Less Is More
I found a full page ad for the new SanDisk Sansa e200 MP3 player in Beat Magazine today. It was somewhat colourful and inviting, but all I was able to determine from it was that it had 20 hours of battery life. There was no mention of storage capacity, cost, supported formats, or anything else that one might consider a useful feature or accessory.
While flipping through the in-flight magazine on the way to Sydney I came across a multi-page ad for a new Nokia phone. Again, no mention of any kind of features, just a compellingly beautiful photo.
It seems that print media has finally gone the way of billboard advertising where these products are concerned. All they want to sell you is the brand and the lifestyle, the rest is not so important. Have we really reached the point where we don’t care what our mobile devices are capable of? I’m not sure I agree.
October 2nd, 2006 at 10:39 am
I disagree a bit, a successful brand acts as an emotional shortcut to convey all the qualities a item has without having to bamboozal people with the specs. Think of Apple - you know it’s going to have a decent feature set and design that melds form and functionality (If you have a laptop you also know the screen hinge will break at some point). The problem is when the brand is not strong enough to tell the consumer, then it tell you nothing (Sandisk - I thought you only made overpriced memory cards?!)
Feature lists in branding is confusing to everybody but us geeks.
Check out the classic “Microsoft redesigns iPod packaging” video that was actually made people inside Microsoft to highlight the problems of their packaging.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4313772690011721857