Product Behavior

I had an interesting discussion with a friend about the Genius model of a product. The Genius, you’ll recall, is a product that thinks about a problem in a new way. The Swiffer, the iPod, Trader Joe’s - all Geniuses. They’re different, a little idiosyncratic, and a consumer must get used to the way they do things - but once the initial barriers are passed, and the consumer sees the light, the Genius product seems like the only way to solve the problem. Everything else is old fashioned and bogged down.

As I look forward to 2008, I’m very interested to see how the political candidates will market themselves once the primaries start, and pass, and we line up for the election in November. Political communication is pure marketing, for better or worse, and we get to see it in action in ways we usually don’t for other sorts of products, in a truly exaggerated form.

We had a snowstorm in New England yesterday, which wasn’t a big deal unless you were driving in the same direction as everyone else. Before the storm, I checked to make sure I had all the essentials, and realized that my snow shovel was broken. So I went to the store and bought a new one, which led me to ponder the value of a manufacturer’s warranty. Bear with me.

Designers like making models - “prototyping” - to judge aspects of a product they’re working on. At Continuum, we have a huge model shop, with several full-time model makers, and pretty much everyone in the company spends time down there at some point carving up a block of foam or hot-gluing some foamcore together to [...]

“The Story of the Product,” a simple tool I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, can be easily altered to help understand and support the issues around a product’s Archetype. Recall the Star, the Hero, and the Genius - your product can be one but can’t be all of them. So use Stories customized [...]