Earlier today, I read an editorial by marketer Laura Ries that reflected on the popularity of the iPhone. She offered that she’d originally believed that the iPhone would fail, because “convergence” is generally a bad idea, but owned up to the fact that the iPhone has been a success in spite of – not because of – it’s blending of a cell phone and a PDA. She then cited reasons she believed the iPhone took off (here’s a clue: “marketing”), and finished up by admonishing Apple to “keep it simple” and not continue to add functionality and features to the iPhone.

With all respect to a marketer that usually hits it out of the park, analysis-wise, I think she’s got a swing and a miss here. Here’s why…

While virtually every other device on the market is, as Laura puts it, a “convergence” device, the iPhone, oddly enough, is not. The iPhone is a universal developer platform – in other words, just like it’s kissin’ cousin, the personal computer, the iPhone is a “Swiss Army Knife” device – a tool that can be used in almost any way you can imagine. While my “Wagon Queen Family Truckster” Windows Mobile phone is an inelegant mashup of phone/PDA/computer/music player/battery hog – and performs none of those functions well, the iPhone was designed from the ground up as an integrated platform – allowing the seamless development of a virtuously unlimited number of applications that can do almost anything.

By trade, I’m a marketer, but in experience, I’m not just a marketer, but also a designer, an animator, a writer, and a entertainer. I’ve done all these things professionally, for most of my life. One of the things I’ve specialized in was software user interface design, and what we in the field call “human factors engineering,” or more simply, “usability.” The iPhone stands at the pinnacle of usability. (The Windows Mobile platform wallows at the bottom.) The beauty of the iPhone is that it is so well thought out. The gestures, the zooming, the dearth of buttons – all intuitive. The more intuitive something is, the less friction you encounter using it. Less friction = ease of use. As ease of use increases, the usefulness of a device does as well. Simply put, it is far easier to do even simple things (like make a call) on an iPhone than on a Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian, or Android device. Period.

Ms. Ries is correct when she cites the iTunes AppStore as the thing that made the iPhone take off like a rocket. Nothing like opening up a platform to free market enterprise and unbridled capitalism to stoke the fires of profit and increase market share. But what she fails to understand is that just as people buy apps to solve problems, and therefore buy hardware to run software, you must constantly improve hardware to keep up with the demands of software.

Bill Gates once famously opined that he could not envision a world where anyone would need more than 512KB of RAM in a computer. Today, even the cheapest PC comes with 2GB of RAM. (For the non-propellerheads in the audience, 2GB is the same as 2,097,152KB. PCs evolved to handle the demands of software, and software evolved to handle tasks that users wanted handled. It’s a simple as that.

Ries makes several points to show why she thinks that the iPhone is not the all-powerful dreadnaught that everyone thinks it is. She cites iPhone’s market share of the cell market (9%), Blackberry’s (17%), the rise of Netbooks, her KiSS (Keep it Simple, Stupid) philosophy, and the inability to use applications to advertise (?!) as reasons that the iPhone still might falter. I disagree. The iPhone is currently in the final year of a 3-year exclusive distribution agreement in the U.S. with AT&T – a move that might have helped iPhone get early market share by way of a partner who needed them as much as they needed a carrier – but a move that is now holding them back. (If I had a nickel for everybody that had asked me about getting iPhones on the Verison network…)

the iPhone is tool. Tools have form factors. Just like no two women seem to carry the same size purse, or pistonheads disagree over the best engine, there’s no need to narrow a market to a single form factor. I worked for a company back in the early 90s who’s CEO once told me they were in the CD-ROM game business. I replied, “No, you’re in the entertainment business. CDs are just a delivery mechanism…if you focus on the delivery platform, you’ll miss the Next Big Thing, and be out of business.” Guess what? He missed a little thing we call “Internet distribution” and his company is now one for the history books.

The thing about the iPhone is that it’s an elegant tool. Netbooks look cool, but as they stand now, I don’t see them used as a phone. Some people prefer separate gadgets. As for me, I prefer carrying one tool – not so many that I end up with Batman’s utility belt around my waist.

