Chapter 1
Love

“Love and work are viewed as totally separate, yet work without love is dead.”

—Marta Zahaykevich

Business cases aren't romance novels. Things begin, and end, with the numbers. If there's a story behind those numbers, it's supposed to be a military epic: brilliant generals, clashing armies, risky maneuvers. DoCoMo's story has all that and more. But at its core, DoCoMo's success depends on a love story. Somewhere, mixed in with the systematic analysis of corporate strategy, the technical innovation of engineering, the analytically derived emotion of marketing, and the ruthless efficiency of operations, the i-mode team sparked a love affair.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Why should anyone care about this particular love story? Because it created success for Japan exactly where every industrial nation needs it - and exactly where efforts in the United States and Europe have met only failure. With i-mode, DoCoMo made commerce on the mobile Internet compelling - so compelling that it is fast becoming universal throughout Japan. Even there, in an economy plagued by recession for ten years or more, the result has been the kind of tech-fueled boom that the entire developed world is now praying for. By delivering mobile Internet access that people actually use for new kinds of business, DoCoMo created enormous value. Its market capitalization shot from just under 2 trillion yen (about $16 billion) to almost 45 trillion yen (almost $400 billion) in less than a year. It captured 30 million paying Internet customers, about as many as AOL, in one fifth of the time. And it earned the chance - the top seed, really - to become a major player in the nascent (almost dormant) market for wireless data here in the United States, to say nothing of Europe and the rest of Asia. It did all that with i-mode, a system that turns the pedestrian cell phone into a personal network connection. Always with you, always on, i-mode invites its millions of paying subscribers not only to send messages to one another, but to download - and pay for! - information. It delivers them news, entertainment, and other content exactly when and where they want it. And it gives all kinds of businesses a direct channel to the consumer at the point where a sale is really likely. Technically, much of that is possible now on the wireless Web services marketed outside Japan. But, as anyone who has tried those services knows, most are not yet ready for prime time. DoCoMo's i-mode is not only ready; it is a runaway success, a blockbuster hit. That's why the story matters.

This is a big story. Only a complex set of passions could give DoCoMo the explosive energy needed to reach its current, unchallenged position. Later, we're going to tell you about all of the passions. But this chapter focuses on the emotion that started it all: love.

What's Love Got to Do with It?

Launching a new product, especially an info-tech product, has gotten tougher in the past few years. And it doesn't look like it is going to get better any time soon. With no small irony, the principal culprit has been revealed as information technology itself. As John* and our colleague, Tom Davenport, explained in The Attention Economy,¹ when information becomes cheap and plentiful, something else becomes scarce: attention. That's a resource that many of us implicitly assume is free, or at least cheap. And for a long while, for most consumers, it was. But we need to change that almost invisible assumption, because the reality is now completely different. When the average grocery store holds 40,000 SKUs, yet each family buys only about 150; when there are 300,000 new books published worldwide each year; when hundred-e-mail days are common and we find ourselves fast-forwarding through everything...well, we're not exaggerating when we say that attention is the scarce resource. That has implications throughout business.

*As mentioned in the introduction, the two authors will refer to each other by their first names.

“Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.”

—Attributed to Howard Aiken

One of the most ironic implications, though, is that it's tough for innovations - even absolutely great new ideas - to be adopted. New ideas have always had a tough road. In olden days (say, the 1970s), a cool new product might have been considered or even tried, then perhaps rejected as risky, unfamiliar, or just plain weird. Now, though, its most likely fate is much worse. Innovations seldom get to the thrill of true customer rejection; instead, they are simply ignored, lost in the flood of information that washes over us all.

Loving I-mode

So when you see a new product take off like i-mode has, reaching 30 million users - almost a third of the population of Japan!!! - without even slowing down, you have the chance to learn from a rare and valuable phenomenon: a historic triumph of adoption. In a market full of electronic gadgets, i-mode somehow captured the passion of millions of customers, then sustained and leveraged that passion to build new habits - and an enormous business in an entirely new category. That feat made the company a huge pile of money. Emulating it might do the same for you.

That's where love comes in. No, not your passion, or anyone's, for money. The way DoCoMo created this world-class feat of adoption - in a market where billions of dollars have been invested worldwide, with disappointing results - was to spark a love affair. Why? Because, whether they knew it or not, they had to. Like any new product, i-mode needed to break through the competition for consumers' time, attention, and money. Like any new kind of product, it also had to overcome barriers of apathy, suspicion, and fear.

Think of it on the human level. In i-mode's first three years on the market, 30 million consumers purchased the handset and signed up for service. Before i-mode came along, almost none of these people struggled with a surplus of time and cash. Virtually all were getting along quite nicely without a next-generation cell phone, and certainly without mobile Internet access. And most, if they bought i-mode, faced some risk of:

* Being embarrassed at spending a lot of money on a gadget that didn't turn out to be valuable
* Being seen owning and trying to operate a device they weren't familiar with
* Wasting time learning the tricks needed to use a new system
* Discovering that no one else wanted i-mode, and worst
* Being forced to admit that they made an expensive mistake.

