Friday August 19, 2005

It's a big world. We're glad to be part of it.

Late Friday isn't the right time to bring up good news...most of us could use that on a Monday morning. But in case you weren't watching, Sun is doing very well these days in places that aren't the United States.

You'll find this frightfully exciting news at TechNewsWorld: Sun Growing Significantly Overseas. The company's fastest growth in Asia came from India, not China, for the year, said Pramanik, noting that for the last 12 months, sales increased 28 percent at Sun, seven percent higher than the overall IT market.

...Right now, only one percent of people living in sub-Saharan Africa use the Internet. For other developing areas, the figure is about 4 percent. This may change in the future -- as Sun is providing training for the youth leaders from these developing countries as to how to produce blogs, Web sites and chat groups.

( Aug 19 2005, 02:01:39 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

A few words on desire

Matt Zellmer is starting a conversation about "brand experience." Check it out, and join the fray.

On a related note, yesterday Matt and I had an interesting conversation about desire. And specifically about the BMW Mini. Work with me here: Matt has a family of five. He lives in the mountains of Colorado and has always opted for the larger, SUV-type vehicles. There's no practical reason for Matt to want a Mini, yet he's losing sleep at night trying to figure out how he can get his hands on one (and still stay happily married, my editorial added ;-)

All of this, of course, just screams of an incredible, holistic brand experience: in my opinion, he doesn't want the car at all -- he wants the design values that went into the car, to be sure, but perhaps more importantly he also wants the whole breadth of experience that comes with the car. Starting with its reputation, its hip factor, its pre-sales "configure your own" website, its magical delivery experience. That's what he wants and is willing to pay for: the complete experience.

Again: he doesn't want the car. He wants the experience.

But what he pays for is the car. Which leads us to a question: what's he really buying?

Athe end of the day some companies (and certainly most car companies) think they sell "goods." The product is what people actually fork over money for, so it's what most companies focus on. Product managers in such firms could easily look at a spreadsheet of sales figures and get a sense of their company's health, and choose to do reactionary things like offer an "employee discount" as an incentive to get people to buy cars that as exciting as a cow pissing on a flat rock.

But what's really being sold are attention and relationships that span all those touchpoints over in Matt's map, from advertising to followup. Driving that institutional change is a very hard thing to orchestrate within a company. But it's also very much worth it...in the case of BMW, it's part of what's generated insane demand for their Mini Cooper. It's also why they'll never have to offer a sales gimmick like an employee discount anytime soon.

( Aug 19 2005, 09:16:37 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]