several remarks and, maybe, new analogies:
- The price of power
In comparison with the early 1980s, personal computers have become as fast and as versatile as airplanes - wings for the mind - but they are more difficult to use and, especially, to manage and maintain, like airplanes.
- The world at your fingertips
Connected to the Internet, they are also ‘wheels for the legs’ - you can shop around the world without having to get out of your house.
- Your ‘world’ at your fingertips
With a program like iTunes, you can store all your CDs on a PC’s hard disk and have your favourite music at your fingertip - ’wheels for the arm’!
- Computers are becoming truly personal
Finally, pocket/palm-sized devices that you can ‘wear’ all the time - high-end cellphones, PDAs, iPods - are the first breeds of truly personal IT systems, albeit not yet convenient enough (do you enjoy typing an SMS with a numeric keyboard?). But with software like Migo you can now carry your desktop (files, settings, email, etc.) in your pocket - ’wheels for the wheels’?
Hi-tech keeps evolving. Market education needs never disappear. Isn’t IT still fun?