Can you overhype a mobile device?
Conventional wisdom is that there is no such thing as overhyping your product, particularly when you are competing against a marketing juggernaut like Apple. Palm definitely followed the CW with the launch of the Palm Pre. The Pre was positioned as the next killer mobile device in the run up to its launch at CES as it was Palm’s first big innovation in the market in years (which I know well as a formerly loyal user of the Treo dinosaur). The marketing hyperbole was almost iPhonian in its fervor and length. You had Roger NcNamee of Elevation Partners, one of the company’s investors, predicting the Pre would cause the death of the iPhone and columnists fawning over the device six months before they even got to try it. The overriding sentiment from this full court launch; it was going to turn around the fortunes of not just one company but two (Palm and its exclusive carrier Sprint).
A funny thing happened on the way to commercial success. The Pre launched, and it is a great device. However, it hasn’t quite been an incredible success or disaster. It has basically been like a typical Cal football season – not a wipeout like Washington (or Motorola) but not legendary like USC (Apple). Unfortunately, everyone expected a Rose Bowl appearance. The marketing machine built expectations so high that the actual results have been labeled a relative failure. With no information forthcoming from Palm on initial Pre sales, a number of analysts have created their own methodologies for measuring volume and claim they are disappointing.
Palm seems to have learned a lesson for their second act with last week’s launch of the Palm Pixi.
The Pixi is aimed at a younger more hip crown that doesn’t need all the bells and whistles of the Pre. Rather than rev up the full marketing machine like they did for the Pre, Palm relatively buried the Pixi announcement, putting it out the day before Apple announced to its usual fanfare the latest upgrade to the iPod line. Despite the toned down Pixi launch, it got almost the same tone of coverage as the Pre but the stories lacked a lot of the snarky undertones from the initial batch.
Hyperbole and hype don’t always constitute key cornerstones in a launch. Sometimes pragmatism works well too, even when constructing mobile device launches. Or healthcare reform.
Posted by Merrill Freund on September 16, 2009 at 2:23 PM
Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