Something for the Pain

In theory, the way you overcome all those barriers - the risks, the competition, the inertia - is by delivering rational economic value. You offer consumers enough convenience, or savings, or other measurable, practical good things, and they in turn buy your product. That's certainly true, as far as it goes. In a steady-state world, where people know and understand their options, including your product, it might even work. But for customers in our post-modern consumer economy - with their basic needs long since satisfied; with technology creating more new products than anyone can even know about, much less sample; with attention by far their scarcest resource - that kind of value is not enough. To successfully introduce any package of information and technology, you need a lot more. You need to touch people where they live. You need passion. You need, for example, love.

And love is what i-mode delivered. For millions of consumers, it tapped into deeply felt needs, desires, and wishes. As is often true with new product types, customers themselves weren't sure why they were taking the plunge. But if you look carefully, you can see it: In one form or another, the love was there. As in many love stories, it was tangled with two other complex and powerful elements: constant and unpredictable change, on the one hand, and the eternal mystery of why we humans do what we do, on the other. Consider the following.

The Tale of Two Sisters

"I think you're talking to the wrong person."

A mutual friend had suggested that Yasuko Sato would be a good example of an Internet phone user: Japan's new wired (well, wireless) generation. She obviously didn't agree.

To almost any global businessperson, Yasuko is impressive - almost the emblem of modern Japan - and easy to identify with. Poised and attractive, she is clearly intelligent, hardworking, and dedicated to achievement. Yasuko grew up believing that if you were reasonably talented and invested sincere effort in the right areas, you would achieve success in your career, and economic rewards to match. The daughter of mainstream Japanese parents, who encouraged her to excel in school and work, Yasuko earned her degree at a first-class university (in a country where university rankings are discussed like vintages of Cabernet).

She went to work for one of the most famous financial institutions in the world. Still in her twenties, she already has compiled a long record of working hard to achieve the right goals. And she has not shrunk from technology; she was an early adopter of the Internet, by Japanese standards, not to mention her i-mode phone. Yet Yasuko knows that, somehow, a lasting change is passing her by. She is modern, successful, and wired...yet not part of the new generation. And that generation, she fears, may be remaking Japan.

"Sure, I have an i-mode phone, but there are so many people who use it so much more than I do. I think you really need to find someone who was raised on these kinds of things. You know those young people who started using pagers when they were in junior high school."

Did she mean drug dealers?

"No!" Yasuko sounds offended. "I mean that generation that was raised carrying around electronic devices. I wasn't."

Even though she's a young, computer-savvy professional, Yasuko isn't being modest when she claims not to have grown up with digital gadgets. Nor is she unusual. When she graduated from college in 1997 and took her first job, she had never touched a computer. In fact, electronics in general were more than a bit of a mystery to her. Yasuko was raised by parents who were, in her words, "old fashioned." They hadn't allowed video games in the home. They'd never considered using a mobile phone. Don't get us wrong; Yasuko's parents weren't Luddites. Nor had they blocked her from technology because she was a girl. To them, most electronic devices - especially consumer technology and new gadgets that did not directly fill some traditional, productive purpose - were irrelevant to success, or at least not very important. Certainly they weren't as valuable as another few hours of juku, Japanese cram school, or more time practicing the piano.

Her parents poured out their love by providing their firstborn daughter with all the encouragement, resources, habits, and attitudes that led to success...in the old world. The result? Yasuko presents an impressive veneer of the modern Japanese career woman, but beneath it her attitudes and beliefs, her model of how the world works, the way she thinks - all these predate the Information Revolution. Mama and Papa Sato lovingly, relentlessly instilled good old-fashioned analog values in their daughter.

Through her college years, Yasuko carried on the tradition with no deviation at all. So, compared to an American or European of the same age, Yasuko would have seemed, back then, electronically challenged. But she wasn't alone. In 1997, most of her peers in Japan, male and female, didn't have a clue about computers, the Internet, or electronic communication.

If You're Not Part of the Steamroller...

Five years later, they all do. Yasuko and her friends have been caught in the middle of a revolution. Granted, it has been a subtle one - almost invisible. Many things don't seem to have changed. The fundamentals, in fact, are completely the same: People still work and earn money; no one died on the barricades of this revolution; there haven't even been riots; government still goes on as it did before. And although some visible changes have taken place, they seem transient.

Millions of Japanese teens carry i-mode phones. But, then, aren't Japanese teens prone to fads and gadgets? Yes...but this is a case where small differences matter. The i-mode, and the class of devices that it represents (mobile, personal network connections) are not Walkmen. Ringtones are not Pokemon. This is powerful, many-to-many, interactive communications technology that's with you all the time. Even when new users are focused on some seemingly trivial purpose, like changing ringtones, they are learning how to use the technology. And once that barrier is broken, more important applications always seem to follow.

