Recently, I was using a gym in a hotel I visit once a year. The management had replaced all the fitness machines and I was keen to discover what the latest equipment can do. There was better integrated TV, touch screen controls, and some local gamification – showing me my performance stats compared to other users over the last day. There were also lots of Facebook and Twitter logos trying to get me to be social with my gym stats. Another thing was new this year – a kind of fitness machine I had never seen anywhere before.
The new machine was a variation on a cross-trainer – the one where you stride purposefully, as if using ski poles. But this machine had footplates at strange angles. When I got on it, the action was one of twisting from the hip at the same time as striding forward. Interesting indeed. I’m sure the company that makes the machine would love me to start tweeting about it and discussing it with you but there is a big problem. That machine had no name. Screens full of mostly useless social logo clutter, but no name. Not printed on it, not on screen.
I discussed this with a colleague and we tried to think up names for it. She came up with one based on the movement. I won’t repeat it here – it sounds similar to wincing, which is what I might have been doing if I had stayed on it very long. But why would we try to find a name for it? Simple – we wanted to tell some of our colleagues about the new machine. That old school process, dear marketers, is called word of mouth recommendation. It’s hard to achieve a good net promoter score if one person cannot promote your machine to another because they don’t know what to call it.
I suspect this is the beginning of a problem we are going to see a lot of in the internet of things world. There will be new kinds of products and in the rush to just get them out there, companies will fail to name them. That is understandable, time to market counts. What is not forgivable is a CMO who use spends developer time and agency budget on superficial social integration that nobody will use, while failing to get the basics of marketing right.
Pizza drone, vaping device, iWatch – the list of emerging IoT terms is starting to grow. Job #1 for product marketers must be to create strong thing names. Without them we will all be at a loss for words. You cannot sell what we cannot communicate.