A few weeks ago, Ballmer was giving a talk somewhere and got a bit chewed out from a mother about her daughter (?) who had begged her to switch to Vista, only to switch back shortly thereafter. He told her something along the lines of, “Your daughter saw a lot of value!”, to which the lady replied, “She’s thirteen.”
The point here is a little bit more general than, “hey, look, 13 year olds might have a different judgment of value than, say, larger people”. If you get past the soundbyte, Ballmer spends the next bit trying to explain the lady the value of Vista. Remember that the lady had already run Vista and found in wanting. After this, Ballmer was effectively attempting to explain to her the value she apparently missed.
Here’s the thing: there’s a very important place for marketing. It’s the thing that introduces people to your product, sells them on an idea, and perhaps pushes a few to buy a product they wouldn’t otherwise consider. The one thing marketing is not, however, is a replacement for actual experience for a product.
Consider Apple, and consider the Apple store. The whole point of the Apple store is to get people to play with Apple products. There is a considerable amount of marketing to get you into the store, and even marketing while you are there, but there is nothing standing between you and using the product. You know why? Ironically, the marketing for an Apple product is not a replacement for using the product.
A person is perfectly willing to believe anything on TV, except, of course, for things they have seen firsthand to be otherwise. Like Ballmer and the lady. The lady bought into the marketing (a fair bit of which came from her daughter), used the product, and thought it was a piece of crap. Ballmer then stepped in to do the whole marketing effort, to her (and everyone watching), explaining that, well, she must not have been paying close enough attention.
So here’s the important part: once somebody has used your product and found that it sucks real, real bad, you can’t win them back by showing them a picture of what they just saw and telling them that they missed the point. They experienced it, in a non-mediated way (e.g. through another person using it, through a commercial, through an ad, etc.). You can’t produce an experience more realistic than that.
Value isn’t something that you can create in marketing. It certainly is something you can hint towards, especially in an audience that is inclined to be predisposed in a certain way. Take, for example, me and Time Machine, one of the new features in Leopard. After just reading about it, I thought it was the dumbest feature ever created (obviously overstated – Vista “features” take the cake here – think driver model that doesn’t let you have two video cards with different drivers). However, being that I’m a firm believer that Apple makes quality products (unlike one of their very large competitors – no, I’m not bitter much), I gave them the benefit of the doubt and watched their Leopard walkthrough on their website. My verdict? Time Machine looks cool. Like, usable, and interesting, and completely unlike what I expected.
Get that last part? Marketing lets you get rid of expectations. Ironically, Apple probably needs to fight this the least in the average consumer anymore, whereas Microsoft needs a few metric shittonnes to even get me to look at a new product (and even then, using it is a pretty convincing metric of why I should be using, well, anything else).
I’ve never used Leopard, and I have enough Mac envy to choke a…well, something that is hard to choke. I’ve used Vista, and now I’m convinced of three things. First, when I buy a new computer to replace my two desktops, it will be running Ubuntu solamente. Second, when I buy a new non-server box, it will be a Macbook Pro running Leopard. Finally, I will be running, through VMWare Fusion, XP Pro. Preferably one of the copies I already have.
The final takeaway is this: you cannot create value with marketing. You can only create value by creating value.