Trust in the Future

I first started thinking about the touch and the feel of a product about 10 years ago, when Lexus gave us the task of establishing a luxury car in the United States. We saw the car, and it was an incredible vehicle. Its performance was unbelievable. When we talked to consumers about what they wanted, they liked its functionality -- but they loved its sensuality. They told us that they live in a world that is cruel and heartless. Companies fire them; their parents are divorced. They've got nowhere to turn. So they want to be surrounded by sensuality -- by things that they can touch and by things that touch them.

Look at the iMac. If you've got one on your desk, people want to touch it. They want to lean on it. They want to fondle it. You never see anyone act like that with a run-of-the-mill PC. We've moved from hard-edge design to soft-touch sensuality.

This absolutely applies to services as well as to products. When it comes to services, not only do you want something that you like to touch, you want something that touches you -- and that has a personal touch. Hallmark cards touch you. That's emotional marketing. Or think about the opposite -- a touch that is so impersonal that it practically drives you crazy. These days, if you try to call an airline to get information about your flight (Is it on time? Is it delayed?), all you get is an endless number of computerized voices. You absolutely cannot talk to a person, and in the end, it doesn't matter what information you're actually seeking because you're totally frustrated by the experience. No matter what the content is, the experience is depersonalized, and it hasn't touched you.

Trustmarks are a mystery. Trustmarks can't be pinned down: They have a sense of mystery. Brand management at Procter & Gamble was built on expressing the functional benefits of each product to consumers in a clear, compelling, consistent, competitive, media-intense way. I don't think that's needed anymore. Now what you've got to do is create belief -- and a part of having a belief is recognizing its sense of mystery.

For example, I have no idea how the performance of an iMac compares with the performance of an IBM PC. Steve Jobs has never told me. But you know what? When I was looking to purchase a computer, Apple made my choice really easy: hot pink, green, purple, orange, or blue. Apple changed all of the factors that I use to make a computer-purchasing decision -- because in my reptilian brain, the key word that relates to the word "computer" is "fear." I am scared shitless of computers. I don't know how they work. I don't know the vocabulary. I don't even know how to buy one. Fear.

And then Apple offered me a billboard: It showed a hot-pink computer, an orange one, and all of the other flavors. And underneath them was just one word: "Yum." Complete mystery. Complete sensuality. And I said, "Right! I'll take the hot-pink one!" Why? Because the iMac is all about mystery. I get to fill in what it means to me -- I get to give it my own interpretation.

What differentiates Ray-Ban sunglasses from their competitors? I don't know if they're really better shades or not -- and I don't care. I just know that when I put on Ray-Bans, I'm a cooler guy. It's the mystery that captures the emotional connection between a product and a customer.

Too much information can kill the romance. Brands are all about information, and we've mastered that. But today, the thing people have the least of is time. They no longer have time to absorb a ton of information. And the fact is, you don't have to inundate people with information anymore. If your goal is to give people information, then send them to your Web site -- because the information is all there.

We are just now in the process of launching a hair-care product for Procter & Gamble called "Physique." It's a huge idea; it's already gone national, and it's going to go global. But here's the thing: Instead of spending 90% of our money on a television plan, we spent 30% of it on TV and invested the rest in a Web site. Physique is already P&G's most-visited Web site. We've already converted more than 500,000 people in the United States into members of the Physique club through the site. But the best part is that the average amount of time that people spend on that Web site is about 11 minutes! Eat your heart out, 30-second TV commercial! We've got the consumers. We're talking to them; they're talking to us.

My point is this: The mystery that intrigues you about a product in the first place is much more important than the information that you get about that product. Look at the folks at Harley-Davidson. They are incredibly smart. In performance terms, their bike is actually pretty average. Imagine if someone from P&G were at Harley-Davidson -- what would he do? Probably the first thing is a side-by-side comparison between Harley and its fastest competitor. Let's say that competitor is BMW. And because they're really smart in R&D at Harley, they'd find a way to build a bike that was faster. Then they'd run an ad that shows a race between a Harley and a BMW, and the Harley would win.