Better vs. Something New: A Parable About Creating Different
The language you use to describe your product fundamentally changes that product.
Once upon a time, there were two towns, Better-town and Different-ville. Both places were impacted by a severe economic downturn, leaving many citizens unemployed.
The leaders of Better-town were well-established business people. They believed that the companies they had built in their town would always be able to employ the local population if the workers just applied themselves and waited for an opening.
At the same time, the leaders of Better-ville were compassionate. They knew that many of their citizens were without jobs and that something had to be done to keep families from starving. However, they also knew that giving someone something for nothing had eroded people's character in the past, destroying communities and entire civilizations.
Therefore, they felt they were faced with the horrible choice of (1) letting the unemployed starve or (2) destroying the communities they had built.
Borrowing from their town name, they landed on a solution they considered “better” than the welfare programs that had come before. Like those past programs, they would provide “relief payments” for the unemployed. However, these payments would come with a severe moral lesson in the form of public scrutiny.
They designed their “improved” system so that obtaining assistance would be made so difficult, humiliating, and disagreeable that there would be no temptation for anyone to go through the process unless it was absolutely necessary; the moral disapproval of the community would be turned upon the recipients of the money at all times in such a way that they would try hard to get "off relief" and "regain their self-respect."
Once implemented, the plan faced immediate backlash. The relief recipients resented the cross-examinations and inspections at the hands of the "relief investigators," who, they said, took advantage of a person's misery to snoop into every detail of private life. Additionally, the scorn from the employed community, instead of pushing the unemployed to find work, created class hatred, dividing the town into the “haves" and the "have-nots.”
The recession, therefore, hit Better-town very hard. The relief policy had averted starvation in some places, but personal quarrels, unhappy homes, and the weakening of social organizations had also resulted.
People in Better-town shook their heads sadly and declared that it all went to prove over again what they had known from the beginning, that giving people something for nothing inevitably demoralizes their character. The citizens of Better-town gloomily waited for prosperity to return, with less and less hope as time went on.
The story of the other community, Different-ville, was quite unlike that of Better-town. Different-ville was full of independent thinkers who imagined a future altogether distinct from what had come before. The leaders of this town believed that unemployment, like sickness, accident, fire, tornado, or death, hits unexpectedly in modem society, regardless of the victim's merits. They went on to make the case that Different-ville's homes, parks, streets, industries, and everything else the community was proud of, had been built in part by the work of these same people who were now unemployed.
They then proposed a different solution to the problem of unemployment by applying a principle of insurance: If the work these unemployed people had previously done for the community could be regarded as a form of "premium" paid to the community against a time of misfortune, payments now made to them to prevent their starvation could be considered "insurance claims."
They worked out in detail, to everyone's satisfaction, the conditions under which citizens should be regarded as policy-holders in the city's social insurance plan and decided to provide claim payments every month to each of Different-ville's qualifying, unemployed families.
Different-ville's "claim adjusters," whose duty it was to investigate the claims of the citizen "policyholders," had a much better time than Better-town's "relief investigators." While the latter had been resentfully regarded as snoopers, the former, having no moral lesson to teach but simply a business transaction to carry out, treated their clients with businesslike courtesy and got the same amount of information as the relief investigators had, with considerably less difficulty. There were no hard feelings.
News of Different-ville's plans reached a regional TV station that ran a story describing the program in a top feature story on the nightly news. As a result of this publicity, inquiries about the plan began to come to the city hall even before the first checks were mailed out. This led to a considerable feeling of pride on the part of the city leaders, who felt that this was an excellent opportunity to put Different-ville on the map.
Accordingly, the city leaders decided that instead of simply mailing out the checks as they had initially intended, they would publicly present the first checks at a sizeable civic ceremony. They invited the governor of the state, the president of the state university, the senator from their district, and other local officials. They decorated the National Guard armory with flags and got out the American Legion Fife and Drum Corps, the Boy Scouts, and other civic organizations.
At the big celebration, each family to receive a "social insurance check" was marched up to the platform to receive it, and the governor and the mayor shook hands with each of them as they came trooping up in their best clothes. Images of the event showing the recipients of the checks shaking hands with the mayor and the governor made the rounds in both local and national media.
Because of this unique approach, the recession did not last as long in Different-ville. While it took time for the economy to recover fully, there was no class hatred in that town and much less animosity among neighbors. Every recipient of these insurance checks felt that they had been personally honored, that they lived in a wonderful little town, and that they could face unemployment with greater courage and assurance since their community was behind them...
As media personalities interviewed the leaders of Different-ville, one particularly cynical reporter challenged one of the city leaders, saying, "isn't this just a story about the power of promotional work? You and your colleagues on the city council clearly had real advertising sense, and this civic ceremony was a masterpiece...it made everyone happy...put over the scheme in a big way. I suppose calling relief `insurance’ has actually made people like it. Hasn't it?"
"What do you mean, `calling' it insurance?" asked the city councilman. "Our plan isn't relief at all. It is insurance."
"But it's still relief, no matter what you call it. Relief is relief, isn't it?“ said the reporter.
The councilman responded, "but insurance is insurance, isn't it?"
Language in Action: MP3 to iPod
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 a product known as an MP3 player - a technically named product made by companies who competed based on "better" features and functions (sample advertisement below).
The iPod that Apple launched that day in October 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 the digital music players that had come before by centering his new offering through the language "1,000 songs in your pocket."
And the way we listen to music changed forever.
We're in the Business of Making Change Happen
As marketers, our mission is not to incrementally fix what is broken in the lives of our customers; it is to replace the failing framework they currently have for their problems with a new, successful one.
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 - through which you present your product to your customer is the single greatest factor for 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.