I have a Rio Cali mp3 player. Have had it since 2004. It had a whopping 256 MB capacity, and an optional 500 MB SD card brought it to ¾ GB. But the sound was great, and it held enough songs for running. My little Cali used a single AAA battery, ran forever, and had flash memory. I sweated on it, dropped it (more than a few times)—but the only thing that could do it in was my change to a 64-bit operating system.

Why? No drivers, no support.

Why was the iPod everywhere?

It seems Rio had long ago been eclipsed by the iPod, which first came out in 2001. There were 5GB players 2 years before the iPod, like the PJB-100. There were indestructible little flash-drive players like my Rio Cali. But they all tried to be “better” in some way. More and more memory. Smaller and smaller form factor. Radios. Voice recorders.

I despised the iPod. Its hard drive made it useless for running. Its proprietary battery meant I might as well buy a new one every year. It was pricey relative to the competition. As someone who researches and obsesses over every technology purchase, it made no sense to me. But there it was, everywhere.

Experience as strategy

I learned why from the best marketing book of the past 5 years—Adaptive Path’s Subject to Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World. In it you’ll learn that being the best is not a strategy.  That way of thinking hearkens back to the world of industry when “businesses sought technology, features, and optimizations to maintain or increase an advantage over their competitors. But the value of investing solely in those things has reached an end.”

So what takes the place of being better? Experience as strategy. Does your product mesh with “the way people move through their lives”? Before the iPod, how did people get songs on an mp3 player? They ripped them from CDs and used a program to convert and move them to the player. Apple’s genius was in empathizing with its users. What did they want?

As Subject to Change puts it, “Apple clearly had an experience strategy for the iPod from the outset: all your music, any time, anywhere…In fulfilling this goal, Apple’s genius wasn’t the design of form or interface, but in the design of the entire system that supports the media consumer.” They placed functionality across the system where it was appropriate: the iPod let you play music, iTunes let you browse and add audio, and the Music Store let you buy media. No extraneous functionality on the iPod—no radio (clashes with the strategy of your media), no voice recording (who uses that?), and no wifi until iPod Touch (when it made sense with the strategy of your media, anywhere).

Not about brand

The iPod and its experience brought Apple back into the limelight. It was not that much of a “brand”—best remembered for its breakthrough 1980s ads from 20 years prior.

Remember the Apple Newton? It made the mistake of stuffing unnecessary features into a large form factor. The inventor of the Palm Pilot, on the other hand, carried a block of wood that matched the size of his colleagues’ shirt pockets. When anyone suggested new features, he challenged them: where would it go on this block of wood? Again, the thought was always about how people moved through their lives with the device.

Adaptive Path makes it clear that an experience strategy is not a brand strategy. Brand begins with the company: here are our values, here are our attributes, and here’s how we project them to consumers. Brand, they say, is rooted in 19^th- and 20^th-century manufacturing of making and selling products. Brand is still important; however, “products aren’t interesting in and of themselves, but only as interfaces to larger systems.” Experience strategy is “about contributing to a desirable experience, helping people accomplish what they want to get done.”

So the next time you think about what you or your client wishes to project to a consumer, turn it around. Empathize! First of all, who cares what you want to project? Second, will you get far if you view people as consumers (ie, a simple means to make a profit)? What are your customer’s motivations and behaviors? What context do they live in? What do they want to accomplish today? How can you design an experience that will help them get it done? How can you help them move through their lives a little more gracefully?