Emotional attachment to technology and catalyst apps

Another day. Another discovered note.

I heard Nick Jones from Gartner give a talk a while back. One thing he said regarding emerging markets that stuck with me was that (I don’t remember the exact quote) ‘Folks with no emotional connection to technology just use it. Emerging market players can experiment. There is no emotional connection to existing biz models’ to hinder product use or uptake.

He also made a characterization that I constantly use when looking at products, which he called ‘catalyst apps’. Catalyst apps are the apps that convert the non-user to a user.

I guess this is for the folks who do have an emotional attachment to some tech or biz model.

I kinda view it as the cross-over metaphor, one that folks understand and can transfer to, say, a mobile device.

For example, email and browser use are metaphors folks understand from the fixed desktop Internet world. But the potential of Internet connectivity from mobile devices goes way beyond that. Therefore, we need to use email and browser use as the metaphors to hook folks on mobile Internet use and only then offer them apps that go way beyond that.

Make sense?

2 Comments

  1. I’m not following you on this one.
    You’re saying people who get devices in emerging markets buy it because they have no emotion? It doesn’t matter if I make $1,000 or $100,000 a year, if I walk by a retail store I will have an emotion.
    The 7 recent phones Nokia announced for emerging markets, they are styled like that to compete with what Sony and Motorola have over there. I wouldn’t go so far ans saying that people have zero emotional connection to technology.
    When it doesn’t work they get pissed off, when it does the job well they start building a relationship with it because it is a valuable tool. A jeweler loves his tools just as much as the guy who puts horse shoes on … horses.

  2. Stefan,
    I didn’t mean ‘no emotion’. Yes, folks in emerging markets want and covet mobile device just as much as the next one.
    What I mean is that they have no emotional connection to existing tech, basically no baggage that will hinder them from trying something new and mind-blowing.
    On the other hand, us here in the technologically saturated North, have very old and seated expectations about what mobile devices should deliver and hold every new device to those expectations, making the emergence of new things difficult.
    I think the emerging markets right now are showing a large degree of innovation around mobile devices because, since they have no emotional attachment to previous metaphors, they are able to think freely.
    Y’know what I mean?
    Tchau,
    Charlie

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