What’s Your Better Business Reality?

By Tim Miles, Wizard of Ads Partner

Regardless of the stage your product/service/business is in, consider its better reality if you want to be successful.

I was reminded of the late HBS professor Theodore Levitt’s principle of marketing myopia again yesterday when reading Dave Caolo’s excellent blog, 52 Tiger.

Speaking of the iPad in his post iPhone gloating, Dave wrote:

It was no accident that when Steve Jobs first demonstrated the iPad, he was sitting, cross-legged, in an easy chair. Anyone who ever tried to do the same with a laptop was struck at how appealing that scene was. The iPad offers the Internet that people want in a cozy, book-like form factor.

In fact, a recent Nielsen study revealed that 7 out of 10 people use a tablet while watching TV. Fifty-seven percent use a tablet in bed.

Haley is thinking like a geek, but we geeks represent a small portion of computer customers. Most shoppers want a computer for the tasks described above. For them, the iPad is a causal device for casual computing, while netbooks never evolved past, “Ooh, look. It’s a tiny laptop.”

Levitt’s principle was essentially to distill your product/service/business down to what your product really did for people or allowed them to do.

People didn’t want a small laptop, as Asus believed, but rather people wanted a better way to interact with Facebook, email, eBay, books and a few Angry Birds.

Apple understood that.

Click to read more.