If you ask me, the iPhone has succeeded because it put ease of use ahead of everything else, and because of that, became the platform of choice for developers that saw it’s potential as a platform. Until and unless other phones take that same path, they will fail in the same way that other “convergence devices” have failed in the past.

Like Laura, I have no idea what the future will hold. However, I do know that new opportunities require more than just a cool gadget or an a+b approach – it takes people that are willing to come up with ways to solve problems that make life easier, and shun answers that create barriers or make things harder, rather than easier.

As a marketing guy, I believe the smartest thing I can do to stay sharp is to spend a part of each day keeping up with what others are doing – and saying – in the world of marketing. In particular, I like to look at TV ads (go figure), listen to commercial radio, flip through magazines, and read the trades. I also enjoy reading marketing blogs, especially those written by people whose opinions I respect and value. Exhibit A: Ries’ Pieces, a marketing blog penned by Laura Ries. Laura is a crack marketer in her own right (you’ve likely seen her on one of the cable news channels) and author, and is the daughter of Al Ries, for my money, one of the living ‘gods of marketing.’ The senior Ries, along with his then-partner, Jack Trout, wrote a couple of the most influential books on marketing ever, including Positioning, the bible for how to view your brand within your marketspace.

I was reading Laura’s blog the other day, and noted her comments on the re-packaging/re-branding of Tropicana orange juice. I hadn’t noticed that Tropicana had changed their packaging prior to this, so I made it a point to visit the refrigerated section of my local grocery emporium, just to see what all the hubbub was about.What I found was…interesting. My conclusion was that, while Ms. Ries makes some incredibly valid and insightful points, there were a couple of things she missed. To wit…

One of the things I do is design packaging. Packaging design is one part science, one part art, and one part alchemy, because you can design something that is both attractive and follows all the rules of behavioral science, and still end up with something that causes your product to fall into a black hole of invisibility on the shelf. This is the fate that befell Tropicana.

Aside from the stupidity, hubris, and arrogance of some CEO’s plan to completely revamp all their brands (a sure and certain sign of managerial arrogance in the vein of a dog marking their territory). Unless your sales are in the tank and you’ve got nothing to lose, changing an establish brand’s messaging, positioning, and branding is a fool’s errand. And yet, that’s exactly what Tropicana did.

Good brands evolve. To change a brand’s look and feel abruptly is essentially throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Laura cites a number of brand logos that have evolved recently. In every case, you can see a linnage between the old and the new. That’s as it should be – there’s a family resemblance between the old and the new, like a son resembles his father. The new Tropicana brand bears zero resemblance to it’s fore-bearer. None. Zip. Zilch. Nada. No straw in the orange. No emphasis on the fruit. Instead, we see a glass of orange juice (not an orange at all). The biggest text on the box states “100% orange” – while the brand name is twisted sideways, making it more difficult to read. On the old packaging, you couldn’t miss “Tropicana” – the name was the most prominent thing on the box outside the orange with the straw in it. On the new box, the designer chose what looks like Futura Medium as a typeface – possibly the most soul-less face ever designed. It screams “generic!” The old box used a face that evokes Carmen Miranda, Rio de Janerio, and Xavier Cugat. The old face is fun. The old face is distinctive.  The old face is “tropical.” The new typeface is none of that.

Here’s the central problem – there’s nothing wrong with the old Tropicana packaging. It’s attractive, distinctive, and has that much sought-after, elusive quality that I like to call “it stands out from the crowd.” Seriously. Go to your local supermarket and visit the refrigerated section where they keep the juice. Stand back, and see what catches your eye. If you’re like me, you’ll notice that the new Tropicana packaging is nigh on invisible. It was actually kind of weird, in that “these are not the droids you seek” kind of way. My eye went right by the Tropicana section and stopped on the Minute Maid and Florida Natural packages. I had to scan the section again before I even saw the Tropicana boxes. Not good. Then I realized why. The Tropicana packaging re-design makes the product look like a generic, house brand. That’s bad. That’s VERY bad, especially for a ‘premium’ brand. When Joe or Jane Consumer is in your aisle to make a purchase, the last thing you want is for your packaging to challenge them to a game of “Where’s Waldo.”

