What Is The Future Of Your Product?

Today I was sent a video – “A Day Made of Glass... Made possible by Corning”. Super cool.

Personally I love these ads that take a current brand or the product it produces and shows what the company envisages it will be in the future. Some may argue that they aren’t ads because they aren’t really selling anything. Maybe they are more promotional videos? Semantics I suppose but for me they are ads that are working in a brand sense.

So many companies spend their marketing budget on the here and now trying to change behaviour or elicit a response (someone buying something). For me, companies that project themselves into the future are subtly saying “hey, we’re gonna be here for a long time”. It creates buzz that these companies are working on bigger and better things and not just shifting current product.

Done correctly, the video can go viral. In fact, I tweeted a link to the glass video and got an @mention from Trending Tube (@TTube_) that the video it was #38 on the most viewed videos for the day. In fact, the video has had just under 9 million views in a month! I bet not too many of those 9 million had heard of Corning before. They have now.

The Corning video and the idea of sharing your vision borrows loosely from a common sales technique called “projecting”. I used to use it all the time when I was selling gym memberships back in the day of my European adventures (HT Trent Jakubowski). Instead of simply saying “here is a spa that is open until 10pm” I would instead project the potential member to a time when they would use the spa e.g. “When you finish you workout on a Thursday evening you can sit and enjoy this spa up until 10pm”. Real Estate agents also use it when they suggest you de-clutter your house before selling it so that people can "imagine” (project) themselves to a time when they would live there and how it would look with their stuff in it.

I know we don’t all have big budgets to spend on these types of ads/videos. But companies should still consider how they can produce compelling content that gets people excited about the companies vision of the future and what its products would be like. Consider a round table podcast discussing products in 20 years time. Ask customers what they would like to see. Write a blog post. PROJECT!