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Comment by thesash | Hacker News Reader

Consumers don't care about product specs, they care about their dreams, goals, and aspirations.

Compare an iPhone commercial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EP1YAatv1Mc

to a DROID commercial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-K71MpwCko

Apple commercial => fun, likable personality using the product, and benefiting from it.

Droid commercial => OMG uber technology forged from a robot beast with a processor and LTE and a bunch of other stuff. 0 product. 0 benefits.

Droid is selling technology, Apple is selling an experience. It seems so obvious which one a mainstream consumer with no interest in the innards of their phone is going to choose. Google understands this concept, judging by their own marketing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqiSE-ukmgc

Maybe now that they've acquired Motorola they'll knock some sense into their marketing strategy

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While I agree that everyday consumers couldn't care less, I think "dreams, goals and aspirations" is giving Apple way too much credit. Apple ads are cool. People want cool.

I actually don't think the Droid ads are so misguided. Look at ads for pickup trucks, sports cars and the like. People do respond to ads like that, they're just more demographically specific than Apple's ones.

Its funny how picky you get when choosing between these commercials. You should have chosen one of the Galaxy's commercials and it does a great job of explaining everything, too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWnunavN4bQ

Samsung has great marketing, picking a fight is a fantastic strategy. However, this comercial still sells features not benefits. Imagine how much more powerful the comercial would be if they could capture the benefit to the samsung user. How does having 4G improve my life?

When I see this Samsung commercial or the Droid commercial from my original post, I can just picture the company execs giving their ad agency a list of features that need to be included in the commercial, because the features are what's important to the company. The problem is, customers don't care about features at all, they care about what those features allow them to do.

I'm really not sure this is true. I'd like to see evidence of it because certainly the people I know who buy android do it for features. That's also how they evangelize. It seems to work. Apple has a great marketing strategy but that doesn't mean the best competitive response is to mimic it.

Google's own Nexus commercials are a much better analogue to Apple's "dreams, goals, and aspirations" commercials. See the Galaxy Nexus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdD8s0jFJYo or Nexus 7: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2XmymhCdHU

To be fair, I'm a developer and I don't care about those features, either. Android ceding the browser wars (at least until Chrome is the default) matters so much more to me than the kind of difference you need benchmarks to notice.

You've been pretty disappointed with the iPhone launch it seems. Thanks for letting us all know, Mr.Staunch Apple defender =)

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