Shut up Grandpa, this is the future of reading.
When Amazon announced the Kindle DX earlier this month, I had a conversation with a woman who believed the Kindle would be an immediate failure. This woman was 27-years-old, well-read and an English major at a university with a celebrated creative writing program. She aspires to become a successful fiction writer. These are her words:
“Who wants to read on one of those things? I certainly never would. Besides, nothing will replace the feeling of the printed page”
My reaction? “I agree. But remember, we don’t matter.” Now, of course she does matter—to her fiance, to her family, to her student loan creditors—but not to the future of the Kindle. And that’s the catch with marketing. Often, mostly, almost always, it’s not about you.
Too often, as marketers, we find ourselves thinking about what we’d read, what we’d eat, where we’d live. When, in reality, we should be thinking about what the target market is looking for. Amazon does not expect a generation of avid book readers raised on the addictive touch, feel and smell (ohhh, the smell) of printed paper and ink to fall in love with the Kindle. They expect their kids to. Or at least their younger cousins. Was your 40-year-old mother the first person on your street with a CD player? A DVD player? An Ipod? Of course not, it was your older brother who bought one after saving all summer. And your parents thought it was ridiculous. The future lies in the youth…especially in technology.
Unless you are the target market, take yourself out of the equation and point your marketing in the direction it should go, towards the target.
UPDATED: Seth Godin agrees with me, sort of.
