The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

Yes, that's a mouthful. I went on to explain it's meaning:

1. people will change their financial situation
2. in order to have access to certain technologies
3. that make their lives easier

I've continued exploring the implications of this finding. One of them is probably obvious to people marketing consumer technology; A given consumer population can change the shape of a given consumer technology due to market forces.

This is obvious to anybody who remembers 8-tracks and Beta video tapes, the Apple Newton and the list goes on.

Another implication is more fascinating to me; Unless you're willing to change your technology basis as rapidly as the consumer environment responds to that technological change, you'll never be able to mandate ecologically safe technological change.

Note that the ecology you want to keep safe in the above is the one which is the basis for the consumer environment.

One of my readers wrote me that she loves my blog and that the science is often over her head. Let me see if I can change that...

We, the folks assigning values to goods and services are a very fickle lot. We basically go after the latest bright and shiny thing rather than stay with what we already have. It doesn't matter if what we have works for us, all that matters is that we have this belief that the next bright and shiny thing will make us better, wiser, stronger, so we go get it.

Thus, the consumer environment responds to any introduced technology by making it out of date as rapidly as possible.

Because we tend to use and discard, use and discard, our consumer ecology gets burdened with technology that is still viable but that nobody wants to use any more because another bright and shiny has caught our eye. Often this burden is transferred to technologically less advanced consumer environments (what's known as "dumping"). The problem right now is that the internet has made us all equal consumers and therefore there isn't as many "other" consumer environments to dump our perfectly good but no longer interesting technological marvels on.

So unless you're willing to periodically change your technology basis -- oil to fuel cell, for example (and I'm not using that to be politically correct, it's just an example) -- then be prepared for the consumer environment to mandate changes to itself rather than providers to that environment mandating changes.

IE, if you don't provide consumers with what they want, be prepared for them to go looking for it and abandon you when they find it.

I've heard heads of large companies talk disparagingly about consumers in the past. I doubt they'll have the chance to do that much anymore.

Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.

I'll be speaking at the San Francisco April '07 Emetrics Summit on Quantifying and Optimizing the Human Side of Online Marketing on May 7, 2007. Come on by and say hello.