Yasuko senses the difference. Even though she might classify herself a casualty of this revolution, and certainly not a leader, she knows that these devices, which give people the ability to communicate, using voice or data, any time and any place, change everything. The changes seem small at first - in her case, they certainly did. But once set into motion, they work their way into important, almost invisible processes. Long-established patterns begin to shift; barriers and guidelines erode. Over time, the economic landscape is transformed. And one company has been instrumental in enabling Japan to lead this transformation: NTT DoCoMo.

Blame It on the Boyfriend

Yasuko was first introduced to NTT DoCoMo in 1998. About a year and a half into her first job, she reluctantly decided to buy a mobile phone. She had always avoided them for aesthetic reasons as well as practical ones. She thought that the people using cell phones in public places were rude louts. She hated the loud rings. She could not figure out why these people liked to disturb others, let alone sacrifice the privacy of their own conversations. But Yasuko was in love. And her boyfriend wanted to be able to get in touch with her outside the short windows of her evenings at home - they could make spontaneous plans to meet after work, for instance.

So Yasuko relented. She figured there was really no harm in carrying the device. It was, after all, small enough to disappear into a handbag. And she had a plan. She would only give out her number to her boyfriend, her mother, and a few personal friends who she knew wouldn't disturb her at work or in the middle of the night. She would always keep it off when she was around other people. Yasuko was going to control when and where she used this thing.

At the time, Japan had lots of mobile phone service providers. And there were many different phones on the market. As in the United States and Europe, the phones' features, underlying network capabilities, and price structure varied widely and changed all the time. But Yasuko was not interested in becoming an expert on mobile phones or rate plans. That seemed boring. So she asked her boyfriend which phone she should purchase and which service made the most sense. He suggested DoCoMo's Citiphone.

Nippon Telephone and Telegraph, DoCoMo's parent company, is the Ma Bell of Japan. Even its acronym is suggestive. For a reluctant user like Yasuko, what would be less threatening than good old NTT? The Citiphone service also had the advantage of being relatively inexpensive for high-volume users. Here, too, love entered in; Yasuko's boyfriend planned on talking a lot.

Creeping Cellularitis

At first, Yasuko's phone spent a lot of time "sleeping" in her handbag. As she had predicted, she could not see any good reason or opportunity to use it. If she had anything really important to say, she preferred to get home and say it on a regular phone. Yasuko did have a significant commute: She worked in Yokohama and was living with her family a full hour away. But talking on mobile phones is prohibited on Japanese trains and on even-numbered cars on the Tokyu line in Tokyo, for instance, the phone is supposed to be turned off completely. And Yasuko certainly wasn't going to use the gadget to disrupt work. It just always seemed to her that there was no phone call so important that she couldn't wait a few minutes to get to a "normal" phone.

Then, she began to understand the wonders of mobility.

Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life

"Finally, though, I began making occasional calls with my cell phone. After I started using it, I found it was pretty convenient."

Though she doesn't come right out and say so, Yasuko finally began to try this new technology, because of love (romantic and parental)...that and the construction techniques in Japanese homes. Even after a decade of recession, the Japanese are affluent by any standard. But, famously, their houses are smaller than those of Americans and Europeans. And the walls are literally paper thin. Of course, the Japanese norm is to provide privacy through behavior, not space. (When he first moved to Japan, it took John weeks to accept that when Japanese neighbors aren't supposed to hear you they insist, even believe, that they literally do not hear. To a curious American, this seems like an amazing act of will, right up there with firewalking.) Still, privacy poses a challenge for any young person.

Once Yasuko became a teenager, even simple chats with her girlfriends had begun to call for nuanced language or hushed whispers. Not that the dutiful Yasuko really wanted to have any shocking conversations. But, as she says, "You know, you don't want your parents to know everything about your life." Back then, if she really wanted to say something important, she'd grab her umbrella and walk down the street, wait for a pay phone to free up, and still usually have to talk quietly because someone else was often in line behind her waiting to use the phone, and thus could hear the entire exchange. But once she began using her mobile phone she found she could say all of those things on her walk home from the train station - or at night she could settle in at the little neighborhood coffee shop and chat on the phone in relative anonymity and comfort. The mobility of the device let her duck outside for particularly sensitive exchanges.

Sato's sixteen-year-old dog, Jerry, also probably owes a few of those years to cellular technology. Yasuko had always believed it was important to take the dog for a short walk, but once she accepted wireless as a real phone, the walks grew a little longer. If she talked while she walked, she could even discuss the most private of subjects; no one was likely to hear enough of any particular conversation to really make a difference. So whenever Yasuko found herself deep in a conversation and not yet ready to go home, Jerry's constitutionals became marathons.

One third of the housing in Tokyo averages only 121 square feet, while the average Japanese home is 650 square feet. Even outside Tokyo, the average home for a family of three is still under 1,000 square feet.