Let’s get real. Until Tropicana came along, orange juice was thought of as a commodity. Tropicana did for orange juice what Starbucks did for coffee – created a nationally-recognized brand around a product that tasted better, and was worth a little extra coin. The last thing in the world you want to do for a premium brand is to make its packaging look like that of a discount brand.

Some years back, I was approached by a software publisher to create a dozen or so packages for some games and utilities. He wanted packaging that helped set the price point at around $50 a pop. Set the price point with packaging, you say? You’re not suggesting we print the price on the package are you? Nope. For you see the look and size of the package can say a lot about the product’s perceived cost and it’s worth to the consumer.

I’d designed retail packaging for software products for years before this particular project, but it had always been for the kinds of apps you expect to pay $499 and up. Some years back, Walmart had established a “standard” for packaging for their stores which set the width and height (so they could standardize their shelving and merchandising in the software section) and the industry went along with the idea. This stopped guys like Microsoft from releasing products with boxes full of air, designed to take up so much shelf space that they drove the competitors, quite literally, off the shelves. (Think back to the launch packaging for Microsoft Excel…it was a double-wide package, filled mostly with air.) With a standardized face dimension, other factors had to come into play to help the consumer determine the “worth” of the product, packaging-wise…the thickness of the box and the sophistication of the graphic design were the two big ones.

My client wanted some packaging that screamed “this product is worth $50!” Conversely, he didn’t want a package that was so slick that it left the consumer with the impression that the product should sell for $99 or more – because then they’d wonder “what’s wrong with this product, and why is it selling for such a low price.” When expectations don’t match perception, it’s easy to lose a sale.

That’s the problem with the Tropicana boxes. They look like discount-brand, house-brand, cheap goods that you’d more likely find at a dollar store (not that there’s anything wrong with that) as opposed to a premium brand for which you’d be willing to pay a premium price. There’s nothing wrong with freshening a package design. But there’s everything wrong with a radical rethink of a successful brand. That’s brand suicide.

According to Laura, Tropicana has bowed to consumer pressure (read: “their sales fell off a cliff when the new boxes were launched”) and have decided to go back to the old packaging. I hope somebody’s ox gets gored over that one. Unfortunately, it’s not likely to be the CEO’s – the person that likely put this train wreck in motion. I’m sure some hapless marketing manager or art director will get the ax instead. (In chess, you can sacrifice pawns – never the king.) Still, if this is the kind of brilliant marketing we can expect from the PepsiCo CEO, it shouldn’t take long for more stunts like this to cause a major shakeup, and a changing of the guard at the top of the food chain.

[A side note: If Tropicana is looking for really stupid ideas, they can always come out with a "Tropicana Frozen Concentrate" version of their "not from concentrate" product. That's the only thing that I can think of that would kill their positioning faster than what they did here.]

So how does this affect your brand? During the dot-com boom, there was one S.F.-based startup that adopted the slogan, “find out what sucks…don’t do that.” While that’s a bit rude and crude, the sentiment is sound. Throwing out a well-established brand and package for the sake of worshiping at the altar of “new” is a stupid idea. Refresh = good. Replace = bad. Learn that lesson (that Tropicana missed) and you’ll be one step ahead of the game.

Way too often, marketing seems like 1 part mysticism, 2 parts voodoo, 2 parts common sense, and an extra-large dolop of B.S. People that think things through, explain the rationale behind things, and provide a framework for determining what’s good – and what’s bad – in marketing do our entire industry a service. 

One of the most influential (and dare I say brilliant) marketers is actual a family of marketers. The Ries family has been pioneering common sense in marketing for years, first with a series of books by Al Ries and Jack Trout, then with Al and his daughter Laura Ries Brown. Books like Positioning, Marketing Warfare, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, and The Fall of Advertising & the Rise of PR have altered the ways marketers think about their craft. I don’t necessarily agree with every position the famiy Ries stakes out, but I always find their work to be thought-provoking, and, more often than not, find myself agreeing with them.

