Guy's Golden Touch

Guy's Golden Touch

August 14, 2013

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The question that people ask me most often is, “How can I get people to evangelize my product?” The short answer is called “Guy’s Golden Touch.” This doesn’t mean, “Whatever Guy touches turns to gold.” If only this were true. This does mean, “Whatever is gold, Guy touches.”
My message is that the key to evangelism is a great product. It is easy, almost unavoidable, to catalyze evangelism for a great product. It is hard, almost impossible, to catalyze evangelism for crap. (Evangelism, after all, comes from the Greek word for “bringing the good news,” not “bringing the crappy news.”)
The salient question, however, becomes, “What are the characteristics of a great product?” Think: DICEE

• Deep. A great product is deep. It doesn’t run out of features and functionality after a few weeks of use. As your demands get more sophisticated, you discover that you don’t need a different product.
  
• Intelligent. When you encounter a great product, you can see that the company understood your needs and your pain. You may not have even realized you had this need or this pain, but the product not only makes you aware of them, it solves them too.
  
• Complete. A great product is more than a physical thing. Documentation counts. Customer service counts. Tech support counts. Consultants, OEMS, third-party developers, and VARS count. Blogs about it counts. A great product has a great total user experience—sometimes despite the company that produces it.
  
• Elegant. A great product has an elegant user interface. Things work the way you’d think they would. A great product doesn’t fight you—it enhances you. If you really do it well, it becomes “one” with your customers.
  
• Emotive. A great product incites you to action. It is so deep, indulgent, complete, and elegant that it compels you to tell other people about it. You’re not necessarily an employee or shareholder of the company that produces it. You’re bringing the good news to help others, not yourself.

If you want a smashing example of a DICEE product, you need not look any further than Evernote. It embodies DICEE-ness. (Disclosure: I advise Evernote.)

• Deep. People can use Evernote on computers, tablets, and phones. They can use it to track travel, expenses, passwords, or the food that they ate. Evernote can capture things you see, hear, and receive.
  
• Intelligent. The fundamental intelligence of Evernote is that the company understood that people needed to both save and retrieve many kinds of information from many kinds of devices. It is closely integrated with scanners, and built-in optical character recognition so that things like business cards that you scan in become searchable.
  
• Complete. Evernote is complete because it works across all your computers and mobile devices. It also supports a thriving third-party developer program called “The Trunk” that provides even more functionality.
  
• Elegant. Evernote is organized and efficient with a great logo. In most cases adding information to Evernote takes a couple of clicks whether you’re trying to add a web page, email, or file. Searching doesn’t require picking fields or files—you can search everywhere in the Evernote file without thinking about it.
  
• Emotive. People fall in love with Evernote because it becomes an extension of their brain. In my case, it’s better than my brain because it never forgets anything. I keep orders, receipts, password confirmations, hotel confirmations, airline confirmations, writing idea, and research tidbits in it.

So if you want raging, inexorable thunderlizard evangelists for your product, make sure it’s DICEE. What products do you think meet DICEE standards?
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Guy Kawasaki is the author of twelve books including APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur — How to Publish a Book,What the Plus!,and Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Action. He’s the former chief evangelist of Apple and current advisor to Motorola. Guy shares enchanting stuff on the topics of marketing, enchantment, social media, writing, self-publishing, innovation and venture capital.
Photo credit: Big Stock Photos