For brand creatives, being a fan is undefeated
Yes, you actually need to educate yourself. You can't just guess.
Appleās Human Interface Guidelinesāthe HIGāhave been revamped. The HIG isnāt newāhereās a PDF version from 1987; and a talk about its genesis from 1997 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain Viewāand Iāve long recommended a read through these guidelines as a useful way for a non-engineer to get a quick education on user interface and experience design and why a good app feels good.
Being able to engineer an app isnāt mandatory for someone doing marketing or comms in tech. But I would argue that knowing how an appāor anything youāre floggingāis made isnāt just a nice-to-have, but essentially mandatory to uncover storylines that might be missed by others, including executives or clients more focused on big picture goals. You may not care, but an audience does. If you are part of that audience, youāve just done tens of thousands of dollars worth of research just by being a fan: you know its relative size, influence, and trends; what they respond to and whatās been done before.
Just last year, a major tech client of mine told me straight up that a major, decades-old, multi-billion dollar product line of theirs wasnāt a priority because āItās boring. Weāve said everything that can be said. It makes us look antiquated.ā It happened to be a product category that I know, or at least have stayed aware of. I asked them to let me take a few days to dig deeper and to let me talk to some engineers on the project.
Six weeks later we had a major YouTube influencer on the ground at their factory. The shoot immediately veered from the planned, vetted schedule because the influencer was busy interrogating the facility engineersāpeople whose job it was to create the productāabout all the things they were excited about in this yearās new model. The in-house comms liaison freaked, worried about the executives sheād told would be on camera who obviously were not going to make it on camera. (Reasonable.) I wasnāt calm, exactly. We were putting our entire bet on this one setup in one facility, reliant on the influencer to see the genuinely impressive but highly technical improvements the engineers had made.
But he got it. And so did his audience a couple of weeks later when the video was posted and racked up a couple of million views in 24 hours, including hundreds of comments that said, more or less, āI thought this company was old and behind. I didnāt know they still did such cool shit.ā
We got lucky on that one, in large part to an influencer who also happened to be a killer on-site producer of his own work. But it was inexpensive to try, didnāt have an inordinate amount of risk, and it happened to be the biggest piece of earned media that particular division of the company had gotten in years. And it all could be rewound back to a simple pushback: the client thought nobody cared; I simply asked if theyād been talking to the right audience, because I cared.
And I cared because I bothered to learn about their industry in the first place.
The downsides? Being too close to something can make you discount riskier ideas out of hand, because you feel the consequences more acutely. Be a fan, but know when to take a step back or even let someone else take a risk you wouldnāt. Nothing healthy is static.