Recently, I stumbled onto Laura’s blog – Ries’ Pieces - and I once again find her insights thought provoking. Her latest entry discusses the evils of line extensions – something both father and daughter have railed against for years. If you’re not sure what a “line extension” is, set your WaBaK machine for the 1960s. If you went into a “convenience” store (what today we refer to as a 7-Eleven, or in the vernacular, a “Stop-N-Rob”) and asked for a “Coke” – your biggest decision would be to choose between an 8 ounce (Regular) and a 12 ounce (King Size) bottle, of the glass variety. (I am among the Coca-Cola Cognoscenti that can tell the difference between the taste of an 8 oz. and 12 oz. Cokes in glass bottles. Don’t even get me started on the difference between the taste of cane sugar and that abomination that is “High Fructose Corn Syrup.”) Today, ask for a Coke and you have to choose between Coke, DIet Coke, Cherry Coke, Vanilla Coke, Lime Coke, Diet Caffeine-Free Coke, Diet Coke Plus, Diet Cherry Coke, Coke Zero, and so on, and so forth. Everybody’s doing it, so that must make it right…right?

Not according to Ries. Or me, for that matter. 

Back in the Swingin’ 60s, Coke had a product – Tab – that was (essentially) Diet Coke. It was a cola-flavored drink. And it had all of ONE calorie. I thought it tasted like used anti-freeze (or at least what I imagined that used anti-freeze would taste like, sans the glow-in-the-dark green color), and had no use for it. But at the very least, Tab had it’s own brand, it’s own identity. Diet Coke, on the other hand, is a bat – neither bird nor rodent. It’s Coke, but Not Coke. All Some of the taste, and None of the Calories. 

Years ago, I worked for a software company, a game publisher to be exact. The CEO told me he was in the “CD-ROM Game Business.” I argued, that he was, in fact, NOT in the CD-ROM game biz, but in fact, he was in the entertainment business. The CD-ROM part was the distribution method, and not the market itself. When game distribution changed from CD-ROMs to online, his company was unprepared for the switch, and was unable to transition. They were subsumed into another company, and faded from the market. The company dabbled in both a variety of titles, and a few line extensions. Interestingly, the line extensions never sold as well as the original titles. 

I’m in the process of starting another company – a manufacturing company that will build and market a variety of accessories for musicians. In the process, I’m having to decide what my little company wants to be when it grows up. As a marketer, I’ve learned that focusing on something specific makes it easier to own a piece of a market. When starting a new company, it’s easier to be the expert in chrome-plated wing nuts, than it is to try to be a mogul in all things fasteners. However, product specificity can severely limit your market. The trick is to come up with a focus for what your company does, and then focus on best-of-breed products within that marketspace. 

For instance, I came up with an idea for a really cool guitar stand (we’ll launch – Really Soon Now – at www.guitarfurniture.com, if you’re interested). However, I know that while there is a market for guitar stands, that’s a market with some really big, well-funded players. However, I quickly realized that there’s nobody playing in the high-end of the market, and I suspect that there’s a good bit of money to be made there. Rather than focusing on a single product (i.e.: a guitar rack that will hold six instruments), or a huge market (say, guitar stands in general), I’ve chosen to focus on a product line that will target a segmentof the guitar stand market – the high-end segment. This seems to me to be the right compromise between focusing on a specific market, while not getting TOO focused, where you have no room to grow, and make money. 

Time will tell if I have the right idea on my market focus. Too broad, and I’m tilting at windmills. Too specific, and I’m chasing a market too small to be profitable. 

So when it comes to your marketing, how do you stack up? Are you canibalizing your own market with line extentions that only appear to be the lynchpins of a sound strategy? Are you focused too tightly on a market, and find yourself leaving money on the table? Or have you carefully examined your market, and figured out the best way you can stake out your own territory in it?