The Nexus One launch yesterday was really interesting when you compare it to the way Apple markets. So, rewind back, and it was around a month ago that Google simply gave its employees a Nexus One as a Christmas present and then permitted them to tweet about it. Then a few top bloggers were given review copies of it. And then there was a launch yesterday. That's it. No heavy marketing buys. No complex hype machine.
The big "what if" then, is what if this beats the iPhone? What if this strategy prevails over the Apple reality distortion field?
I'm reading Ken Auletta's book Googled, and he describes Google, for better or for worse, as being all about engineering. For example, some top designers have quit Google in frustration because design ideas based on intuition and holistic thinking get overridden by usability and focus tests. It's numbers over moxie. The engineers are running the mad house, and my guess is they override marketing as well. When you think of Google, you probably don't think about them for their stellar marketing.
Or maybe you do, but it's the kind of marketing that Seth Godin promotes, wherein you make your products so extraordinary, that they market themselves.
But taking that a step further, what if that's more than just a strategy, but an actual representation of where industry is going? In an ideal world, with efficient markets, nobody would need to tell you about their products. The good products would already be known. What if ten years from now, Godin's strategy is the only way to market your products, by investing in stellar product development.
If you step back and take the broad view of technology, you'll see that one thing it does well is cut out the middlemen. It nixes all the people in between the product and the customer. That has been Dell's strategy with its trademarked "Be Direct" slogan. And that is what the Internet has been doing all along.
"What if ten years from now, Godin's strategy is the only way to market your products, by investing in stellar product development."
God, I hope so! That'd be great. But marketing is still a very huge cog right now, UNLESS, you're a major player like Google, Apple, Blizzard, Valve, etc.
Sort of an aside, but I saw Auletta give an interview on PBS and didn't come away too enticed by his ideas(at least not enough to buy the book). Do you like it so far?
I've read the first chapter so far. I really enjoy the parts that show how much insider access he's had for such a long time (ten years). Some of the stories really cut to the heart of Google.
But half of the book is random blather about how Google is squashing one industry after another. This kind of line of thinking has been rehashed many times before in the blogosphere.