Only for the Phone-Literate

In February 1999, NTT DoCoMo came to market with an entirely new product: the i-mode phone. In addition to the voice capabilities that Yasuko had grown used to, the new phone allowed for Internet connectivity. These new capabilities excited technophiles but held little interest for her. That wasn't because she was uninterested in the Internet. Quite the contrary; in her first few years on the job, Yasuko had unexpectedly grown to love the power of computers.

Her company was a traditional Japanese firm. "It was not at all like the U.S. style where everyone has a computer on their desk at work." In Yasuko's workgroup, one computer terminal served five employees. (And this was in the finance/accounting section!) The shared computer sat near a window. As a member of the section, you could get up from your workstation and go to the computer to gather information. But if you did, you would be away from your phone and therefore out of touch with other company members and the outside world - a real sacrifice by Western standards, but far worse in consensus-driven Japan. There was another problem, too: At that time, using a computer directly was thought of as pretty menial work. So when Yasuko joined the group as a young and inexperienced female, it was not surprising that her superiors decided that she should log the bulk of the computer time.

Yasuko had graduated from Waseda University, one of the top schools in Japan, but her degree was in Asian history - not a major that requires a huge amount of computer expertise. The first day that she had to deal with the computer, a young man from the information technology department showed up and explained how to turn on the unfamiliar device. Yasuko learned quickly, though, at least in those areas where the system had clear, practical value. (She had heard a lot about the Internet, for instance, but connections were not possible from her work computer, and she wasn't really sure what she'd use the Internet for anyway.)

Soon she was actually teaching others how to use the proprietary accounting packages on the old Hitachi workstation. Before long, she could no longer be considered a bit player in her section. A year or so later, with her growing confidence in the use of computers, Yasuko took a huge leap: She got her own laptop computer. With that, she became a part of the e-mail generation and found that it was even really useful in her work. Now, in retrospect, she admits that she could "never go back to those pre-Internet days." Yasuko has never had any affection for high-tech devices themselves, but she has always loved the freedom, reach, and responsiveness the devices put within her grasp.

As computer use was changing Yasuko, it also changed traditional Japanese attitudes. The value of information processing became obvious to more and more managers. So over time, computer skills began to be respected, computer users began to win status, and the business capabilities that computers made possible began to be taken for granted. Indeed, computers (and the related communications technologies) moved from menial status to a favored topic of conversation among many rising employees, "particularly the men." According to Yasuko, these guys literally love technology: "they are always talking about gadgets - gigabits and megabytes - that kinda stuff."

Yasuko admits it might be good for her career to take part in such conversations, but she just can't bring herself to care about technology itself. It doesn't seem serious enough. She's happy to adopt technology when it clearly will help her, but only then. Perhaps because of her upbringing, she doesn't have the genuine feelings she would need to join the tech lovers. But, feelings aside, it's clear that those who do chat gigabits are not only indulging a genuine passion but also building strong personal relationships - and establishing credibility with one another as fellow members of the rising digital elite. As they move up through the ranks together, they'll remember who among them is advanced, technologically savvy, ready for innovation.

An April 2001 study by Japan's Ministry of Public Management reported that 34.5 million subscribers access the Internet through their cellular service - almost matching the 37.2 million people accessing it through fixed-line connections.

Masako Loves I-mode

Yasuko insists that, when it comes to mobile technology, she is the wrong Sato. "You should really be talking to my sister about this. It is Masako's generation that is really using i-mode." Masako is attending nursing school in Tokyo and living at home. She has not achieved the career and academic success that Yasuko has. But when it comes to i-mode, she is a star; she does all the things that a good i-mode generation person would be expected to do.


Masako Goes Mobile ø Always

Masako uses her mobile phone a lot. Even though she's a student, she racks up at least $150 a month in mobile phone charges. "When she goes over $200 in a single month, my mother really gets upset," says Yasuko.


Masako Accessorizes

Any good mobile phone user in Japan - whether they use DoCoMo, J-Phone, or Au - knows about carrying straps. Yasuko has one, with kyoro-chan on it. (Kyoro is a retro anime character, an old cartoon that "is old enough to be cute again.") Masako, on the other hand, has a whole wardrobe of them.


Masako Hacks

Japanese users also know the importance of ringtones (chakumelo) and screensavers. Yasuko uses a screensaver on her PC but never bothered to download one for her phone. She does use different ringtones for different functions (e.g., calls where caller ID isn't known sound distinctive). For Masako, though, downloading chakumelo from a free site is something of a hobby; she installs a new one every couple of weeks.

Masako Does Data

Finally, Masako does data on her phone - all the time. (Yasuko doesn't. Even her Citiphone service allowed her to send short mails, but she never used it.) From looking up train schedules, to making reservations at restaurants, to buying movie tickets, Masako does everything on the train as she commutes to and from school, or as she sits in a pub with her friends. And, naturally, this is her favorite mode for e-mails. The level of involvement this provides - nearly constant interaction with her friends and colleagues, the ability to be an active, visible part of discussions that go on with almost no regard for boundaries of the work day - is a huge competitive advantage in most careers. It's an expansion, really, of the bonding Yasuko sees among her gadget-loving (primarily male) colleagues.

