Robots vs People: Or why Android device marketing is just weird. | Hacker News Reader

Robots vs People: Or why Android device marketing is just weird.

netwhisperer.com

32 pointsfeverishaaron15 comments

It really is a shame that so much of the Android marketing has taken its cue from Verizon's techno-masculine Droid branding.

Google was dead on with the Nexus One's "Web Meets Phone" ad. If you haven't seen it, it's worth watching - right at the center of Google's brief expressive / cute / minimalist advertising phase. Think back to the "Parisian Love" Super Bowl ad and the Motion Theory "Google Chrome" short. They're delightful.

These shorts present Google as a very different company - one that's personal, bright, and helpful. Much of this work is coming from (or commissioned by) a division called Creative Lab that's largely independent from the majority of Google's culture and management structure. I had the pleasure of collaborating with them on a couple projects and was amazed by their creativity, insight, and lighthearted approach.

I would love to see more work in this style from Google. They've demonstrated they're perfectly capable of creating very good ads that deliver a consistently solid impression, but have ceded much of the opportunity to brand Android to carriers who have screwed it up to the nines (though we shouldn't forget that the platform is actually called "Android"), with the lone exception of HTC's highly personal commercials.

I hope they can turn it around. If and when they do, I further hope that it will be a part of a more comprehensive strategy to rebrand Android as a whole. It's a solid platform with a lamentably robotic image.

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[1] Nexus One ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6COwgigJ-g

[2] Parisian Love: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU

[3] Motion Theory's "Chrome": http://vimeo.com/5721933

Interesting background, I didn't realize Creative Lab worked on that campaign. It's certainly an improvement on Google's usual branding efforts and I totally agree that that's a better direction, but I think it still misses the mark in some ways. They want to pull on your heart strings, and yet the whole time you are stuck staring at a browser window. If the message was supposed to be human-centered rather than the Droid-style technology-centered, like "Your life is what's important, Google can help you", why did they stick the technology in your face for 100% of the time? Instead of showing the human side, it's almost like they unintentionally made an ad about fear of technology: you spend all your time staring at a screen missing real life. Who knows, maybe this is Creative Labs opinion of Google's culture.

This is unlike Apple's FaceTime ads, which also play on the same emotions, but that ad succeeds because it's set inside the human world. Facebook tried something similar with Places (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfX_ZQag1BM), trying to connect the technology with very strong emotions, nostalgia, etc. They did show a lot of real life scenes, but I think it also failed. They're selling the idea that Places helps you have serendipitous meetings with your "facebook friends", i.e. casual acquaintances you generally don't share those kinds of strong emotions with. It's completely incongruous for Facebook to try to brand itself around what are fairly private emotions that you usually reserve for only your most intimate relationships, especially after basically forcing everyone into public mode and declaring privacy dead.

I think you're right. They're selling features rather than benefits.

Google's spots are certainly brighter and happier, but still not quite as humanistic as Apple's advertising. OK, "Parisian Love" is redeemed by the sappy love story, but out of all three videos the only thing I saw or heard of an actual human being was a disembodied voice giving the phone voice commands. Other than that, the Nexus One spot was just an animated feature list with electronic music--still pretty robotic, even if it's a bright and happy robot.

Apple's very first iPhone ads had a real human voice talking to you and a real human hand operating the iPhone. And before that, their iconic iPod ads had human bodies dancing. People respond to the human form better than they respond to facts or figures or even the most beautiful industrial design.

Here's Apple's FaceTime ad. There's more human beings in the first frame than in all three Google ads put together: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yatSAEqNL7k

But even before that, here's an iPhone ad. Note the key difference: there's a dude talking to you and you see actual human hands operate the phone. It's not some abstract robotic thing, it's something meant for humans: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhhbaaWBgnk

And I'm sure you've seen the old iPod ads, but again--the focus is "iPods shuffle help human beings enjoy music", not "iPods shuffle have this feature list": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE4EEwQAfxo

I don't know much about advertising, but could this be on purpose? That is, an attempt to create the impression in the market that the Droid is the powerful, bold, masculine device, and so by implication (certainly never stated directly) that the iPhone is the rounded, feminine device. I don't have a marketer's sense about why that'd be an agenda item, but I could guess it may be a tried-and-true PR advertising technique -- if you're coming from behind, try to create an identity issue around the decision that will get you the fraction of the market you think you can get.

