What’s old is new

The other day I was talking to my brother about the company he launched last year and recalling spending a lot of time in 2015–2018 doing product marketing research. I was tripping about how, while I was moderating focus groups in Denver, one participant kept pronouncing Zillow “ZYE-low” despite everyone else in the room pronouncing it correctly dozens of times.

My favorite was from working on Volkswagen. I worked on the launches or refreshes of the Atlas, Passat, Jetta, Arteon, and Tiguan and I forget which it was, but the moderator had asked what features people want in their next car.

Some context is important.

First, car designers live in the future. The coolest day of the year each year was when Volkswagen’s global head of design would come to the agency with a couple team members and talk to us about what was coming. The way they think about space, materials, and mobility is truly mind-blowing. They showed us things that are still just rumors on car blogs.

Second, drivers live in the past. The average car on the road is ~7 years old. About 1/3 of people who drive new cars (and thus would qualify to be recruited to a focus group about new cars) tend to lease, which means their cars are newer relative to the average driver. But still, cars can change quite a bit in the three years of a lease.

Back to the focus group room. At this stage the brand was the first to offer Apple CarPlay and Android Auto connectivity, which puts your phone’s apps on your car’s screen. Big players, especially luxury carmakers, had been offering proprietary phone connectivity for years.

Moderator:

“What kind of technology do you want in your next car?”

Chorus of respondents:

“Bluetooth”

“Oh yeah, it’s gotta have Bluetooth”

“I NEED Bluetooth”

Cut to product planners gasping for air. Bluetooth was such an old technology — it had been in cars for 15 years — that it was being phased out and only offered on the base trims (the ones you see advertised for $129/month).

It was one of those “If i’d asked people what they wanted they’d have asked for a faster horse” situations. But even more so, a sobering reminder that people really don’t give a shit about features, which live in the domain of brand language; they care about how things can work for them, ideally easily and at a cost that’s negligible relative to benefit. “GIVE ME Bluetooth” was the shorthand for “simply connect my super-entertainer to the place I spend an hour a day sitting in traffic.”

It’s almost impossible not to fall in love with your own creations. It’s the endowment effect--we overvalue things we own. Like therapists help us understand if/ when we’re being obnoxiously self-absorbed in relationships, outsiders (like strategists, wink) help business owners understand what to communicate when, and how.

Going forward, Apple CarPay and Android Auto had a prominent place in brand-building advertising (where the impressive visual told the story) and on the website (where we built immersive modules to show the power of the technology). What feature did we call out when we advertised base trims? Very often, Bluetooth. There was no clearer signal that your phone was going to be friends with your new car.