Product, motherf—ers. Product.

Those words, spoken by drug kingpin Stringer Bell in The Wire, could just as easily have come from Steve Jobs – a supreme businessman who knew that the product, and the experience of the product, was everything.

Just like a Baltimore crack dealer, Jobs knew how to deliver an experience so toothsome, so electrifyingly moreish, that the customer would queue up at midnight to pay over the odds for it – and thank him for the privilege.

By making great product after great product, and learning from its own mistakes, Apple ended up building one of the world’s great brands.

By extending its philosophy of simplicity in design to its marketing, it created a tight, simple style that served its purpose admirably – getting that all-important product right up in our face.

Steve Jobs made Apple in his own image: focused to the point of obsession, secretive to the point of paranoia, controlling to the point of oppression.

For a company based in a garage to be exactly like its founder was obvious. For the biggest corporation in the world, it was astonishing. Jobs was there for every call, only letting go six weeks before he died.

As Bob Hoffman has pointed out, Jobs’ closed, introspective approach translated into a branding stance that is sharply at odds with modern marketing orthodoxy. Apple doesn’t ‘do’ social. It doesn’t engage. It’s remained resolutely aloof from social media, deigning only to create a defiantly unilateral Twitter account for the App Store.

Some might say Apple succeeds despite its isolation. I think it succeeds because of it.

Apple is like a star. A proper, untouchable, dazzling superstar. Someone who inspires the fiercest, maddest devotion in their fans, and never needs to explain or justify the moves they make.

Someone like J.D. Salinger, who captured adolescence perfectly on the page, never to write again. Someone like Morrissey, who stubbornly refuses to ‘cater’ by explaining himself or his lyrics. Someone like Michael Jackson, with his supernatural talent and otherworldly aura. And, of course, someone like Steve Jobs – surely the only CEO ever with such star quality.

To describe those people as ‘brands’ is an insult. But if they are brands, their key value is their mystery. Their mystique. Their aura. And Apple has the same aura.

Becoming a true star is incredibly hard. You’ve got to keep on delivering ‘insanely great’ experiences, year after year. You’ve got to keep your promises, every time. Then, after a while, you don’t need to prove anything any more. People believe in you; it seems to your audience that you just ‘know’.

On the other hand, falling from stardom is incredibly easy – all you have to do is let the edges of the user experience become frayed, diluted and disappointing. And even though people want stars to be stars, they can’t stop themselves trying to peep behind the curtain the whole time. The star brand must protect its followers from their own disillusionment – for their sake, and its own. If Syd Barrett had given in to the people who harrassed him while he was doing his garden, and gone on Parkinson or something, his legend would have been burnt out before the credits rolled.

That’s why Jobs rarely gave interviews, and why his firm keeps such a manically tight grip on everything from its ads to the experience of its stores. Stars belong only to themselves; they dictate the terms. They don’t engage because they don’t need to. They’re above all that. They’re to be apprehended from afar. They shine, we gaze – in awe.

In terms of product, I think Apple’s trajectory is pretty much set – for a few years, at least. If the people left behind can achieve 90% of Steve Jobs’ focus, Apple will be able to carry on bringing out products that people really love. But the real question is whether it can still be a star without Steve.

“MORE” THAN A “SNACK”

Very much stet on those bizarre scare quotes, which took a terrible cliché and plunged it into post-structuralist uncertainty. Just what was being queried about the ‘more’ and the ‘snack’? Could something be allegedly or possibly ‘more’ than something else, and in what sense? And what dimensions of ambiguity, allusiveness or irony did a snack take on once it was in quotes? (Sadly, as you can see, I can only find an image of a later version of the slogan, with a misspaced hyphen between ‘more’ and ‘snack’ – hardly an improvement.)

Seabrook’s has updated its packaging now, adopting the questionable slogan ‘a right proper gobful’, but it’s still way off the pace in terms of crispy copy. The plethora of ‘healthy/real’ crisp brands that have bobbed up in the wake of Kettle Chips have ladled an unbelievable amount of funky tone of voice on top of what’s essentially a commodity product. With almost nothing to choose between their product and a competitor’s, boutique crispsters look to their copywriters to give their products an air of fun, character and authenticity with some winning packaging copy. So let’s rip open the word bag and grab a handful…

Kettle Chips

We like to keep things simple…

We always insist on using the best potatoes we can find, hand cook them with care in small batches, then season with great tasting ingredients.

