What a product is (part 1)
I think part of the reason that business/industry makes so little sense to me is that I just don't understand the way that people think about products.
Product vs Experience:
You know that saying, "don't buy things, buy experiences"? That's sort of how I feel, only extended to everything. Products just don't seem very real, or very relevant to me. Like with the saying, it seems like my fundamental human measure of relevance is my own experience, so I tend to think of the fundamental units of economy as being the experience rather than the product.
So this comes up in a bunch of ways. (Also, I don't know what my point is, I'm just exploring this subject.)
First, there's the idea of the "user experience" of a product. So that's sort of an experience, right? Take a car, a canonical product-- but a lot of the design of cars is around experience. So I don't feel comfortable claiming that there's a precise dichotomy between product and experience like the difference being paying for a necklace and paying for a vacation, because people sure seem to think about the "experience" of the product.
But I do, anyway. Claim there is a dichotomy. However you style it, different ways of using a product is still, fundamentally, centered around the product. If you were really in the "transportation experience" business, you'd be diversified between cars, segways, buses, walking shoes, and each of those 'products' you get your hands it would be a lot more varied. "True differentiation", as marketing people sometimes call it.
Marketing, the fuzzy area, and the Harley-Davidson case study:
So there's also marketing. Marketing these days is all about convincing people that a product is really an experience, when it's really just a product. This is why I've mostly thought about marketing is a profession of lying jerks (at least, up until yesterday's post). Quite simply, marketing uses media to associates moods/experiences/"images" with a product, so that when you use the product your conditioned mind gives you a little kick of that mood. This is, as experience product goes, pretty unimpressive.
But take the Harley-Davidson case study, which I think is awesome. So a while ago, Harley sold bikes to rebellious free-riding types. Then their market got old and they started doing really, really badly. So, in which is referred to as a "marketing" coup, they started selling the lifestyle of being free to late-middle-aged white collar professionals, rather than the bikes to people who were already punks. But they didn't do this by showing a lot of images of free bikers. They did it by actually supplying the lifestyle in the form of Harley-organized clubs, road trips that their audience could attend on weekends and return to work on Monday, and other proactive culture building measures. And it was, of course, very successful.
I argue that this is not actually "marketing" in the traditional sense-- because they changed their product. Specifically, they went from selling a bike to selling a social event production service with a bike involved. In other words, they actually started to sell experiences.
A Worker Economy Around Products:
I could get very excited about designing, manufacturing, and purchasing the Harley lifestyle experience, even though I'm not a biker and don't really identify with them. But as a job, I could really enjoy producing that during the day and then coming home at night to do something else entirely.
But a major part of the reason I've never joined a company is that most companies really just product products. And I really just can't stand the idea of so many people, so much resources, so much elaborate organizational infrastructure-- so much life!-- all being poured into these little objects (not necessarily literal objects). Some companies produce tools, like software. But it's still just one thing. All the rest of it-- support, adaptation, design, and other cool puzzles, are really just accessories, just like the "user experience" ends up being an experience accessory. Other companies produce services-- but most services are still fundamentally unitary.
Why should I put so much of my life and my attention into something that will by definition not occupy much of the recipient's attention? If I, especially a manager, am going to call for a group of people to band together, pool their labor, and becomes something larger and greater than one human being, to accomplish something-- it seems at the end of the day like sacrilege for that thing to be anything less than a piece of the human experience.
Conversely, it also means that I, the worker, and we, the group, should be responsible for nothing less than the entirety of the experience that we produce.
This is why I approve of Apple, despite all the criticisms: It might be autocratic on the inside and oppressive to its consumers, but it has a vision of what technology itself is, what it means, and how people should interface with it. Like Harley, Apple is selling a culture, not a product.
This is why I approve of all those terribly sustainable, organic, fair trade little food items like chocolate: It's not just selling food, it's selling participation in a specific vision of a different economy & distribution system.
This is why I think Google is both cool and irresponsible: I'm down for gathering huge amounts of personal information about you-- it's not selling search, it's selling participation in a world environment in which all these little details that go on in life are actually coded, relevant, and transparent. However, do they really want to sell the experience in which people learn to think of the data in the world as organized by linear lists?
