How Airport Express Saved My Marriage

For what seemed like forever I had been trying to convince my wife that we needed to buy an Airport Express.

For one thing, there’s this dead spot in our house where the main Airport base station doesn’t reach - conveniently it’s in the family room where the stereo is. For another thing, I wanted one we could take on trips where there was a wired connection in the hotel room, but no WiFi. After all, once you’ve blogged from bed, you can never go back to blogging from the desk again.

It wasn’t until a week before our annual New Years Day brunch when my wife asked “is there a way we could get music on your computer…. on the stereo” that the justification for the gizmo made sense to her. It was that ‘a-ha’ moment we all get when a new piece of technology makes perfectly clear sense to us.
Now playing our iTunes playlists on the stereo in the family room is as natural to us as turning on the TV, and we don’t know how we lived without it.

It occurred to me then that this was the secret behind most tech success stories. It’s not what we knew we needed, but what we didn’t realize we needed until it showed up on apple.com/store.

Confession: I was, and still am a marketing/public relations consultant working with tech companies. I’ve seen dozens of product launches. I always ask myself (and much more quietly, my client) “yes, but is this something we needed?”

If the answer is yes, the product usually hits a home run. If, as it invariably is, the answer is no, the product sinks like a rock.

The ‘a-ha’ moment is when you first realize ‘where have you been all my life?’ It’s not about some marketing double-talk designed to convince you it’s something you never realized you needed. It’s the thing you really never realized you needed until you discovered it.

Think of Expose. The first time you pressed F11 and thought ‘holy moley… THAT’S EXACTLY IT.’ Now whenever I’m working on a Windows computer it drives me up the wall that I can’t just hit F11. It’s those products that become more than just a toy but part of the way you relate to the underlying technology that are the home runs. It’s the difference between tabbed browsing and Sherlock.

The other tech marketing secret I’m about to reveal is that the best products, the one’s that are ‘must haves’ the day they come out, focus on benefits, not features. Think of the aforementioned Airport Express. Features: small, portable, audio-out jack. Benefits: fits in that tight space behind the bookcase where you have your stereo, you can take it with you on a business trip and work from anywhere in your hotel room and now you can play those 2,000+ songs on your PowerBook anywhere in the house.

It’s a general rule of thumb in the tech marketing-verse that most PC manufacturers get caught up in features (faster hard-drive!!!) while Apple focuses on benefits (get to your pictures quicker).

So the next time Steve Jobs says “just one more thing…” take a look and ask yourself, now that I know what it is, can I imagine how it will fit into my life? And how can I possibly live without it? And more importantly, will it save my marriage?