Could one man have a marketing idea that would change the world?
One of my marketing heroes lived over 100 years before marketing even existed.
His name was James Watt and he marketed the Industrial Revolution.
In 1712, Thomas Newcomen invented the steam-driven beam engine. It had a piston which would push one end of the beam up.
To lower the beam, the piston had to be cooled down again. It could only do 5 up-and-down strokes a minute, it was slow and inefficient.
In 1764, Watt made the whole up-and-down process instantaneous.
Then he transformed reciprocating motion into rotary motion: non-stop power.
But that left him with a problem: for all of history everything was driven by horses, how could Watt sell his steam engines to people who knew nothing but horses?
Watt’s marketing brilliance was talking to people in their own language.
All everyone knew was horses, so Watt didn’t talk about his machines in terms of steam engines, he talked about them in terms of horses.
James Watt’s genius was to invent the unit of horsepower.
He started with the amount of work a horse could do in a day: lifting 33,000 lbs of water from the bottom of a well 1,000 feet deep.
He divided those numbers up until he got a usable unit: one horsepower = 500lbs raised 1 foot in 1 second.
By converting a horse’s energy into a number, he could compare it against his engines. Now he had something any farmer or pit-owner could understand.
Instead of some new-fangled gimmick his engines could be compared directly against horses. Watt could explain how many horses his engine could replace.
For instance, a 6-horsepower engine could do the work of six horses, a 12-horsepower engine could do the work of 12 horses, and so on.
He could explain that his machine never needed a rest like a horse, so where horses could only work 8 hours shifts, his machine could work 24 hours non-stop, replacing three horses.
The brilliance of Watt was in not starting from the technology, but starting from the language of the people he wanted to talk to.
‘Horsepower’ not only launched the industrial revolution, it got into the general language. In fact it’s still used as a measurement today, all over the world.
For instance, a modern small family car is rated at around 100 horsepower.
A Formula One racing car, travelling at 200 mph, is rated at 1,000 horsepower.
A nuclear aircraft carrier is rated at 250,000 horsepower.
The Artemis rocket, which went around the moon, is rated at 22 million horsepower.
Consumers used it because Watt marketed his engine in the language of the consumer.
200 years later, another genius used similar marketing to start his own revolution.
When Steve Jobs wanted to launch the iPod he didn’t talk about technical specifications. He didn’t say it had 5 GB of memory, a 2” LCD screen, a scroll-wheel, and 10 hours of battery life.
He just held it up and said “It’s like 1,000 songs in your pocket.”
And suddenly everyone knew what was great about the iPod, even if they didn’t know the slightest thing about technology.
He compared it directly in terms of what ordinary people understood, and where it fitted in their lives.
Steve Jobs’ maxim was: “You always work backwards from the user to the technology, never the other way round.”
In other words, before you can sell anything you need to know what is the human problem that you are solving.
Even if you have to create it yourself.