Product vs Experience:
You know that saying, "don't buy things, buy experiences"? That's sort of how I feel, only extended to everything. Products just don't seem very real, or very relevant to me. Like with the saying, it seems like my fundamental human measure of relevance is my own experience, so I tend to think of the fundamental units of economy as being the experience rather than the product.
So this comes up in a bunch of ways. (Also, I don't know what my point is, I'm just exploring this subject.)
First, there's the idea of the "user experience" of a product. So that's sort of an experience, right? Take a car, a canonical product-- but a lot of the design of cars is around experience. So I don't feel comfortable claiming that there's a precise dichotomy between product and experience like the difference being paying for a necklace and paying for a vacation, because people sure seem to think about the "experience" of the product.
But I do, anyway. Claim there is a dichotomy. However you style it, different ways of using a product is still, fundamentally, centered around the product. If you were really in the "transportation experience" business, you'd be diversified between cars, segways, buses, walking shoes, and each of those 'products' you get your hands it would be a lot more varied. "True differentiation", as marketing people sometimes call it.
Marketing, the fuzzy area, and the Harley-Davidson case study:
So there's also marketing. Marketing these days is all about convincing people that a product is really an experience, when it's really just a product. This is why I've mostly thought about marketing is a profession of lying jerks (at least, up until yesterday's post). Quite simply, marketing uses media to associates moods/experiences/"images" with a product, so that when you use the product your conditioned mind gives you a little kick of that mood. This is, as experience product goes, pretty unimpressive.
But take the Harley-Davidson case study, which I think is awesome. So a while ago, Harley sold bikes to rebellious free-riding types. Then their market got old and they started doing really, really badly. So, in which is referred to as a "marketing" coup, they started selling the lifestyle of being free to late-middle-aged white collar professionals, rather than the bikes to people who were already punks. But they didn't do this by showing a lot of images of free bikers. They did it by actually supplying the lifestyle in the form of Harley-organized clubs, road trips that their audience could attend on weekends and return to work on Monday, and other proactive culture building measures. And it was, of course, very successful.
I argue that this is not actually "marketing" in the traditional sense-- because they changed their product. Specifically, they went from selling a bike to selling a social event production service with a bike involved. In other words, they actually started to sell experiences.
A Worker Economy Around Products:
I could get very excited about designing, manufacturing, and purchasing the Harley lifestyle experience, even though I'm not a biker and don't really identify with them. But as a job, I could really enjoy producing that during the day and then coming home at night to do something else entirely.
But a major part of the reason I've never joined a company is that most companies really just product products. And I really just can't stand the idea of so many people, so much resources, so much elaborate organizational infrastructure-- so much life!-- all being poured into these little objects (not necessarily literal objects). Some companies produce tools, like software. But it's still just one thing. All the rest of it-- support, adaptation, design, and other cool puzzles, are really just accessories, just like the "user experience" ends up being an experience accessory. Other companies produce services-- but most services are still fundamentally unitary.
Why should I put so much of my life and my attention into something that will by definition not occupy much of the recipient's attention? If I, especially a manager, am going to call for a group of people to band together, pool their labor, and becomes something larger and greater than one human being, to accomplish something-- it seems at the end of the day like sacrilege for that thing to be anything less than a piece of the human experience.
Conversely, it also means that I, the worker, and we, the group, should be responsible for nothing less than the entirety of the experience that we produce.
This is why I approve of Apple, despite all the criticisms: It might be autocratic on the inside and oppressive to its consumers, but it has a vision of what technology itself is, what it means, and how people should interface with it. Like Harley, Apple is selling a culture, not a product.
This is why I approve of all those terribly sustainable, organic, fair trade little food items like chocolate: It's not just selling food, it's selling participation in a specific vision of a different economy & distribution system.
This is why I think Google is both cool and irresponsible: I'm down for gathering huge amounts of personal information about you-- it's not selling search, it's selling participation in a world environment in which all these little details that go on in life are actually coded, relevant, and transparent. However, do they really want to sell the experience in which people learn to think of the data in the world as organized by linear lists?