Product Behavior

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.

“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 [...]

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 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 [...]