Thursday, April 29, 2010

Purposeful Exclusion of Non-Customers

To All Presenters:

To be successful your product or service must be designed to purposefully exclude large numbers of people. If you try to do everything for everyone you'll find you do very little very well. The end result is a mediocre offering and a lot of alienated people.

The best promotions have a well-defined target audience, the best companies support their core business above all else and the best products do one thing well.

You don't have to please everyone, and nor should you try.

The Scion xB is a great example of this concept. The original xB was an econo-box on wheels that was either passionately loved or viciously scorned by all who viewed it. The benefit of this dichotomy was the vehicle created instant apostles - people who who would pontificate upon its glorious merits at any given opportunity. Given the volume of persons who had few complimentary things to say about the xB, there was much opportunity for boisterous discussion - and so the interwebs and other assorted media exploded with free advertising for Scion. However, after the initial launch of the xB to cult-like response, the product line experienced a series of redesigns intended as concessions to the haters - beefier engine, added weight, rounded edges and so that which was kooky became blase.

The result was not the hoped-for mass migration of tweens to the new offering, but rather 16 consecutive months of sales losses for the automaker. Scion lost their apostles by trying to appeal to people who didn't like them in the first place, and arguably never would.

In 2007 Scion sales dropped 25%.

THE POINT: There is only one Swiss Army Knife - don't waste an opportunity trying to be everything to everyone.

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