Watching today’s Apple iPhone 5 event on the live streams across the web and the fever being generated by its fan-base is an infectious thing. You just can’t help being swept away by the passionate showmanship of the presentation, the slick handovers, the way the numbers are presented.
Whilst the iPhone 5 may be Apple’s worst kept secret to date it doesn’t detract from the fact that it will sell by the bucketload despite that all the facts, all the leaked shots have been seen well in advance.
And yet if you turn to your own industry, whether it be CRM, BPM, Telecomm, Data…you can’t help wondering why we can’t do the same.
It’s true we don’t all have the same fanboi fever for our products like Apple does and yet year on year the industry conferences dwindle in number because there is a distinct lack of passionate evangelism shown. Conference events have become another cog in the rather slow moving marketing machine; we turn up, we present via autocue, we go home. The closest we have to Tim Cook is Marc Benioff.
Business people are consumers, too. The same infectious enthusiasm works with us. We want to see a show and be stimulated as much as anyone. Maybe our passionless conferences and PowerPoints are a relic of the Industrial Age, but work doesn’t have to be dry or boring. Wow us.
Solve for Interesting
Seth Godin Blog
Jeremiah Owyang
IT Redux
HBR Blog
Clay Shirky Blog
SocialMedia Today
Chris Dixon
Brian Solis
Chris Brogan
The TIBCO Blog
Venture Beat
Engadget
Wired
Lifehacker
Mashable
The Verge
GigaOM
TechCrunch
The difference between the iPhone5 and enterprise software is the amount of effort each requires. To be equally excited about enterprise software requires a naive knowledge. I can go to the store and get an iPhone and start using it immediately. For enterprise software, especially ERPs, WMS, CRM, BPM, etc. I have to build a giant business case, recruit and retain a team of equally devoted zealots, build broad based approval for the need, get approval to investigate, publish an RFI/RFP/RFQ, slog through pages and pages of responses, suffer the derision of those naysayers that don’t think we should change systems, select a few vendors to shortlist, finally select one, pay extortion level amounts of money and then slog through months and months of implementation, training and project delays to finally get my first peek at what it does for my company. Talk about killing the joy. It is a wonder anyone even considers this stuff at all.
Like the Techcrunch article suggests, it’s all about the turn.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/13/the-iphone-5-event/
Whilst the iPhone is in a completely different space and is a consumer commodity the fact remains that business software remains seen as some sort of jurassic lumbering beast despite the agile picture it tries to paint. But that’s our fault because all we produce is 1960s style ‘open university’ YouTube videos, slidedecks with pie charts. Where is the passion behind the product ?
Do you see Apple releasing marketing for iOS and Mountain Lion like we do ?
They use Keynote for their presentations because of their belief in their product. They truly evangelise. We just translate evangelism as turn-key marketing and it shows in our conference events. Lacklustre business presentations and carbon-copy case studies.
Instead of changing we instead try to bolt on ‘gamification’ as something new, again it’s an attempt to look cool, grasping for the latest fad rather than reinvent the way we do it completely.
We seriously need to motivate our marketing efforts, and unfortunately that means accelerating retirement for a lot of people who are just coasting.
Reblogged this on BPM redux.