Salvatore Iovene

Before the last few years, I don’t recall any­one say­ing they were fans of some com­pany. I could imag­ine peo­ple say­ing “I like Ford cars” and “I pre­fer Ben&Jerry ice cream.”

But being fans? No, I’m pos­i­tive I’ve never heard or read any­thing like that.

Nowa­days I read and hear it on a daily basis. Peo­ple are fans of Google, Apple, Nokia. They lit­er­ally cheer for their favorite com­pany, watch­ing their direct (patent law­suits) and indi­rect (new prod­ucts com­pet­ing each other) bat­tles, and hop­ing that it wins in the end.

Face­book, being extremely unpop­u­lar these days despite me think­ing it’s no big­gie, is indeed risk­ing a damn lot just because of the cost of being uncool.

What does this tell? Is there a pre­cise con­nec­tion between the qual­ity of one’s prod­uct and its per­ceived cool­ness? Or is there a link between the mar­ket­ing and this cool­ness? Per­haps none, per­haps both. A com­pany goes build­ing an image, and it looks like each sin­gle tiny thing that hap­pens plays a part into gen­er­at­ing this pub­lic image.

Apple has seen a tremen­dous explo­sion of pop­u­lar­ity since the iPhone, and that’s helped a lot with build­ing an image. An image that’s really dif­fi­cult to erad­i­cate. Let’s be hon­est: the iPhone’s hard­ware is far from the com­peti­tors’ (see Nokia’s and HTC’s recent devices) and the soft­ware is barely catch­ing up (mul­ti­task­ing? It was about time.) Still, they’re going to con­tinue being cool, no mat­ter how many times they’ll mar­ket thinks like Cut & Paste like the best inven­tion since sliced bread. Why? You know it: because first impres­sions are hard to go.

So what has a com­pany to do, today, to be cool? Where is the line between meet­ing the expec­ta­tions for the sake of not dis­ap­point­ing the user base, and exceed­ing them with the risk of being ahead of the times?

I can iden­tify a few things to keep in mind.

Con­fi­dence. Whether we’re talk­ing about mar­ket­ing, or push­ing for a risky idea, hav­ing con­fi­dence mat­ters a lot. Deal­ing with large user bases comes with two big prob­lems: you can’t make every­one happy and you have to tell your user what they want while allow­ing them to feel that they’re get­ting what they thought they wanted. It is risky, but it’s the only way to lead. If your com­pany lacks the con­fi­dence to do that, it’s in trouble.

Hon­esty. Your users are smart. Maybe not all, but enough of them are smart enough to make noise. Don’t try to fool them. Per­haps you’ll sell a lit­tle more units in the short term, but your pub­lic image will deteriorate.

Integrity. Mak­ing mis­takes is OK, but it doesn’t work if nobody believes you. You need to have a clear set of val­ues, and stick to them.

All in all, it boils down to the DBAA prin­ci­ple, i.e. Don’t Be An Ass. Do that, and make sure you are able to give your users what they want and what they don’t know they want, and peo­ple will cheer for you.