I think if you try, you can see analogues to this strategy in Apple's marketing, especially when it was famously coming from behind in the "I'm a Mac" ads. By attempting to segment the market -- "If you're a serious older person, PCs are for you, but if you're a young hipster, the Mac is your natural choice." -- they attempted to artificially create this sort of identity-based split in preference.

Again, I'm not a marketer, so I don't know if this is standard playbook or just reading more into what I see. I don't even know if this stuff works, but based on Apple fans' statements, it seems to me the message that they should think of themselves as a young, hip, enlightened minority who "just get it" and have great fashion sense seems to have taken root pretty well.

Doesn't seem to be hurting Google to much, with over 200,000 devices activated per day, if the CEO is to be believed.

He's obviously never sold PCs to regular people. They care about features as much as techies, maybe more. I did this in the late 90s. People were asking how much RAM a computer had, how many megahertz the processors were, etc. who didn't have the slightest clue what they meant.

The laundry list of tech specs works even on people who don't have the slightest clue what they mean.

Apple wants to sell iPads even to people who are afraid of PCs. My grandmother got rid of her PC because it intimidated her. I doubt she would even consider using something named 'Android'. Even if it was exactly identical to the iPad.

The world of Normals is a world of insecurity and shallow, emotional, surface judgements. Apple is superb at targeting them.

Yes... the "geeks/techies" he talks about are the normal people. As opposed to the "if its purpose is something I want, and it's expensive enough, it can't really suck" crowd that Apple is able to tap into.

The second group of people would have significant reservations to buy a copycat design if they can afford the original. The first group is concerned about bang for the buck. And they only know how to measure "bang" in terms of numbers - because, among nondescript gray boxes (or small packets of shiny black) that all run similar software, those numbers are all you can easily find out.

Care to see how good the camera is? Either take a standardized benchmark to try out in controlled lighting conditions, or ask for the numbers. Do you want to know how well the microphone does? Either take your oscilloscope with you, have very good hearing, or ... well, people are not eagerly asking for numbers, they just assume that the microphone is always good enough for talking and not good enough for serious music recording.

Apple can work towards their targeted pricepoint by selecting which features/experiences to include such that the product as a whole is a pleasant experience. (Even though, among the "experience" crowd, no one would go for the quality of earphones that the iPod comes with, if they were to shop for new ones). The "commodity" people have a given feature set (the industry standard) and a pricepoint (or even worse, compete based on price) and all they can do to preserve their margins is squeeze hard.

"power users" — the affected gits that fancy themselves knowledgable because they aren't afraid to click through dialog boxes and wizards, install inane themes, randomly strip files and kill services as 'optimizations', and copy-paste inept blocks of sudo-ridden shell from linkbait tutorials. Lifehacker readers.

Apple managed to almost completely marginalize them with the introduction of the App Store (nobody's writing jailbreak apps), but Google's been courting them aggressively from day one.

In decades past they'd have been bickering over their choice of microcomputer platform on BBSes, from the Apple II and C64 to the Amiga and BeOS. Now they have the real-time internet and the companies they partisanly prostitute themselves for are the largest in their sectors with market caps from 80-220 billion dollars.

While his point may contain some truth, his examples biased: it's unfair to compare 30-60s brand advertising for Android to what's effectively an 8m infomercial for the iPad.

> “There is no wrong way to hold it” As opposed to some other Apple products.

6-word summary:

    Android sells *what*. Apple sells *why*.

It's a puzzling approach. Are they hoping early adopters/influencers on the hardcore geek end of the curve convince the less tech savvy in the middle?

I don't buy it as a good strategy, if that's what they're after. Android, from a UX perspective, is an odd mix of feature phone and high-end ATM. (I mean, really, it's like a Bank of America cash machine and my old RAZR had a child together.)

It's not immediately apparent how to get around, at times, and the mystery meat behavior of the hardware back button is often baffling.

The iPhone, of course, was first a hit among nerds before it exploded into the wider market. The big reason for that was that the phone was just genuinely better than what most people were carrying in their pockets. So while techies influenced adoption, they were only channels for that influence, not influencers themselves.

The real influencer, of course, was a focused, enjoyable UX.

Android still has catching up to do; it's far more likely to leave a toe-in-the-water user cold than inspire buying behavior.

Different marketing for different audiences. I don't think the Droid is going to be sold much as an enterprise device, so why advertise to those users? Apple advertising is almost always androgynous, agnostic, and basically smooth and clean. I think mainly Apple wants the user to decide how to define the product, not predefine it and then hope to attract users who fit into that category.

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