Torn Between Two Lovers

As she says, Yasuko is an i-mode user, too, but a very different one. It all started when she returned from a year in school in the United States. She found she really needed a phone again; in the nine short months she was out of the country, cell phones had moved from a convenience to an absolute requirement. Once again, she consulted a technophile - this time not her boyfriend but rather Masako, who said the cheapest place to buy a phone was not one of the big discount stores, but a small shop on an almost forgotten street in Yokohama - a real hole in the wall.

Yasuko read a lot about phones before she made her decision. (The only serious competitor to i-mode was J-Phone's camera phone, which debuted to a lot of hype. But in the end, Yasuko went with the numbers. Even in the summer of 2001, she saw competition possibly heating up for NTT DoCoMo but would not have bet on any other company.)

Even though her new phone is much more capable than her old one, Yasuko still uses it in much the same way. As before, only a few friends have her number; not even her boss does (though he does have her home number). She still uses voice more heavily than she expected before going mobile. But she hardly uses the "i" functions of her phone at all. (And she is not alone; it's a standing joke among some of her friends that the "i" button on the phones is there to collect dust.) Yasuko loves the mobility of i-mode, but only for voice. She also loves e-mail. She just can't seem to bring those two passions together to embrace a single device the way Masako and some of the boys in the office have. Because she first met the Internet on the PC, Yasuko says she'll never want to use a phone as her main way to access it. "Those who start with the Internet on the phone get used to it, and they don't seem to mind the small screens and the limited keypad," she says. the "little" things.

Passion Is Destiny

These are times of rapid change for everyone. In just a few years, Yasuko has gone from computer novice, to local expert, to a solid participant in an increasingly wireless world. She's not at the leading edge. "You can see how analog I still am," she says, pointing out that the guys at work are often real mobile data lovers. One mid-thirties ("and highly paid") manager at work reads the newspaper sites on the train every morning. Yasuko, by contrast, doesn't need to do that; she always takes the actual newspaper on the train with her to work - or reads it over coffee first thing in the morning. That seems perfectly sensible. So why does she feel uncomfortable about it?

Meanwhile, technology keeps raising the bar - and, perhaps, if it is successful, exciting new passions. In October 2001, NTT DoCoMo officially launched its third generation (3G) high-speed wireless Internet service in Tokyo. For Yasuko, is the world's first instance of 3G a new opportunity to leap ahead in her career or simply another gadget? At this point, she's not sure. She is not sure she needs all that speed right now. But she does plan to move into a new apartment soon and when she does, she doesn't want to have to pay for a wired phone line. "The problem is what to do about my Internet connection for my laptop?"

Yasuko believes that if the new service can function as an "intermediary without the cord" to her computer, then she'll sign up immediately. She envisions a day when she could carry a small, very thin keyboard with her as well; this would enable her to input personal e-mail during the day without using her work computer for personal correspondence. As Yasuko describes the value of that connectivity, you can hear the passion and longing in her voice. "I'd never be out of touch with any part of my life..."

For an active, ambitious, professional, it's a natural. Yasuko clearly has the right idea. The question is, will her love of technology's results drive her to follow through? And what will Masako (who loves the i-mode's fashion value) and the guys in the office (who just love gadgets) be doing in the meantime?

Why Yasuko Matters

What do all these excitable i-mode users have to teach the rest of us? What does Yasuko's story hold for your business? Simple: the key to that attention problem we all confront. (You remember...how to get your innovation - the one your company's future may depend on - noticed, tried, embraced, even loved.)

Yasuko, Masako, and the tech-boys back at the office - these and millions more just like them - are the people who gave DoCoMo success. Without their adopting i-mode (seemingly random decisions, made sometimes for reasons they didn't understand, using assumptions that proved to be wrong), none of us, on this side of the Pacific, would have heard about i-mode. How did DoCoMo capture their attention, money, and passion? How can we do the same? By inspiring the right kind of love affair.

Ring Mah Bell?

The traditional approach begins with a bell curve that segments your market into who is likely to adopt a new technology when.

The idea is that different customers tend to dive into innovative approaches early or late. In some cases, it almost doesn't matter what those innovations are. This is a handy framework, and a useful way to begin thinking about who needs to know about, try, and use your product. Yasuko, for example, falls into the early majority. Though circumstances - such as her boyfriend or her initial computer assignment - may nudge her to adopt a new technology fairly early in its life, she is attracted strictly by what the technology can do for her. The tech-boys at her office, on the other hand, are standard early adopters.

Somewhere in their orbit, maybe even in their group, will be an innnovator - the kind of person who found out about i-mode first and tried it early, when there were few other users to learn from, less return on the investment, and more adoption hassles. These are the famous pioneers, complete with the arrows in their backs. And they wouldn't have it any other way. Masako is an early adopter, too, but with a twist; the innovators she learns from focus more on fashion than on technology. Elsewhere on i-mode's subscriber list are millions of late adopters - customers more conservative than Yasuko, who waited until i-mode was proven and of obvious practical value, before jumping in. Finally, there are the laggards, who may not get i-mode for years, if ever.

