And notice how what he does in this bit, he actually sells
to us his goals, his values, his criteria for decision making.
He wants batteries that integrate well, and this is not necessarily
what the audience was thinking in the beginning of his presentation.
He is trying to first sell to us his criteria and
then, only then, to sell his product.
Let me show you another example, the iPhone presentation,
the very first iPhone.
And in the beginning of his presentation, Steve produced this chart.
And he said well, you see regular, normal phones, what they call dumb phones,
they are not very smart, but they are kind of okay to use.
But things that they call smartphones, yes, they are way smarter.
But they're also very hard to use, even for simple stuff,
like sending a text message, you are having hard times doing that.
And where we want to be, we want to be in that quadrant,
we want to be super smart and we want to be very easy to use.
So, once again, he's selling his criteria first and he's contrasting his product
with the competition, and he actually had a number of slides with.
And these are of course all the guys that he is fighting against.
And this is his product which only looks good in
comparison to the competition, right.
So, another example from the MacBook Air presentation,
which begins with a presentation of a Sony computer.
A Sony laptop TZ Series which has all kinds of characteristics.
It has certain thickness, certain screens, certain keyboard, etc.
And, well, we like the wight,
the weight is sort of okay, the rest we can do better.
And, of course, at least as far as thickness is concerned, this is the Sony's
thickness and the green one is the MacBook Air.
And actually what's even more, our thick part is
still thinner than their thinnest part.
So, once again, this is an example that the product only
looks good in comparison to other existing products.
Now, a bit of warning here and this comes from Tyler Cowen,
an economist who blogs at the Marginal Revolution blog,
which I read myself and wholeheartedly recommend to you.
And Tyler Cowen here says that every time you're telling this good versus
evil story, you are lowering your IQ by ten points and I would argue,
the IQ of your audience as well.
So what does he mean by that?
He is talking about something which is called the Straw Man Fallacy.
This is where people construct a fight which is just not fair,
because, you see, nobody is sitting and comparing this car to that car.
Those people interested in car restorations clearly will take the old
car, the rest of the audience will take the new car, no questions asked.
You don't need to do this comparison, this is just stupid.
And this is thing number one, thing to remember,
your competition should have at least a chance to win,
otherwise this fight is just not very interesting to watch.
It's too predictable, right?
And for number two, nobody is actually choosing between just two things.
For example, in my own experience we were doing this presentation
about how do we fight forest fires.
And, you see, forest fires are of course an objective problem.
But this, once again, is nobody else's problem.
Most people are not interested in this.
But we are talking to a specialized audience,
people who are in charge of putting out forest fires.
And what they choose in between is they are thinking, well, I can have a bunch
of foresters walking around and putting out fires at very early stage.
Thing number one, I can have imagery from satellites,
and see fires on satellite images.
I can use airplanes, airplanes are expensive,I can use drones
to fly around and to watch out for forest fires.
And our solution was very different from all this and
we had to understand how do we compare to foresters, satellite,
airplanes, drones etc., and what our strengths are.
And in our presentation, we were talking about all those four things.
We were actually trying to help the audience to make the best decision
possible because we believed that our
product was way superior to all of those choices.
So don't settle for just two choices because the choice,
oftentimes, is not that easy.
Okay, what if I cannot mention the competition?
People ask me all the time,
what if I don't want to bad-mouth to disparage my fellow competitors?
Well, there are a few things that you still can do.
Thing number one, you can talk about the traditional, the standard,
the regular, the ordinary laptop and
compare your product to what you call an industry standard.
Well, good enough, maybe good enough for
TV, probably not good enough for the live presentation.
I would argue that there is actually a much better thing to do.
You can compare your product, or
rather its certain characteristics to the everyday objects.
But, of course, you have to have a bit of surprise here.
For example, Steve here,
is taking his brand new MacBook Air out of a paper envelope.
So, the message is that the computer is so thin, it fits into
a paper envelope, which, of course, was surprising at the time.
Another example, a product is smaller than a pack of gum.
So a pack of gum is shown in a bad light here and
our MP3 player is in a slightly better light.
It's lighter than a stack of quarters.
So, once again, favorable comparison.
So you don't have to talk about competition, but
then you need to find some everyday objects for comparison
Alexei KapterevLomonosov MSU BS
