“Show me the money.”
At the end of the day, all the wonderful pieces of technology we carry, write about, lust after, despise, rant, all the smartphones built by factories around the world, with stickers and labels placed on them, all need to be sold.
It's all about selling you something. It could be the latest hardware, it could be to get you signed up and using a service (and with those free to use services you're there so the company can sell you and what you represent), it could even be as simple as downloading an application and paying your one euro, that then gets split up between all the interested parties.
It's getting less about technology and more about image. And that means that the art of selling has changed.
The people who can make money from the initial stages of a revolution are the people who supply the tools and basic hardware. The bits and pieces people will happily sit down, read the manual, and get to grips with it. But over time this changes as the revolution matures and becomes commonplace.
The need changes from a rather basic one to something a bit more esoteric, a bit more fashion conscious. What other people think about your choice rises up the scale of importance (diminishing the power of the inward-looking complicated tool).
As technology becomes commonplace, it's about the perception of the tool, not the tool itself. When there are multiple choices available, with roughly the same capability, the ability to compete on just a specification or a price list is not enough. That's where the marketing department come in, that's where the perception of your software or hardware come in. It's just as important to control what people think of your offering as well as controlling what goes into your offering.
Let's take a few examples from the recent news – all of which are cases that directly affect a product, but have very little to do with the mechanics of what is going on.
Gartner first, and a blog post (with a lovely link-bait headline) from Nick Jones on the fortunes of Symbian going forward over the next few years. The argument is a well worn one on both sides - the delay in getting Symbian^4 and the new UI into the hands of the consumers (and the analysts!) and the loss of market share during this lull – and I'm not going to go into that now. What I wanted to draw attention to was that this article damages the perception of Symbian and needs to be countered. Actually not even countered, Symbian's point of view should already be out there and a robust rebuttal needs to be delivered.
People will not buy a dying system – it's not cool. They will buy a system that promises the future. Deep in the story of Symbian is the path the future will take, but is it front and centre and easy to see so that people will buy into it? Apparently not.
Of course, Gartner are promoting themselves with this story as much as their thoughts on Symbian, and with this story pick up brownie points from those who agree (and want to be seen to agree with) the view they have written up. It's not the truth, it's the meta-truth that counts.
How about the news from Fring and Skype yesterday that the two systems would no longer work together? We looked at this at AAS in what we could write about, and saw company A say one thing, company B said another, and an explosion of blog posts, comments and opinion online trying to work out which was the “right” answer.
Not which answer was the one following the letter of the rights in the API terms of use, not the answer which would stand up to forensic scrutiny, but the answer which felt right. The Fring/Skype dispute is being fought in the realms of PR, trying to cast the story so positively to your company (or so negatively against the other) that the cost in terms of brand reputation in following the strict TnC conditions is more than just caving in and giving them what they want.
You can see it time and time again in stories online – the technology is not the key to sales. Perception of the product is the key to the sales. If you have a strong image in the public's eye, then you can get away with quite a bit (such as an antenna assembly that suppresses a lot of the signal if your hand is in the wrong place). But you can't trade on a good name forever, and people have long memories.
That's one of the reasons why the problems with the N97 were so damaging to Nokia. It was a phone that held a lot of promise, and many people were holding on that this would be the next big phone after the N95. Unfortunately it wasn't to be, and some manufacturing problems, some unfortunate memory decisions and under-developed software saw a lot of people who did buy the N97 become very unhappy with Nokia. Rightly or wrongly, the collaborative relationship of Nokia and Symbian became unfashionable.
There is no denying that the ecosystem does have a perception problem – and one of the first public moves made by the new head of Nokia's Mobile Solutions Anssi Vanjoki was to address these on the Nokia Conversations blog – but it's not enough to just deliver a solid message and say that an impressively specced mobile phone is on the way.
Vanjoki has the hardest challenge of his life. To make people want to buy Nokia again. He can't do that just from having the best hardware. He has to make Nokia's name attractive again, he has to make it cool to like the Finns (again), he has to go on the offensive. And there are no half measures, he needs 100% commitment to win back the cool points.
That goes for anyone in the smartphone space – the goal is not to be the best product, the goal is to be thought of as the best product. Symbian and its partners (especial Nokia) clearly pass the first part of that challenge, it's the second that's going to make life interesting over the next year.
-- Ewan Spence, AAS, July 2010.