Specs Don’t Matter

At the March unveiling of the iPad 2, Steve Jobs had this to say towards the end of his presentation:

Jobs struck a chord with me in that moment because he hit on something that I’ve had a strong opinion about for a while now: Hardware specifications don’t matter. I didn’t always think like this, in fact, six years ago In would have laughed at myself as I wrote this. I simply could not understand why one person would go out and buy a device with inferior specs at the same, or even a higher price. But it’s the truth, and there’s plenty of reasons that support this line of thinking. In fact, working in the field of marketing and advertising sparked my interest and led me to ask why they don’t matter.

I came around to three general lines of logic about how people understand information, and how they react to experiences. I want to highlight and illustrate those three problems and their solutions for the sake of helping cultivate better communication with the people we work for—our customers.

1. You can’t sell average people on numbers.

Unless you’re selling something a person can tangibly see or feel, numbers are meaningless to the average person. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, only 73.9% of American students graduated from high school. About 38% of Americans between 18-34 claim to be bad at math, with 63% saying they have difficulty estimating distances or weight. The words people used to describe how they felt about math included things like:

(Women vs. Men)

• Frustrated (26% vs. 16%)
• Anxious (22% vs. 15%)
• Inadequate (20% vs. 10%)
• Worried (15% vs. 11%)

Do those emotions sound like something you want to put your customers through? It’s an important thing to consider on the onset of developing a marketing message for your product.

The truth is that people aren’t educated on technology in the same way the people who create it are. While we may understand that a computer with 8GB of RAM will blow away a computer with 2GB, our audiences don’t understand that, for the most part. They don’t speak our language, and if you want them to succeed, and understand what you’re offering them, you can either go through a long, arduous, and most importantly, expensive process of teaching them to understand what you’re selling. Or you can try to figure out a new way to communicate with them.

2. There are too many numbers.

A point-and-shoot camera with 20 megapixels doesn’t look as good as a DSLR with 10 megapixels. Why? Isn’t 10 half as good as 20? This is how people think. Outside of my Mac, the rest of my house is filled with PCs that I built from scratch. In each of them I’ve put in the processor, RAM, motherboard, case… you name it. I’ve observed on more than one occasion a machine with inferior system specifications perform the same task at the same speed as a system with better ones. It left me wondering how that could be true. Especially because better numbers, usually translates to higher price tags.

I’m human, and can’t detect everything perfectly. So let’s try to solve this problem logically. There’s just one problem: a computer has too many different specs to account for to make a clear and understandable message for people to understand. Let’s take a look at a popular computer processor, the Intel Core i7. But that’s not it’s real name. It’s really the Intel Core i7-950 Bloomfield 3.06GHz 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor BX80601950. That is something my grandfather would lovingly refer to as “Bullshit.”  And that’s just the processor. Lest you forget, you have at least half a dozen other components with a list of specifications this long or longer.

I’m certainly not saying that if you understand the benefit of an  8MB Level 3 cache that you know useless information. But people who do understand that must simply admit that they are not representative of the rest of the world. When you sell a product, do you want to sell to 100 people, or a million?

3. Human emotions

There are plenty of blogs, and thousands of designers, that will tell you “all that matters is the experience.” It’s one of the reasons people rationalize buying high-end products from Bose, Apple, or BMW. But what exactly is experience, and why do we care about it? Numbers don’t make you feel anything. They’re not sexy; they can’t be interpreted; they’re flat, rigid, data points that people can’t connect with as is so often the case with technology.

This all has to do with human emotion. In Simon Sinek’s book “Start with Why,” he waxes on about The Limbic Brain. It’s the part of our brain that gives us that “gut feeling” or instinct, and, ultimately, the one  that really makes our decisions. Hardware statistics have no place in this part of our heads; they simply serve as methods for us to rationalize our decision to purchase a product to ourselves or others.

People don’t buy a BMW for the horse power, they buy it for the feeling it gives them knowing that they’re driving a BMW. They also buy it for the feeling they suspect others have when they see them in a BMW. There are faster cars, and cars with more features. Even if BMW makes a car that breaks every record and sets every standard, they’re in an industry that moves fast, and will be overtaken in specs by a competitor within months of rolling off the lot. But the one thing their competitors will never do is satisfy someone who craves what they perceive as “The Ultimate Driving Machine.” Nothing else will ever give BMW lovers a chill up their spine, or elicit that emotional reaction you could only dream of achieving.

These three things are pretty big problems for the technology industry. And while I’m always rattling cages and pointing out problems, it’s not particularly constructive unless I’m offering solutions. So with these three problems the questions are posed. Features and specifications tends to be the name of the game in the hardware and software business these days, and on top of that, most of what we consume are evolutionary upgrades rather than revolutionary ones. Heck, if you’re an OEM, all you have is numbers. I’ve come up with some basic concepts that can help us navigate through the murky waters of specs and details when marketing to our customers.

Solution No. 1: Don’t sell numbers, sell answers.

If you can’t sell people on numbers, what can you sell them on? The answer I hear to this all the time is features. This is a false assumption. Instead you have to sell customers on solutions to problems. So you have a computer that has a 64bit operating system? So what? That message should read a bit more like “We have a computer that lets you do more things faster.” But take it a step further: If your audience is gamers, let them know they can play World of Warcraft and Watch a movie at the same time. If it’s a business, tell them they can send clients files, communicate with customers, and manage inventory all without slowdowns. You gigahertz, gigabytes, and gigabits mean gigasquat if they don’t help the end user.

Solution No. 2: If the numbers are the real story, make them mean something.

Think about when Apple first came to market with the iPod. How much hard drive space did the first iPod have? It had 5GB. But that number only got a tiny mark on the back of the product, and a light-gray text entry on Apple’s website. In fact, the only way Apple ever really communicated that product was 1,000 songs in your pocket. This is something all smart companies do with their marketing material. The basic theory here is that if the stat, or specs, is a big part of what makes your product great, you need to talk about it in a way that makes sense to people.

• It’s enough images to fill 1,000 photo albums
• It’s as big as your pinky.

How heavy is 3.22 milligrams? I can’t guess that in my head, but if you said, “It’s as light as a toothpick,” then that will resonate and produce a “wow.”

Solution No. 3: Making a great experience.

Make every part of your product special, and make it something you’d want to have and use every day. Hardware should live in harmony with the experience you’re trying to produce. It only needs specifications that will allow you to accomplish your goals without compromise, not simply because it’s the fastest, newest, or cheapest. If you focus all your energy on having a product where you never settled for “ok,” then you won’t need to spend time and energy convincing people it’s what they need. They’ll convince everyone else for you.

A great experience isn’t just a user interface, and it’s not just a personal thank you to the person you’re doing business with. A great experience is the result of leaving literally no leaf unturned. It’s knowing your audience and not giving them what they ask for, but solving their problems in ways they didn’t know could be solved. If you wait for people to tell you what they want, you’re always playing catch up instead of innovating.

That, my friends, is what helps create good marketing, enlightened consumers, and it’s why specs don’t matter.

A special thanks to Martin Lieberman for editing this post for me.

• *Changing the Equation Study (2010) http://www.changetheequation.org/news/2010/09/16/latest-news/in-a-new-survey-americans-say-we-re-not-good-at-math/”
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• “TIMSS (2007) http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2009001”