A Lesson in Communication
Sometimes we try too hard.
It’s easy to complicate things.
This is the lesson I took from the Macworld keynote.
How do you make a laptop remarkable?
How do you communicate the difference in a way that anyone can “get” immediately, graphically?
Do you think this is memorable? Easy to talk about?
Regardless of how useful a thin notebook really is, I think this was mighty clever.
What do you think?
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Posted on January 16th, 2008 by Chris Garrett in Marketing
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Well I like the marketing, but the laptop on a flash drive doesn’t do much for me. Just like I bought the 60GB iPod - I need storage!
It is clever…but surely to be a successful product, not just something that can be communicated successfully, the remarkable attribute must be about something that really matters to the consumer.
@mark - Yeah, I don’t think I want to spend £1k extra for a solid state drive but I like the idea for when the price comes down
@Jack - Well if we focus just on the marketing they have done well, what will be a problem is on the consumption side so you are right, there has to be both attention and a real benefit. For an example of good attention though I think it is spot on
Well, I just hope they don’t ship them in those. Talk about pushing the envelope…
Apple’s always been brilliant at this stuff. It’s in their DNA. It comes out in everything they do. When you look at a slide from a Bill Gates keynote compared to a slide from a Steve Jobs keynote, Bill’s slides look like clip art bombs went off. With heavy casualties. Jobs’ slides are zen simplicity.
There’s definitely a lesson in communication for me:
Use pictures
Use simple but extreme phrasing (”world’s thinnest”)
Create one single, clear idea
they make everything beautiful.
It was incredibly clever. It instantly illustrated the key aspects of the product (thin and light), and made you not even care about any limitations (only a few ports and no CD/DVD drive).
Brilliant. (and yes, I do want…)
@Michael - Bill Gates could buy Apple out of the money he has at the back of his sofa…minimal slides seem to have their limitations in the marketplace.
I think this is one of those times that Mr. Jobs has gotten caught in his own reality distortion field. I understand the coolness of having the world’s thinnest notebook but Apple’s most popular products have not just been cool, they have always had a functional benefit (or at least a functional difference) as well.
Or maybe the truth is as simple as Mr. Jobs did the best he could with what he had to work with.
Steve Jobs has always been about the packaging. The thing speaks for itself. Although a new laptop may not be a miracle, the same style of introduction for the Iphone created a buzz you could not buy, He is a master of clean crisp visual communication.
The Macbook AIR would be sell like 1000x faster if it was the same price as the mac mini, which it should be! Yes it’s memorable and easy to talk about.
It´s just like the “commoncraft-show”! Explain difficult things in plain english added with clear visuals…
The laptop itself is really nothing special in my eyes. Yes it´s thin, but where is the Hardware? Where is the storeage?
My wife has been holding off getting a new laptop for 4 months as we’d picked up some of the “super thin” mac rumors (and yes - I’m gonna use American spelling! ;-p) She’s the classic apple target customer: pc user at home and at work, uses the internet to get information, make purchases, get music, watch video, write and read blogs. She has no interest in understanding the tech specs - she just wants it to work. She’s an early adopter - got the iPod when it came out, got the iPhone and it just makes sense to her to go mac as it’s gonna make everything easier. Tie in the fact that portability is of high importance to her, weight and size and the fact that the thing just looks amazing - there’s no contest. At $1800 plus throw in the remote cd/dvd drive and taxes, she’ll probably spend 30% more than she wanted to - but she’s already stoked.
Her decision process is less defined by tech; she just assumes that it is going to work, it is defined by how easy it is to understand and how good it looks! Apple are the masters of that.
I think there is a market for a super-thin, super-light laptop.
The creative class, who uses Macs far more than any other, is also often a “road-warrier” class- constantly going out places, flights, meetings, etc, etc. I can imagine the benefit of having a super light laptop thin laptop, and have all the juiced-up functionality (additional hard drives, big flat screen, extra ports) back at the office.
Plus the next generation will be better- it always is. We’ll see what happens, of course. I’m not an early adopter, although I am a long-time Apple user (back to 1982 and the ][+.
I think you’re spot-on, Chris. This is a brilliant example. I’ve already been receiving emails from folks saying “Hey, look at this!”
I am not sure this would be powerful enough to accomplish everything I would do on a normal PC. But maybe it would be great to use as an on the go blogging laptop. Hey maybe I should invent that. I will call it the blogtop. All it does is blog and has a connection to your wordpress.
The problem with this particular laptop is that its only remarkable up until you realize that it’s too expensive for the basic user, but not nearly powerful enough for a power user. As much of an Apple fanatic as I can be, this just goes to show how sometimes they put the design cart ahead of the horse.
This particular laptop is only easy to talk about for a few days and then it becomes one of those products that gets shelved after a year because of lackluster sales. Unless they really improve the functionality or bring down the price significantly, this won’t do nearly as well for Apple as they hope.
Apple’s ability to send a clear message through it’s marketing teams has been phenomenal over the past several years. As they create new products the creative marketing groups will get more of a chance to show us what they are made of.
I must confess that my immediate thought was:
“But I can just buy a bigger envelope!”
In fact, there’s an excellent spoof screaming out to be made of a regular Macbook being pulled out of the biggest envelope you’ve ever seen, followed by the caption, “We bought a bigger envelope. Saving: $788″
I give it a week before someone more motivated has thought along the same lines and actually made it.
The market has been screaming out for one of these things, a well designed, well specced laptop that is very light and thin. I think they’ll sell loads of them.
Of course they cost a lot when you stick a 64Gb solid state drive in them - look at the technology that you’re getting, it’s not exactly the ‘norm’ is it?
And then people get the right idea for jumping on the idea:
http://www.manilamac.com/
Hilarious…
The techies always poke holes. It’s what techies do. Customers are mostly not techies. They want what they want. The iPod wasn’t an engineering marvel. There are mp3 players more sophisticated, cheaper, and better. But why do iPods sell? It’s what people want.
If there’s one thing that Steve Jobs gets right, it’s his pulse on the ‘want factor.’ The others get bogged in the details. Thankfully, he doesn’t.
And this is coming from a person who doesn’t even own a Mac.
Sean
http://www.psychotactics.com