Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
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Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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12/17/2001 - 12/23/2001

Tuesday, October 22, 2002
22:15 - Looks like it's working http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/2202	(top)
The "Switch" campaign is having an impact as a cultural meme, evidently-- or at least if you're willing to believe the word of one of the Kool-Aid-soaked brethren. It seems to me that any marketing campaign has a critical period of a couple of months, in which it's just getting off the ground, where the company just has to weather whatever criticism the press heaps on it. If they can keep it up through that period, then the people who have actual opinions about the campaign will have tired themselves out talking about it, and then the 98% of the public who takes only a passive interest in the miasma of advertising that is the modern TV landscape... will have absorbed it. People can quote one-liners from the ads, and their friends will laugh. Penetration will have occurred. And once penetration is complete, there's an unspoken assumption in people's minds: The company that made the ads that that one-liner came from is cool. It worked for the Dell Dude. It worked for the "Can you hear me now?" guy. It worked for that damn Taco Bell dog. It worked for the Jack in the Box ads-- to this day I can't stand their food, but I still keep going in there once every couple of months, just because the ads are so cool, just to reaffirm the sad truth of the burgers' stubborn uninspiredness. Something tells me that the Apple marketeers knew that the intelligentsia of the tech world would sneer at the "Switch" ads, particularly the first wave of them; the refrain would waver between What kind of moron can't figure out how to use his computer? and Who wants to take computer advice from these* clowns?* But that would only last a month or two, and by then the damage would be done. The tech pundits might guffaw and jeer and cast dark aspersions upon the parentage of whoever plays that maddening balalaika tune. But the average Joe Computer User will be imbued with the thought: Macs are real computers that people actually buy and enjoy. And the slightly more astute will think: Apple is a strong enough company to run prime-time ads. I don't know how many computers the Switchers campaign will ultimately sell, but I do believe that Apple will continue to be a very recognizable brand. And from what I know about business, that's half the battle. Apple's advertising has most frequently centered around artistic and abstract concepts, rather than the typical price-and-performance focus you get with Gateway and Dell. But currently, it seems they've hit upon the idea that brand recognition, especially if done in such a way as to play off the anecdotal and human strength of the products, is way more important than dickering around with statistics and details and the benchmarks of cold little pieces of plastic and silicon. Hell, I never would have known the name Enron until the meltdown, if it hadn't been for those incomprehensible ads with the guy shuffling around in the metal suit. There's a reason why most arguments in favor of the Mac are anecdotal, while most arguments in favor of the PC are numerical. And there's a reason why I (and others like me) continue to use Macs, regardless of how many gigaflops the CPUs can or can't pull. It's that anecdotes-- and, in particular, first-person anecdotes-- speak more loudly than numbers on a page. Like this one: Today in a meeting with a colleague on speakerphone, Kris and I were outlining the schedule for our testing of the current project. I had my iBook open, with NotePod running, and the little calendar date-picker activated so we could pin down days of the week. I had turned the laptop around so we both could see the screen. Kris, speaking into the mike to the other guy but peering at the screen, said sidelong to me, "That's too small; I can't read it." So I reached over, pressed Option-Command-+, and the screen went whooOOOOOOSSSSSHH! and zoomed in smoothly onto the calendar. I'm not sure if he actually jumped, or laughed, or what, but he did lose his footing in the sentence he was working on. (Okay-- so maybe you had to be there. That's the damnable thing about anecdotes.) The gamble is that enough people will discover what it's like to use a computer made by a company with a vested interest in making the user's experience a happy one. That, I think, is the big distinction, and the big secret to Apple's remaining flush with cash: a certain, stable percentage of the world's people are willing to pay more for a higher-quality experience. And, as the anecdotes and the statistics bear out, that's what they get.