Hasta La Creative!

New devices and gadgets are being introduced at a frantic pace. A new pedometer is introduced one week, a curved-screen smartwatch the next, followed by a new home automation gateway. These and other new devices represent an interesting opportunity for consumers to get more out of their lives, but what do they represent for brand marketers? Nike and Barnes & Noble both fell into the trap of thinking that these devices required them to become manufacturers, creating the Nike Fuel Band and Barnes & Noble Nook as a hedge against a world in which their categories would someday be dominated by a single, all-powerful device.

It turns out that neither company needed to go that far in service of their customer-relationship goals. The Nook is crumbling so badly that Barnes & Noble just announced it would split Nook off as a separate company to control the damage. And the Fuel Band is giving way to whatever Fuel-based service Nike will put in Apple’s upcoming iWatch. It’s not because people no longer want the benefits those devices provide. Instead, it’s because the rate of device innovation and introduction is accelerating so quickly that these gadgets are being replaced by more sophisticated — and in some cases, multifunction — devices more quickly than a brand marketer can keep up.

Take, for example, the case of the e-reader. Sony introduced the first modern, eInk-based e-reader in 2006, followed by Amazon’s Kindle in 2007. By late 2008, the U.S. install base for the entire category was less than a million units, a number that would eclipse 25 million in just four years’ time. So it would seem to validate Barnes & Noble’s 2009 decision to join the fray and seemingly have a say in the future of its industry.

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