What else will it take for computer companies to prosper in the future?
Winning companies will help people maintain their personal rates of change. The speed at which computer technology changes -- the speed at which Gateway operates -- is unreal. We change parts to the line every three hours. We change product configurations every three days. We change prices every day. If memorychip prices drop, our prices drop. If we get an unexpected production efficiency, our prices drop.
That's why I love the direct channel. We talk to 100,000 people a day -- people calling to order a computer, shopping around, looking for tech support. Our Web site gets 1.1 million hits per day. The time it takes for an idea to enter this organization, get processed, and then go to customers for feedback is down to minutes. We've designed the company around speed and feedback.
But isn't that the problem with computers? People are dazed and confused by all the change.
Complaining that technology changes fast is like complaining that rocks are hard; it's true but useless. I was just at a conference where a senior executive from EDS talked about the "tyranny of choice." Tyranny? We see it as liberation.
Go back to what I said earlier. Everybody can construct their own reality. People can pace how much they know about technology change to their tolerance for change. If you want to live in a world where there's almost no change in technology, you can do it. You just restrict how often you visit the media. If you want to live in a world where computer technology makes one big change every 18 months or so, you can do that too. Or you can go much faster. Someone told me that an innovation in digital technology gets produced somewhere every three seconds. I suppose that's your maximum fly-by speed.
We act as a technology broker for customers, regardless of their personal rates of change. We don't expect our customers to operate on the ragged edge of technology, except for the die -- hard enthusiasts. Our job is to monitor the technology -- change market, broker the best components in the world, and deliver the right computer systems for that moment in time.
Technology companies are all trying to compete on more than technology. They want to create brands. What will it take to build a brand in the future?
Building a brand requires a "fusion" strategy. In physics, fusion is a process that compresses atoms and produces more energy than it takes to do the compression. In marketing, fusion takes two contradictory constructs, pushes them together, and produces a new construct whose "energy" exceeds either one of its constituent parts.
We practice fusion here. Gateway is Silicon Prairie -- we fuse computers and cows. It doesn't make any sense; the two constructs are wonderfully at odds. So why does Silicon Prairie work? Because it fuses people's desires to connect to salt-of-the-earth values -- deep, spiritual, humanistic impulses -- with the desire to connect to breakthrough technology, which is in some ways the antithesis of those values. That's what distinguishes us from our competitors. Dell sells on product. We sell on spirit. It's hard to describe what an advantage those silly cow-spotted boxes are. People just love them.
So building a brand is about fusing substance with emotion?
It's also about consistency. Every company, once it assumes a brand identity, has to live with the moral consequences of that identity. A brand is a promise, and you have to keep your promises.
There's no difference between what we sell and who we are. The Gateway brand is really just the aggregate personality of the people who work here. We have 9,000 employees. Each of them has 7 close friends; each of those friends has 7 friends. That's 440,000 people -- and they all have email! We can't market a lie. We have to be cow-spotted everywhere, from how we build our machines to how we treat our people.
Gateway's ads almost always feature company employees and you do most of your creative work in-house. Is that because of this "consistency" issue?
Most of what's wrong with advertising would go away if companies understood that the first job of an ad is not to create a one-way communication with customers, but to enact conversations inside the company. At Gateway, advertising is a communication from the company to the company -- we talk to ourselves first. That means we often advertise in media we know our own people read over media that we know they don't read, even if other media might deliver a better audience.
You wouldn't believe the reaction when we run an ad that doesn't feel "Gateway." We get thousands of emails from our people. That means our employees become the customer's best friend. They won't let us lie or shade the truth; they'd get wildly insulted.
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