TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Marcelo Somers:

Sony’s success with the transistor radio came from shifting the conversation for their customers. Knowing that they fell short in sound quality compared to the vaccum tube radios, Sony’s marketing emphasized their benefit: the size. They didn’t just tell consumers it was smaller, they showed them using it on the beach, in their car, and carrying it around. They didn’t compete on features, they competed on the story.

That’s excellent. What I think it means to “compete on the story” is to completely understand how your product should be used and what its advantage is. For Sony, it was listening to the radio wherever you please. For the iPod, it was a thousand songs in your pocket. Etc.

You can’t sell a truly new product (something people haven’t seen before) by listing its features. For the iPod, if Apple said, “Well, it’s got a hard drive and a scroll wheel and a headphone jack and a Firewire port,” people wouldn’t have had a clue what they were talking about. That means nothing to them. So instead, Apple showed them what the iPod does for you: it’s a little thing that you can take with you in your pocket and listen to all of your music.

That’s hard for companies to do, because many of them don’t have the understanding of their product necessary to create such a clear and to-the-point explanation as “a thousand songs in your pocket.” They don’t have a clear understanding because their design process doesn’t have that focus, either; they start with the market segment they want to target, then talk to customers and make a list of what their needs are, and then try to create a product which meets those needs. As a result, the product they create attempts to meet a list of needs rather than solve a problem. Their product has no defining thesis, no single purpose, and therefore they can’t tell customers a story about how it is going to be used.

That’s what design is. On the surface, what Marcelo is saying sounds like it can be something achieved at the end of the product design process by the marketing team. It sounds like it’s a customer perception issue. But it’s not. It’s a company processes and culture problem.