The consumer’s desire can’t be invoked easily. Imagine a free service like Facebook vs. the various big-budget competing solutions. Facebook started with a service that outperformed the competition in the basic areas of simplicity and usability. In a way, Facebook gave in to consumers’ desire rather than forcing a service on the users. The days of “you can have it in any colour as long as it’s black” are gone.

Now, with their enormous user-base, Facebook have the economy of scale and become hard to beat. This is also how Google got started with their superior and very simple search solution: Simple answers to consumers’ desires.

Zignal is in an interesting position with its telecom operator customer base. Over the years, telecom operators have been in a situation where they have been enforcing their technology to their subscriber base. They invest in clumsy telecom software platforms to run their entertainment services. You only have to look to BT, who offer the slow and clumsy Microsoft TV solution for their customer base, or to some of the tier 1 Telcos who engineer their own home-brewed solutions without having the company culture to implement desirable entertainment products for the consumer.

Imagine a world where everything is free for the consumer and paid for by ads. In a world like that, it would be challenging to enforce your big-corporate-budget solution to the consumer; there would simply be better, faster and – well – simpler solutions out there that would hit on the consumers’ real desires.

“I desire this”

This is the thought that should pop up in people’s minds when they see Zignal running on a media device in the electronics shop. Or when visiting friends with Zignal-enabled services in their living room.

Working out ways to trigger this thinking by consumers has served as a product design criteria for us. Even though we are merely business-to-business, not dealing directly with the consumer – if the consumer’s desires aren’t met, our own customers will face challenges.

Therefore we not only engineer our product, we both design and engineer it! for the magic ingredient to make a product desirable stays a corporate trade secret for now, though!