In recent years, this traditional approach has been modified by a really useful observation: Each of these groups adopts technology, or any innovation, for different reasons. And, if you're trying to generate adoption for your product, that can create challenges. That's only one of the problems you face as your sales move from innovators to the increasingly conservative groups, where you can make real money.²

DoCoMo's i-mode became a hit partly because it appealed to two completely separate groups of innovators: fashion-conscious young people, like Masako or her cutting-edge role models, and traditional geeks who fed the early-adopter guys in Yasuko's office. As we have seen, any hit starts with a few real believers. In fashion circles, these can be those in "high society" - wealthy enough to buy the designer styles they see on a runway in Milan or Paris. Or they could be the young hipsters in Tribeca who could never afford high-end fashion but who experiment with less expensive combinations of clothing, shoes, and headgear. To someone firmly in the mainstream, the hipsters can be invisible, even frumpy looking. But for the Yasukos of the fashion market, they set the direction. Either hipsters or the high end can start a fad, but they have to love the product so much they can talk about little else - at least for a few days.

In technology circles the fashion mavens are often "geeks" - the guys (and we use this term advisedly) who cruise the aisles of Fry's Electronics looking for the latest gizmo to use with their thing-a-ma-jig. They, at the very least, play around with every new product out there. Although this innovator population can prove invaluable, it can also be a vicious, double-edged sword. The things they buy, use, and like become social capital at their cocktail-party equivalents - for them, it is better than passing along a great stock tip, or chatting up a wonderful new vacation hideaway. But the things they try and don't like - those are anathema. On the Internet, in coffee-break conversations, and on the phone they castigate the product. They seem intent on reducing the inventor, the financial backers, and even the product itself to a weeping heap through their nasty, caustic comments. It becomes a holy cause to make sure the product never gets a toehold. It's a war they can win, too.

"Early adopters are a scary bunch. They love new features, so they will request more bells and whistles in your product....If you try to explain that you're trying to keep your product simple and relevant for novices, they intepret this as unresponsiveness or stupidity."
- Guy Kawasaki

Remember DiVX? When DVD hadn't quite crossed over beyond the innovators (our geeks), electronics giant Phillips and retail powerhouse Circuit City collaborated to develop a format that reduced the price of buying a DVD to, essentially, the price of a video rental. The catch was that, if you wanted to watch it again, you had to pay again (on a sliding scale). It sounds like a great match for most consumers. But the techies hated it and - of course - badmouthed it incessantly. Whether the mass market would have liked the model or not, DiVX was quickly forgotten.

DoCoMo's home run was developing a product that appealed to both groups. You don't find that too often, but when you do...stand back. By getting the geeks and the fashionable to agree on a single product, the masses in the middle were assaulted on two different (and usually antagonistic) fronts. The result was pretty darn close to impossible to resist. General appeal was born. We should all hope to be so good (and perhaps so lucky).

Getting Serious

The standard tools are great. But if bell-curve-and-chasm thinking can explain generations of techno winners, why are we talking about love stories? Because the world has changed. For the challenge that DoCoMo faced - which, unfortunately, is the same challenge most of us face now in launching new information products - the standard tools just aren't enough. Five big factors make technology adoption a whole new ball game:

* We're all overwhelmed by change. Some of us love it, some of us hate it, but all of us face faster, more sustained innovation, on many more fronts, than our parents did. (Or even our older siblings - remember Yasuko and her sister?) More is changing faster, and we know about it sooner.

* Users are more important. Classic tech-adoption studies tend to analyze B2B products, things that are simple to use, technologies where performance is objective. Many innovations that matter today are more like consumer products. Even if intended for a business audience, the user's individual and unpredictable preferences matter - a lot.

* Information products are different. The innovations we offer are often information products - some mix of device, service, and information, all bundled together with a usage pattern and a business model that both buyer and seller have to think through. That's very different from a faster hard disk, a longer-lasting tire, or more robust seed corn. So it's harder to know what you want; harder to know what a fair price would be; harder to know if the thing is even working right. All that adds risk and inconvenience - thus subtracting possible customers.

* Products are getting personal. Because user preference matters so much, techy products are getting very personal. That makes technology adoption more like the fashion industry - very hits-driven, very hard to predict. Who can tell, before the customers start buying, whether Palms or iPaqs will dominate?

* Innovation now means new product TYPES. Many innovations now have no real predecessor. Starbucks sells coffee, but what it really sells is an experience that, for 90 percent of the U.S. market, simply hadn't been imagined before. TiVo seems comparable to a VCR but really offers an entirely different kind of value. In cases like these, customers must guess what they want in this product, or if they want it at all. The innovator - and remember, we are all either innovating or heading to the scrap heap - has a much tougher job.

