It’s the customer, stupid.
How appropriate that the power went out at CES this year. What used to be a make-it or break-it show for electronics startups has turned into a circus for the absurd…with maybe a few announcements that actually help us out as human beings. And frankly, finding those needles in all of Las Vegas during Carnival is nigh to impossible.
Here’s the problem: make money. With the celebrity status that innovators are getting these days, technology has turned to the same model as pop music: be famous for being famous. Market the hell out of something people don’t need. Grab the money and run. Silicon valley (metaphorically) has become an echo chamber. I mean really, who would pay over 5 grand for a toilet that tracks your bowel movements? Or a headset that promises to melt fat away?
Can’t you just see the sun-deprived, sleep-deprived hipster geeks slapping high-fives over Kodak’s Kashminer? (a machine you rent for 2 years, $3,400 and give up half the bitcoins you mine). It would be really funny if the thinking weren’t so pervasive: “Quick, build something, anything for CES!”
The show was rife with confusion, overpromises, hubris and starry-eyed entrepreneurs.
Twenty years ago I did ads for Procter & Gamble. Not real ads, hypothetical ads. You see, they started by assembling focus groups all over the world and asked simple questions: “What would make cleaning your kitchen easier? What would make doing your laundry more economical? They gathered piles of hand-written notes — -good data, and aggregated it into product categories. Then they created mythical products with brand promises. And that’s what I got: a packet describing the product, the average user, the strategy. My job was to create a TV commercial of the product. That commercial was then shown to potential users of the product for feedback. The message was tweaked, the product was tweaked. And then, armed with all that data, they went to their chemists and their designers and their real ad agency and their distributors and their manufacturers and said: “Look, this is what our customers want. Do it.” Then they rolled it out regionally. Got more feedback, made changes, and rolled it out nationally (meaning whichever country tested highest) and sometimes internationally.
At the end of the day, do we really want robots for customer service?
Most of the products at this year’s CES will flame out, burning money like rocket fuel. It was the biggest show to date, and could rival Burning Man as the world’s biggest dumpster fire.
Why?
Simple. Innovators have grown accustomed to technology telling them what to think and have completely forgotten how to ask the customer what they want. They need to redefine the problem: How do we meet customer’s needs.
