23rd Apr 2004
Hot House iPod
(”Hot House” as in the Dizzy Gillespie tune floating through my iPod
on this Metro North train, threatening to rain, Friday morning …)
Quick New York thought before I get started:
Guy walks into his sweltering 3rd floor flat. Sees a juvenile rat.
He chuckles to himself as 20-odd cockroaches (some of them with “Hells
Roaches” jackets) surround the rodent and beat the crap out of it.
Insect Gangs. Everything with DNA is tough here.
So Gucci is offering a $185 USD iPod case.
This is a sign of something. We don’t see Prada iPaq cases. You
don’t see designer cases for some mp3 player from Dell. It’s
impressive: there are enough iPods out there to make this worth it for
Gucci, and it doesn’t matter that it’s a somewhat limited machine with a
black & white screen. The iPod is a tech item that crosses over
very well into other worlds (fashion, in this case). There aren’t
many bits of tech that become so pervasive, so fast.
So it’s a credit to Apple. The iPod is a household word. The Treo
600 is not. (don’t get me wrong, my wife has a Treo 600, and it’s
crazysexycool, but it’s not going to hit the household vernacular in a
big way). How do you even say “Treo”? Is it “Tray-oh” or “Trio”?
Somehow it doesn’t work as a name.
Other household words: PlayStation. TiVO. AOL. All part of the
vernacular. All brilliantly implemented and marketed for their
respective, highly overlapped, target audiences. (disclaimer: I use
AOL at work, because I work for AOL, but I am not in their target
audience)
Winding around to some sort of a point, Gucci is doing a case for the
iPod, because the iPod has a really high recognition factor. Most
people who haven’t been on a desert island for the last two years have
heard of iPods. New York subways are awash in white headphone cables.
Strung end to end, they would make a mess.
It should be some sort of lesson to those in tech marketing. Nobody
is going to do a case for your clunky RX34-7 Audio Unit. Make it
clean, simple, and memorable. The iPod is all that (perhaps too
simple - I want a little more functionality). Then hire the best
packaging people on the planet to put the finishing touches (and the
first impressions) on it.