Inside the Bell Curve

All five barriers certainly applied to i-mode. Yet DoCoMo somehow vaulted over all of them. That's the love factor. In our view, i-mode operated way beyond the level of bell curves and market segmentation. The adoption battle was won at a much deeper psychological level, capturing the emotions of customers alone and in groups. Fundamentally, DoCoMo created a true hit product by inspiring passion - this really is a love story - in the right groups of people.

Research to support this comes from two scientific hot spots that seem far removed from business: the emerging, highly quantitative science of complexity, and the psychology behind social epidemics (everything from teen smoking to fashion trends).

Making Hits Happen

The computer modelers and quant jocks who study complexity point out that a lot of interesting systems, such as the earth's climate, are so complex that they simply cannot be modeled as simple, linear machines. The would-be modeler is facing too much uncertainty, and too many nonlinear events. One scientist has said that systems like these function "on the edge of chaos and order." That is, they're not predictable - put that spreadsheet model away. But they're not truly random, either. We can begin to anticipate how they act, but only by observing their behavior over time and working to identify the principles and patterns that tend to emerge. One such pattern is the tendency toward increasing returns - something we've all noticed in today's attention-poor economy, where the brand, Web site, or product that is ahead tends to pull farther ahead. To these scientists, any hits-driven business (and that includes much of the innovation we care about) is a complex system.

One such expert who has used the tools of complexity to analyze business problems, Winslow Farrell, points out that "Hits emerge as a function of the conversation started around a product or idea." He goes on to recommend that if you want to make your product a hit, you "look at how people relate to products, and to each other through them."³ In other words, in shaping hits, interpersonal relationships are critical. This, we believe, becomes dramatically more important when the technology itself literally involves communication among people - like i-mode, which changed how Yasuko related to her bosses (she became more tech savvy), to her parents (more independent), and her boyfriend (closer, faster, and yet ultimately more independent).

Tipping

A completely different take on how particular people, and their passions, drive technology adoption comes from the social dynamics that author Malcolm Gladwell labeled "tipping points" A wide range of studies, on many topics, shows that if you want to create a "behavioral epidemic," then the right people are central. (The market and the product matter too, of course.) Consider a hit that, unfortunately, is even more dramatic than i-mode: teen smoking. Despite years of antismoking ad campaigns, parental efforts, laws, school regulations, and education, teens have continued to take up smoking, often in increasing numbers. Gladwell's analysis concludes that it's all about the kinds of people who start the smoking in each new group of teens - the innovators on that particular technology adoption curve. He explains that the very individuals most likely to visibly try smoking first are those independent, risk-taking teens who have enormous influence over their peers. As he says, "Smoking was never cool. Smokers are cool....a select few are responsible for driving the epidemic forward."⁴

In adopting a new product, people of all ages look to their peers. And some peers matter much more than others. A student of complexity might add, although you can't always predict ahead of time which peers will have the most influence, you can identify them on the fly - if you're quick.

From either point of view, complex phenomenon or social epidemic, if what you need is a successful innovation, then you're in the business of creating hits. DoCoMo is, and it certainly has! Some would argue that a "real" high technology product, with hard differences in performance and cost - and i-mode could be included - can't be analyzed like a hit record or a clothing fad. At least for consumer products, we disagree. Yes, consumers care about features, functions, and costs. But in an environment where even the most naive customer knows that cost is constantly dropping, and functionality constantly increasing, do those factors really drive decisions?

In the case of i-mode, how did millions of young Japanese decide that now was the time they needed a data-capable mobile phone? Or Bandai screensavers? And, again, the science from both perspectives tells us that to make your innovation a hit, you have to focus on the right people, as people - just as DoCoMo did. The kind of personal gravitation that pulled both Yasuko and Masako into i-mode's orbit is crucial. Human passion, love, is what it took to capture their attention and use. And without that, without the first wave of early adopters, i-mode would have failed completely.

What the World Needs Now

So, innovation is imperative, adoption is the hard part, the key to adoption is people, and - for i-mode - love was a big part of getting those crucial first people. Even if "love is the answer," what are we supposed to do about all that? How can we use love to make our own products runaway hits like i-mode? Begin with four principles:

1. Promote personal passions. If looking at i-mode users - especially at the crucial first waves that started it all - tells us anything, it's that the seemingly small things that individual people care about (keeping in touch with boyfriends, impulsively having private chats, impressing friends with a powerful gadget or a new fashion accessory) can drive product adoption. (Our research has seen similar patterns in wireless data's other great hot spot, Northern Europe, where user passion for keeping in touch with other people has created adoption rates much higher than we see in the United States.) And the research in cognitive psychology shows why. A number of studies have shown that we humans are much better at processing complex information if it has to do with other humans, rather than with abstractions - including the analytic concepts like market share or service quality that we all work with every day.

