In the runup to thelaunch of the new Apple Watch — priced from $350 to $17,000 — I’ve been thinking a lot about hype.
I’m not talking about the empty kind of hype that’s all flash and no substance, which is often more fraud than marketing. I mean the kind of hype that gigantic tech companies — such as Apple, Samsung, Dell and Google — spend money on to create interest in new products and services. It’s also the hype that small and indie companies find creative ways to generate through social media, word-of-mouth and that quite revolutionary method: just creating a great product people want.
But hype is not only in the hands of CEOs, marketers, inventors and the media. It’s also controlled by the way we as buyers of smartphones and other gadgets adopt or reject new technologies.
All the hype in the world couldn’t save Google Glass-connected eyewear from being mocked and ultimately falling out of favor among the digital elite, to use a recent example. Hype can be manufactured with money, but mainstream acceptance of a hot new technology involves more give-and-take.
In order to understand how hype emerges out of the tech industry, it helps to have some long-term perspective. The last 20 years, from around the time people began to notice the emergence of the Internet, to now has been a pretty fascinating time to follow the spikes of consumer tech.
Larry Chase is a New Yorker who has a long-running Web digest newsletter for marketers. It’s called, appropriately, “Web Digest For Marketers” at wdfm.com. The newsletter dates back to even before the rise of the Internet, Chase says. “I was an advertising copywriter on Madison Avenue in the ’90s. When we started, there was no information. Now there’s too much, so we say, ‘Here’s what you ought to know.’”
In the more than 20 years that Chase has been following the tech industry, tracking wave upon wave of hype, promise and busts, he’s seen countless new tech and media offerings cannibalize old generations. Chase says he sees the most successful companies at generating hype, such as Apple, telling better stories and creating more holistic experiences for customers than competitors.
“Apple sells you stuff you didn’t know you need,” Chase said in a phone interview. “The hot thing now is content marketing. You make it experiential.”
The part that becomes more difficult is gauging whether the world is ready for a particular type of new technology, something that either doesn’t exist in the mainstream or that hasn’t been met with success in previous attempts.
When Apple introduced the iPad five years ago, there was no real market for tablet computers that weren’t sold as bulky tools for certain workplaces. Currently, virtual reality hardware is making a comeback after about nearly two decades of flops and false starts. (R.I.P., Nintendo’s failed attempt at it from the mid-’90s, the Virtual Boy).
Twenty years ago, Jackie Fenn created a way to track and understand these waves of excitement, resistance, disillusionment and, in time, acceptance that goes along with new technology adoption.
Fenn, a vice president and fellow at the research firm Gartner, created in 1995 the Hype Cycle Methodology. “It was really an observation we were seeing with technology,” Fenn said. “We’d see a lot of enthusiasm and over-expectation — and then a trough of disillusionment when people realize that these things are harder than we thought they’d be.
“There’s a backlash until somebody gets it right, often Apple, and then mass adoption,” Fenn said. In her methodology, Fenn calls that mainstream acceptance “The Plateau of Productivity.” Typically, the whole cycle is triggered by a new innovation in, say, engineering or software that makes something new possible.
The Hype Cycle has proven durable. It weathered the accelerated late-’90s/early-2000s dot-com boom and bust and has been reliable through the rise of mobile technology, social media and, now, the cycle we’re in with wearable technology, such as fitness trackers and the Apple Watch.
Fenn says digital music rode the Hype Cycle, becoming mainstream only after a backlash against piracy and the creation of legit places to download music cheaply, such as Apple’s iTunes Store. Apple has had a knack for playing the long game and releasing products only after other competitors have tried and failed.
Gartner currently tracks about 2,000 different technologies on about 100 Hype Cycles, each with about 30 to 40 items, a snapshot of where things stand that’s usually released in the summer. The Hype Cycles also indicate how long the Plateau of Productivity will take to arrive; for 2014, “Wearable User Interfaces” were listed as hitting the Peak of Inflated Expectations with mainstream adoption about five to 10 years away.
While hype and expectations are fluid and can depend on the way tech companies execute and market their goods, the tech adoption part has a much more organic face. “From the adopter side, it’s not really about the technology,” Fenn said. “It’s about human reaction to anything new.”
