We don’t buy things or products, we buy better versions of ourselves. Advertisements, majority of the time, don’t show you how the product is made, or how it works. Rather they show us an experience, a lifestyle, they show you a better version of yourself.
For example, no one’s going to make a skateboard, and then advertise about how meticulously it was designed and engineered to tilt just perfectly and react accordingly . They’re just going to show you someone doing super cool tricks on them — a better version of yourself.
I think a perfect example of this is Beats ads, nothing is said about the product, you just see these world class athletes using it, and there’s this silent emphasis on it, as if it’s what’s solely responsible for making them successful.
There’s a huge difference between ‘our product does this…’ and ‘here’s what you can do with our product’, and I don’t think there are many more accurate representations of this concept than in Nike’s ‘Winner Stays On’ ad.
There’s this direct reflection of the product making you become a better version of yourself, becoming the very embodiment of a superstar footballer, in this case.
But in the case of tech, I think there’s one company whose ideology clearly rests on this concept, Apple.
Apple in general hit this right on the nail. It’s rather evident Apple doesn’t really care about core technologies, rather how these core technologies can effect user experiences. Flinging specs at most people won’t really entice them. Users want the benefits of the feature, not the feature itself, this is why saying “1,000 songs in your pocket” and now “40,000,000 songs on your wrist” resonates a lot more with people rather than telling them the storage capacity available.
It isn’t just apparent in their advertising, but also in what their products do, and how they work. They’re all tailored to increasing user satisfaction by enhancing the experiences of their products and not just what their products are capable of doing.
This is why I think people are the most important advertising tool, but also when creating products thinking about how users will use it is extremely important, because showing what your product can do for someone is more significant than showing what your product can generally do.