"Starting epidemics requires concentrating resources on a few key areas. Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen are responsible for starting word-of-mouth epidemics, which means...your resources ought to be solely concentrated on those three groups. No one else matters."
- Malcolm Gladwell

There's a powerful evolutionary reason: As social animals, our species has survived over millennia by paying special attention to other humans and sentient creatures - a tendency that we suspect kicks in strongly at times of stress and overload. Most important, there's a strong human theme apparent in the customers who made i-mode a runaway success. Think of Yasuko, Masako, and the boys in the office. They were different types of crucial early customers, but all of them bought i-mode because they were responding to people: bosses, boyfriends, pals at the office. So, if there is any chance at all, look for ways that your innovation can be important to users on a human level. Especially watch for ways that adopting your product can bring them closer to each other, gain them status, or make them feel good socially.

2. Go beyond the mainstream. At least for consumer information products - and what product today isn't? - go beyond what seem like rational economic reasons for customers to buy. Look at the original product evangelist, Guy Kawasaki. With Macintosh, Internet, and early-stage investor experience, he's been through the mill of getting new products adopted. And his five tests for defining great products, as he naturally expresses them - see "Rolling the DICE-E" - are all about how customers feel.

The i-mode story teaches the same lesson: to get attention in a hyper-crowded environment, to vault over the many barriers to adoption, and finally to harness the social process that creates hits, your product has to grab customers beneath the sensible surface level of value propositions. Like Yasuko, they'll research and shop with their rational minds, but they'll buy and use and recommend for reasons they probably won't say out loud and may not understand. As with i-mode, those reasons can eventually flow through the entire market. How many mobile phones, purchased for emergency or business use, are actually valued for their ability to keep us connected with the people we care about even though we move around each day? Your job is to watch carefully whom your product appeals to, what they're using it for. Don't depend on what customers say, especially in answering structured questions; watch what they are doing, and understand why. Those unspoken forces are the energy that creates a hit product like i-mode.

3. Look for entry populations - and move fast when you find them. Those human needs are easiest to spot, at first, in fringe populations whose needs or desires place them ahead of more mainstream users. And, always, if your goal is to start a "social epidemic" around your product, it is small groups of people who hold that power. Bottom line? For both attracting first users and creating a wave of adoption that follows them, small and highly specific groups are crucial. These entry populations can move you into the mainstream, fast.

In DoCoMo's case, their original target audience was business buyers. That made analytic sense; these customers have money, are mobile, and seriously need key data. The value proposition made for some nice spreadsheets. So these were the targets, and initial i-mode content was heavily weighted toward the sites they would presumably want: travel, stocks, and so forth. But within two months, DoCoMo found that the most heavily frequented sites were the places to download great new ringtones and wallpaper. These were the things that techies, teens, and trendsetters - the people who actually saw i-mode's value first - wanted. And DoCoMo was incredibly astute in leveraging from these populations to reach, ultimately, not only the business customers they had first thought of, but millions more, as well. So cater to and watch the people who value your product - even if they don't seem like a viable market by themselves.

"Tucked in some recess at the back of our minds is a wishful view of the business world as predictable, plannable, and controllable by our actions."
- W. Brian Arthur

4. Plan to change your product. When you think seriously about the challenge any new product faces, and the process by which i-mode became a hit, you come to know that planning and control are really impossible. That realization will make you (like the complexity scientists we have worked with) a huge fan of adaptive behavior. And you'll be in good company. Scientists and historians will tell you that adaptation has a long and honorable history. In fact, adaptation essentially is history. We're t-t-talkin ïbout evolution here - not a planned or predictable process, but one that proves incredibly powerful. A great deal of its power comes exactly because there is no one driving; the process just relentlessly searches for advantage, even in places where no one expects it, and adapts to use that advantage, as with the heat-regulating structures that, Stephen Jay Gould argues, eventually became wings.

You'd expect the guy who ran Citibank to be a fan of planning and control. Maybe. But Walter Wriston also noted that "the modern world financial system really evolved, as the unplanned result of communication satellites and engineers' control of the electromagnetic spectrum."⁶ Leaders in robotics and AI have often demonstrated the power of rapid, simple adaptation versus heavy strategic planning in search of the optimum approach. And looking beyond business, Malcolm Gladwell concludes that, "Those who are successful at creating social epidemics do not just do what they think is right. They deliberately test their intuitions." By testing their intuitions and changing quickly when reality proved different, the folks at DoCoMo turned i-mode into the only full-fledged success in wireless Internet adoption. So experiment boldly - look closely and deeply at what the experiment is telling you about users - and move fast to reconfigure your market, product, or business model into the hit it can become.

Judging from DoCoMo's experience, that's exactly what it takes to "feel the love."

Notes

1. Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck, The Attention Economy (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2001).
2. Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm (New York: HarperBusiness, 1991).
3. Winslow Farrell, How Hits Happen (New York: HarperBusiness, 2000).
4. Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Boston: Little Brown, 2000).
5. Guy Kawasaki, Rules for Revolutionaries (New York: HarperBusiness, 1999).
6. Richard Foster, Innovation: The Attacker's Advantage (New York: Summit, 1986).

© 2003 John Beck and Mitchell Wade
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