Product Behavior

Yes, I love bacon. I’m a firm subscriber to the “Anything is better with bacon” rule. Here are a couple of bacon-related products that tell different stories about themselves.

The other day, a colleague asked me if a product or service could change from one archetype to another. Of course!

Starbucks is a good example. When Starbucks started out, it was a Genius: a whole new approach to the coffee shop in America (OK, not a whole new approach, but new to most of the people who first experienced it through Starbucks). It had all the Genius hallmarks, including an idiosynchratic look and language, a mental hump to get over (pay how much for a cup of coffee?), and, once over that hump, a great experience that people couldn’t believe they’d been missing.

Over the years, though, Starbucks stopped being so much of a unique experience.

A Genius product approaches a problem–often, an old problem–in a new way. Flor is a great example: they revisited the rug.
Rugs are big, expensive investments. Buy one, especially a large one, and you live in fear of spills, dirt, play-doh: basically, the stuff of life. You can clean your rug with a big machine, but [...]

A Hero product or service stands for something. Raja M. Daswani qualifies. Here’s his ad from the New York Times: Raja Fashions
Mr. Daswani leads with his mission, and everything else he does supports that mission. It’s not even clear what he does until you’re halfway through the ad, but you know what he wants: to [...]

The key to a successful product is its story: the reason it exists, where it comes from, why anyone should care about it. If we want to foster a real relationship between consumer and product, we must think of products as partners. Not “What is the product?” but “Who is the product?”
The three archetypes in [...]