So what you get are naturally crunchy and tasty chips, each one a little different from the last.

There’s no need to add anything artificial – MSG, artificial flavours, colours and the like. And that’s the way it’s been for 25 years.

Simple really.

The daddy of ‘real’ crisps establishes a theme we’ll see in many competitors – the alleged quest for the ‘best’ potatoes and other ingredients.

Kettle Chips make a play on authority here, citing the 25 years they’ve been in the authentic-crisp game, man and boy. Does that convince the reader? Possibly, but in most contexts I advise clients that the date of foundation for the company is of marginal interest to their customers. If the crisps taste good, I don’t really care if you started up yesterday.

A few technical observations. Personally, I’d have put a hyphen in ‘hand cook’ and ‘great tasting’. I’d have found a way to rephrase ‘so what you get are’, to avoid the jarring singular/plural juxtaposition. And I’d have avoided saying ‘artificial’ twice in the space of three words.

In terms of tone, it’s all very self-centred. What about my enjoyment, my mood, the value I get from the product? I’m only tangentially involved in this whole deal. But as we’ll see, smug self-absorption is very much the order of the day in this sector.

Red Sky

A red sky at night is nature’s promise of a good day.

Red Sky potato chips are our promise of something good from nature.

We only use the best ingredients from nature’s kitchen to bring you these beautifully crunchy potato chips which taste as good as you would expect from 100% natural ingredients.

Grammar: there should be a comma after ‘chips’ in the last sentence.

I must admit, I quite like the cheesy play on the brand name (‘promise of something good’). I’ve written before that a slogan should promise value, and making that explicit is quite nice. However, some might find the tone here a bit pious.

The final paragraph is a bit clunky, stumbling around in a circle to where it began with the ‘natural ingredients’ riff. I might have got rid of this last bit in a spirit of ‘less is more’ – the first two bits imply ‘good ingredients’ without needing to wheel out the ‘100% natural’ guns. And as we’ve seen, this theme is hardly original.

Burt’s Chips

A big hello from all the fryers at Burt’s!

In 1997 all we could find were tasteless, junk-filled crisps. We knew we could do better. After a lot of searching we found an old fryer (a machine not a person) and put it in a tiny factory down here in deepest Devon. We then started to work out how to make fantastic chips using only the finest and freshest natural ingredients.

It took us ages to cook the perfect chip with quite a few burnt ones (and fingers) along the way. Eventually we worked out a simple and delicious recipe. Our chips are crunchy, natural and full of flavour – just as they should be. The most naturally delicious chips you have ever tasted.

The ‘tasteless, junk-filled crisps’ of 1997 presumably include Burt’s rival Kettle Chips, who (as we’ve seen) had been going for a decade at that point.

In the hands of challenger/premium crisp brands, this ‘rural quest for perfect crisp’ tale has actually become a cliché. Its weak point, as far as I can see, is the audience not really giving a toss about the fryer, or the factory, or the whole dreary burnt-out-stockbroker-starts-boutique-business-somewhere-not-London narrative. However I must grudgingly admit that ‘good origin’ does seem to play on consumers’ minds – middle-class, recession-immune consumers’ minds, anyway.

The tone is quite interesting. It’s a sort of sub-Innocent, faux-naïf voice that’s used in different forms by lots of these ‘real’ brands. In terms of meaning, it positions the whole Burt’s enterprise as a sort of happy-go-lucky, kitchen-table affair where success, well, just kinda happens to nice people. In fact, Burt’s cottage-operation days are long gone – but the homely connotations suit the brand even as its executives talk turkey with Tesco’s.

Note the recurrence of the ‘only the best ingredients’ jive once again. Although the theme no longer offers any differentiation – they’re all using the best, apparently – premium crisp makers just can’t leave it alone.

(Perversely, all this ‘good origin’ stuff makes me want to pig out on the low-rent snacks made with all the crapola Class B spuds. I bet they’re fantastic. In the same way, Green & Black’s po-faced preening sends me running for the Dairy Milk.)

Real Crisps

When it comes to crisps, we don’t mess about. Oh no. We pick out the best potatoes and hand cook them, so the goodness stays put. No nonsense. Just delicious real crisps – like these, sprinkled generously with sea salt. And you don’t even need your sea-legs to enjoy them.

