What if you had a product that:
- instilled your users with passion
- introduced normally uncaring non-users to your genre or industry and made them users
- actually made users care about the product, and care about you
I think marketers and designers have a great deal to learn from Barack Obama. As record turn-out is being reported at voting stations all across the country, and as people who were normally cynical and pessimistic about politics take time off their jobs and their leisure time to volunteer for him and money out of their own pockets to donate to his campaign, the importance of passion in influencing human behavior is shining.
If Obama was a product, it wouldn't simply be remarkable. It would be revolutionary.
It's also worth noting that there is a difference between simply having a target audience, and marketing your product in a way that makes that audience bigger. If an audience is determined by the worldviews of its members, then the only way to make that audience bigger is to change other people's worldviews to fit that of the audience. This is what Obama has done by convincing cynical and pessimistic people that change can happen and they can influence it. Maybe you can do the same with your product.
Here is a lesson we can all learn from Obama: if you want your users to be passionate about your product, you have to be passionate it first. And you have to mean it.
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