1,000 Songs in Your Pocket: How Language Transforms Product Perception and Market Revolution
The Power of Context in Shaping Product Success...
The language you use to describe your product fundamentally changes that product.
On October 23, 2001, Steve Jobs and Apple forever redefined the category of digital music player by releasing the iPod.
Up until that point, the category had been built around an MP3 player—a technically named product made by companies that competed based on "better" features and functions...
The iPod that Apple launched that day was a great product that could have been positioned solely as an improvement of the MP3 player, but that wasn't what Jobs did.
Instead, he presented the iPod as different from previous digital music players by centering his new offering around the phrase "1,000 songs in your pocket."
And the way we listen to music changed forever...
As marketers, our mission is not to incrementally fix what is broken in our customers' lives; it is to replace what is broken with something altogether different.
We're in the business of making change happen.
If you choose to anchor the language you use to describe your product to the current failed system your customers are experiencing, you will most likely fail to create a movement worth leading.
The context—or the language—in which you present your product to your customer is the single greatest factor in whether your product will succeed or fail.
Great products deserve to be placed in the best context possible; they deserve to be positioned as something new, not just incrementally better.
Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.
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