Best potatoes, delicious, yawn. Not much new here in terms of the content.

Technically, why is ‘hand cook’ two words when ‘handcooked’ is one word on the front of the bag? (See image.) Poor, unfashionable hyphens, we’ll miss you when you’re gone.

Tonewise, we’re striking out even further into Innocent territory – ‘Oh no’, ‘no nonsense’. What is this tone of voice? Tentatively, I identify it as the voice of the middle-class parent: shrill, desperate jollity thinly masking an undercurrent of snobbishness, control-freakery and passive aggression. The sound of an adult talking to a child, or trying to sound like a child, or irritating anyone who isn’t a child by being so overbearingly twee and patronising. With posh crisps, we’re hearing a ‘cool’ but nonetheless authoritarian parent telling us we really should be eating proper snacks instead of those nasty orange Wotsits. Mm?

The last sentence is interesting: a joke that doesn’t make you laugh. (OK, it links in with the picture of a fisherman on the front of the packet, but still.) Why use unfunny humour? One answer is that it’s mandatory for the would-be ‘funky’ brand, so the copywriter goes for the cover drive even if the ball just isn’t there to be hit (see Burt’s lame ‘fryer’ pun above). Another answer is that the humourless lack insight into their own humourlessness.

I always advise my clients never to write something they would not feel comfortable saying to a customer, face to face. I’m not sure this copy passes that test. Who’s talking here, and to whom? And why? (Answers: A. A marketer; B. Themselves; C. To ‘build a brand’.)

Be yourself

As you’ll have guessed, I sampled all these products in the course of researching this post. I have to report that, to my uncouth palate at least, they’re all pretty much the same. So it’s not a surprise that they’ve reached for content and tone of voice as means of differentiation.

What is surprising, arguably, is that they’ve all ended up with broadly the same messages. In place of any allusion to the consumption occasion (when you eat the crisps), the mood of the consumer or anything else we could identify with, we’ve got the same old ‘good ingredients’ thing across the board. Is there nothing else to say?

I’d also argue that the tones used are pretty uniform, with the possible exception of Red Sky. While tone of voice as a concept has value, its practitioners will lay themselves open to ‘emperor has no clothes’ charges if they just end up copying Innocent or Apple, using the same tools regardless of the job at hand.

In my experience, every brand really does have a narrative and every company really has a unique character. The brands who find genuine differentiation are the ones with the guts to be themselves.

But having thought about it a little more deeply, I’m beginning to see what all the fuss is about. And I think it’s crucial to look past physical features and understand the experience offered by the iPad – and how important it could be for the digital marketing of the future.

Experience is everything

Because the internet is dominated by technically literate (and highly prolific) bloggers and commenters, much early online reaction to the iPad focused on its technical features (or lack thereof). Stephen Fry (in this post) was one of the earliest technophiles to guide doubters towards the actual experience of using the iPad, rather than an actuarial dissection of its spec-sheet. ‘The moment you experience it in your hands you know this is class,’ he wrote. ‘This is a different order of experience.’

He was absolutely right. Laundry lists of features or functionality are not the point. I don’t buy an electronic product because it’s achieved a particular technical benchmark or offers tons of features relative to competitors. I buy it because it’s going to change my life for the better by offering new, fun or cool experiences. Not just in terms of using the product itself, but also in terms of the real-world context of my experience.

Apple and the digital life

History teaches us not to bet against Apple

Apple has always understood that people buy experiences, not features. Its products are brilliantly designed and ergonomically peerless, but they are much more than mere museum pieces or geekboy fodder. They are ‘insanely great’ because they offer new, compelling digital experiences that normal people want in their lives. Often, they do so without being particularly innovative in technical terms.

Consider the iMac. It delivered functionality that people could easily get elsewhere. It wasn’t innovative. It wasn’t even particularly cheap. But it presented personal computing in a brilliant, compact design and made it utterly fun and accessible. It was a runaway success because it repositioned computing as a cool leisure activity ‘for the rest of us’. The iMac experience laid the groundwork for Apple’s majestic and still-unfolding umbrella marketing concept: the ‘digital life’.

So, what experience will iPad users be buying into?

Focus

At the core of the iPad experience is what we might call ‘focused digital browsing’. The iPad puts content at the centre of your experience in a way that a computer or phone doesn’t.

