LIVEdigitally

Daily Archives: November 8, 2006

PC guy outlasts Mac guy, isn't it ironic?

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I read today that “Mac guy” (aka Justin Long) from the recent Apple commercials is not invited back to the next round of advertising.

A rep for Long confirms that his days as an Apple pitchman are over: “Every ad you see Justin in is for that previous time period only,” she tells Radar. “There’s no long-term deal with him.” She adds (somewhat implausibly, perhaps), “Justin’s a movie star, not a commercial guy.”

It seems that people didn’t really care for Mac guy. I like this theory over at AdJab:

Hey, maybe they’ll make HIM the new Mac guy (JT: him?), and show how a PC guy can become a Mac guy? (there it is)

Both TUAW and Gizmodo are polling readers to find new Mac guy. I’m with Angela and picked Zach Braff, but I think it’d be funnier if they picked that albino dude from Firewall (which was not only a poor movie, but had nothing to do with firewalls of any kind).

I myself am not “a” Mac guy (not even close to “the” Mac guy), but I do think there’s a bit of irony that he’s getting sacked.  Even if the campaign was unbelievably alienating to us PC folks, you’d think they’d just kill it entirely and start fresh. 

While consulting with a company this week, we got into a long discussion of the Mac/Apple brand and personality.  The iPod brand, for example, is cold. Its better than us.  You are, in fact, priveleged that you are permitted to buy an iPod.

I think of the Mac brand with terms like excellence, perfection, and detail-oriented.  As a person, Mac is not, in my opinion, unshaven and mocking. I like my Vaio, but why couldn’t Sony add an automatic light-up keyboard like the Macbook?  I recognize that many of the Mac faithful through the years includes the design/arts community, but I don’t see a shiny new Macbook Pro and think of a struggling artist.  To me, the Mac itself is the art they are creating (I just don’t want one as my computer, personally).

At the end of the day, Mac guy was smug, and smug is not cool or popular.  Smug gets punched in the face, or, like today, fired.

Like.com: great concept, if they can market it

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As is becoming more and more of the case these days, a new site or service launches, and it’s all anyone is talking about.  And here I am, following in the footsteps.  Sigh.

Over the last couple of years I’ve met senior executives from virtually every major electronics (and mainstream) retailer, and have learned a tremendous amount about consumers and how they shop (both online and offline).  For example, did you know that in traditional, married households the so-called “head of household” (read: man) makes less than 5% of all major purchasing decisions alone, whereas almost 90% of the decisions are made solo by the wife?  And I’m not being sexist here, I know there are tons of people and lifestyles that don’t fit this pattern.  But in the majority of US households, most spending in the home is done by the woman, without consulting the husband. 

Want another neat data point?  Men buy things based on features, descriptions, etc.  Women buy things visually.  You know how most online retailers work today?  Lots of descriptions, text, features and benefits, complemented with a few pictures. So what does this all add up to?  Most online shopping sites today are missing out on the majority of buyers.  What’s missing? The visuals.  Welcome to like.com.

Like.com (from Riya) is a visual shopping system.  There are a few hands-on reviews and commentary you can read (pick your favorite: ZDNet, GigaOm, TechCrunch, BusinessWeek, Robert Scoble, Thomas Hawk).  I’m going to skip the usual rigamarole of anaylizing how good their algorithms work, go check out one of the others’ for that.  Whether it’s perfect or not today, I generally have enough faith in engineers and entrepreneurs that they’ll continue to improve it to the point where it works as promised.  And if they don’t, well, someone else will come along instead.  Instead, I’m a bit more interested in the launch itself.

Right now, they have focused on fashion (a move Don Dodge likes).  If you go back and read above and recall that the biggest category of shoppers in the US is women, I think this is a phenomenal move.  I’ve seen other newfangled attempts to launch online stores, with wikis and whatis and kiwis and whatnot, but at the end of the day, in my opinion there is no opportunity for doing this in the tech market.  If you want to buy a digital camera or a Slingbox or a plasma, buy.com + amazon.com + cnet is sufficient for 90% of the market. 

But if a woman wants to buy shoes or purses online, the current offerings are in every way unsatisfactory.  Yeah, there’s some pictures and all, but it’s not enough.  It approaches the sale from a male perspective.  Like.com is the right approach to this huge, untapped market.  So now the question is, can they market the service correctly?

Robert Scoble and Mike Arrington give them praise for their methods of swamping the blogosphere (more details from the CEO himself).  I agree with them, they did hit the bloggers and hit them perfectly.  But my question is – did they hit the right blogosphere?  They sure got the Web 2.0 and technology bloggers abuzz.  And I’ll bet they got a ton of guys to hit the site today.  But I have a hunch their sales numbers are going to be dismal compared to their traffic.

Like.com needs to do some very aggressive viral and traditional marketing, and they need to do it to the right audience.  The traffic from today’s spike may well diminish to nothing very very quickly, unless all us technophiles are out there telling their wives and girlfriends about the site.  I’m sure they’ll own the term “visual shopping” in Google for a while, but who cares?  It’s not as if there are flocks of women googling that term right now (otherwise you’d already see different results from that term than you do today).

So congratulations on the launch, team Like.  You have built a potentially huge success.  Executing on it is a big challenge, and hopefully you’ll set your sights on the right market, because the one you are after did not hear about your site launch today.

UPDATE: Robert Scoble pointed out that in his interview with Munjal Shah, Like.com/Riya’s CEO, Munjah mentions an extensive press tour with fashion and consumer magazines.  Scoble also did a video demo of Like.com which you can check out as well.  But unlike Maryam, my wife does buy stuff online (and sells stuff too), however she didn’t have a great Like.com experience today – but I’m sure I can get her back to try again…