In an era where everything is customized and hardly anything is a commodity anymore, it’s hard to impress people. Customers already expect that the product they’re purchasing can either be malleable or it’s already given to them with a pre-purchase customization process. In the end, there aren’t really two products of the same brand that are the same. But then, if the vast majority of products and services are like that, how can you manage to wow someone?
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Intel has done it again. With its latest free release, Museum of Me , Intel’s Museum gains access to your Facebook account after your authorization and starts building a museum like collection of your life. People, photos, status, “likes”, the works. It displays it in such a way that it would wow you over to see things you probably didn’t even remember anymore. It will make you laugh, or even cry to see blasts from the past.
Of course, as the article on The Web said, it would bore anyone else but yourself (unless extra spectators have hidden agendas). Then again, customization has no other purpose but to please you alone and not anyone else. Hard to take on the task, but it sure has had a numerous amount of hits this new little gadget.
Another customized product that seems to be in the rise, for quite sometime now, is in fact Nike+. The featured tennis shoes including a tracker inside their soles. You take them out after your run and plug their info into your computer. You share your total distance, calories burned and route taken with all your friends and other members of Nike + community. It’s excellent because you get to be motivated by other people going further, pushing you to achieve greater distances. Plus, it’s not like you can lie and brag about a fantasized run you didn’t do. The information taken by this “chip” is total record, unalterable, just cumulative with your earlier runs. It too is customized, only here you don’t bore anyone else with your own history, you actually encourage other people to tag along.
The latest motivational campaign done by Nike+ was the men vs women campaign. Surely you even saw the spot on the commercial break at the movie theater. This was two years ago, and it still has gained a whole lot more power since then.
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