Phones are about mobile communication first and foremost, and clearly not ideal for reading. Computers, because of their functional design (and ubiquity in the workplace), orient us towards accomplishing tasks whenever we use them. Their versatility also provides myriad distractions from reading.

Contrast that with the iPad, which can only run one app at a time, and isn’t a computer by any stretch of the imagination. Its mono-functionality deals a decisive blow to the fragmented, bitty concentration of today’s web user. No email or instant messages will intrude while users encounter content; the chances of having it read and understood properly just got a whole lot better.

For websites, copywriters might feel that longer, more involved text is appropriate, just as it is when writing advertisements for similarly ‘captive’ audiences in venues such as the Underground (US: subway). There might also be less emphasis on ‘interruptive’ marketing, or on trying to get users’ attention on a more general level. With an iPad, we can be much more confident that the audience is already attentive.

By the same token, PDFs and e-books will surely become much more important as marketing tools. Although they’ve always been important and viable, I don’t know anyone who reads them for pleasure. Scanning a product manual to find a key fact, yes. Working through a marketing guide page by page on screen, no. Not for me, anyway. But if the iPad takes off, I could well be recommending PDF brochures and e-books to my clients as important ways to build links with iPad-using customers.

Touch

The physical aspects of the iPad experience are fascinating. The user will probably be holding the tablet in their hands, like a book. Instead of clicking and scrolling with a spiky little black arrow or a tiny white hand, they’ll be caressing the screen with their very own fingers – literally touching the content. Ergonomically, the experience emphasises involvement, intimacy and closeness – as distinct from the remote, measured stance of the computer user sitting upright and using a mouse.

This might lead to more sensual, involving marketing content, aiming to capitalise on this ready-made intimacy between reader and medium. Perhaps we’ll also be trying to make on-screen shapes, colours, textures and words physically appealing – using images of objects that people like to touch (shiny levers, velvet curtains, polished wood). Over time, more sophisticated interaction through touch is sure to emerge (certainly through apps), but it will need to complement content if it’s going to work on a marketing level and not seem gimmicky.

Comfort

The iPad user seems very likely to be comfortable: probably at home, at leisure, in a comfortable location of their choice such as an armchair or sofa. Unlike readers at office desks, they’re not wishing they’re somewhere else. In fact, the urge to prolong pleasure is likely to keep them exactly where they are. They are ‘voluntarily captive’, and once again this might mean we can target them with longer, more involved marketing messages.

With the iPad, content really will be ‘beamed in’ to the leisure heart of the home. There may be the potential to allude much more directly to the user’s environment when selling particular products – sofas, for example – or, more generally, to capitalise on an existing mindset of leisure and reflection. For many products, the iPad is likely to put the user in a much better ‘buying place’ than a work laptop or even a machine set up at a home workstation.

Embeddedness

Some people feel the iPad threatens the paper book, but I don’t. Again, we must remember that people choose experiences, not products. An example: I might well buy vintage sci-fi in paper form, so I can read it in one of the four classic non-digital reading venues: beach, bed, bath and bog. However, I’m much more likely to get a business title in e-book form, so I can scan, search or quote from it more easily.

Instead of making a one-time, binary decision about which medium or device I’ll use to view ‘my content’, I’m selecting content and medium together to create my reading experience in a much more sophisticated, plural way. And this is how things always pan out. Just as only the most cutting-edge digital evangelist has ditched all their CDs and MP3s for Spotify, so only a handful of readers will switch to e-books exclusively. If old ways still appeal, users preserve their choice.

So even if the iPad takes off big time, we won’t know whether or when our audience are using an iPad to view our digital content. They’ll choose the channel that suits them at the time. But just as podcasts came to be strongly associated with iPods (even taking their name from them), I believe that some occasions, tasks, product types and market segments will come to be very strongly associated with tablet use.

For example, if you owned an iPad and did your weekly shop online, it seems very likely that you’d want to walk round the house with the iPad, checking what you needed and adding items to your basket as you went. It’s easy to imagine how other online selections or purchases could be supported by this kind of ‘around the home’ iPad use: contents insurance, home improvements and so on.

In the early days, we’ll probably just want to test on an iPad, and perhaps provide some content that’s flagged as being ‘especially for iPad users’. Later, we’ll probably plan, write and design digital marketing content in an iPad version – or even design exclusively for iPad. And at that point, I might have to consider buying one myself…

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