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- 1.
Once people have integrated change into their lives and routines, it's very difficult to go back and recall how outlandish the new idea seemed before anyone had heard of it. It’s worth remembering that Alexander Graham Bell thought of the telephone as a way to enhance telegraph communications, and that he believed the primary users would be telegraph operators. No one could imagine a telephone in every home and office, let alone as a device we’d all carry around everywhere. Or consider this: Ken Olsen, the co-founder and CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation, said in a talk delivered to the World Future Society in Boston in 1977, “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.” Not only does this statement seem incredulous given that it was made one year after Apple Computer was founded, but it’s hard to imagine that the head of one of the most successful computer companies of its time couldn’t envision how computers could become personal. The notion that we’d all have a computer (that we call a smartphone) in our pockets, more powerful than the guidance systems used to send Apollo missions to the moon, would have seemed truly preposterous even in 2006—the year before the introduction of the iPhone. Your product is no different. Without context, your intended customers cannot and will not understand why your product is significant and how their lives will be different after your disruption becomes commonplace. (For more on the Apollo/iPhone comparison, see http://www.thedailycrate.com/2014/02/01/geek-tech-apollo-guidance-computer-vs-iphone-5s/. Accessed May 24, 2014.)
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Imagine the context for promoting cars when horses were the incumbent form of transportation. People didn’t commute to work; they largely walked. We didn’t live in suburbs (in fact, most people didn’t live in cities, but on farms). Average people couldn’t afford cars—they were toys for the rich. The best clues we have about the cultural disconnect and what that might have meant to messaging may come from laws left over from the late 1800s and early 1900s. For example, in Pennsylvania, a “motorist who sights a team of horses coming toward him must pull well off the road, cover his car with a blanket or canvas that blends with the countryside, and let the horses pass. If the horses appear skittish, the motorist must take his car apart, piece by piece, and hide it under the nearest bushes.” In South Carolina, male drivers are permitted by law to “discharge firearms when approaching an intersection in a non-horse vehicle to warn oncoming horse traffic.” In Denmark, there must be a person at the front of the car waving a flag so that carriages with horses coming from the opposite direction know that there’s an engined car coming. And again, in Pennsylvania, “automobiles travelling on country roads at night must send up a rocket every mile, then wait ten minutes for the road to be cleared of livestock” before continuing. Talking about safety, how fast your car can accelerate to highway speed, fuel economy, or almost any of the benefits that are now used to sell cars would have resulted in blank stares and created unnecessary fears and questions that would have more likely cost sales than helped.
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An example for Zipcar when they first came to market might have read, “unlike traditional car rental companies, Zipcar’s car sharing approach gives you the spontaneity of car ownership without the expense, and the flexibility of accessing a car when you need one without the hassle of signing contracts and having to get to a rental lot to pick up a car.”
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© 2014 Paul Paetz
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Paetz, P. (2014). Messaging. In: Disruption by Design. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4302-4633-6_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4302-4633-6_8
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