Product Behavior

Writing last week’s piece about experience got me started thinking about what you can actually build into a product. Products can obviously have Creation Experience - that is, they can come about in an interesting way, and when you buy one, you get to own a piece of that story, tell your friends about it, etc. But can products come with other sorts of stories, like a 3rd Party Experience?

A few years ago, I went out into the world to ask people about the stuff in their kitchens. At one point, sorting through a drawer of silverware, one interviewee came out with two soup spoons, with blue-and-yellow-polka-dotted handles. “I love these spoons. I got them in France and I love them.” Then she moved on to something else.

When we buy something, what are we buying? Are we having an experience? Acquiring someone else’s experience?

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When we work for appliance manufactures, we often run into the issue of The Big Box, and, especially, Shelf Space. A Shelf-Space project is only indirectly about providing the consumer with a great product; the main point is to get as many products on the shelf as possible.

It’s certainly entertaining to watch the press do backflips to explain how they could have been just so wrong about the New Hampshire primaries. Did they ask the wrong people? Apply the wrong statistical model? Misread what the public really wants? Or did they run into what every marketing manager knows, or should know: that asking people what they are going to do is not a good predictor of what they’ll actually do.