Last month I wrote about some of the ways in which trade show booths often fail to engage trade show visitors. This month I'd like to turn to a related subject: product demos. Demos can be an extremely powerful tool. They can also be annoying, frustrating distractions. After sitting through literally hundreds of demos—and being involved in creating a few—I've started to see some patterns in what separates effective demos from the rest of the (unfortunately much more numerous) pack.
For your consideration, I offer four time-tested techniques that are virtually guaranteed to lead to a crummy demo:
#1: Lack clarity regarding your goal
Demos can serve many different purposes. For example, some demos are created to attract a crowd to a trade show booth. Others aim to give users confidence that a product is working once they've installed it. Others are designed to help users understand how to use a product. And so on. The key insight here is that different goals call for different kinds of demos. If the developers of a demo lack clarity on the goal of the demo, it's very unlikely that the demo will achieve any goal. As Thoreau wrote, "In the long run men hit only what they aim at."
An example of this pitfall I've seen many times is the demo that is intended to teach a user how to use a product (for example, a software development tool chain), but that is in itself confusing and difficult to follow.
#2: Make it complicated
Many engineers love to create complex designs. Some seem to think that if a thing is not complex, it can’t be valuable or impressive. In reality, the very opposite is often true. And with demos especially, simplicity is a virtue. If your demo requires a half-hour-long explanation, that's a strong clue that it's too complex. Ideally, the demo speaks for itself: that is, just by watching the demo, the audience immediately understands what the demo is doing and why it's worth watching. As Saint-Exupery wrote, "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to cut away."
This pitfall is particularly deadly at trade shows, because there's so much immediate competition for the attention of attendees, and because after the first hour or two, attendees are overstimulated. Perhaps this is why many companies seem to feel compelled to package their trade show demos into cute scripts with professional actors, complicated sets, and loud sound systems.
#3: Make it too simple
Paradoxically, it's quite possible to take the "simplify" dictum too far. In the quest to create a demo that's easy to run and easy to understand, the essence of the value of the underlying product can easily be lost. For example, over the years I've seen numerous demos of high-level design tools. In general, these tools purport to enable an engineer to express functionality of a design at a high level of abstraction, and to automatically generate an efficient hardware or software implementation.
Since my colleagues and I at BDTI focus on digital-signal-processing-intensive applications, most of the high-level tools we see are oriented towards DSP applications. And guess which design example is most common in demonstrations of such tools? Yes, you guessed it: a finite-impulse-response (FIR) filter. Sure, an FIR filter is a real DSP algorithm. But it is also just about the simplest DSP algorithm there is. If I'm implementing FIR filters, I probably don't need an expensive tool to automate the process for me.
As Einstein reportedly said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." This certainly applies to demos. By all means, avoid unnecessary complexity—but make sure your demo has enough meat to be realistic.
#4: Lie
When presenting a demo, it can be tempting to lead the audience to believe that the product is more capable, robust, or general than it really is. Often, this deception is subtle, because it is accomplished not by outright lies, but by omission. When a demo is presented, the audience tends to assume that the demo is illustrating one representative use case of a product that supports a wide variety of uses. But sometimes, all that exists is the demo itself—there is no real product behind it.
While I understand the temptation that leads to this sort of deception, it's never a good idea. Sooner or later, the prospective customer will discover the truth. And a prospective customer who feels duped is very unlikely to ever become an actual customer. As Descartes wrote, "It is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us even once."
So, there you have it: Avoid the four techniques described here, and you'll be on your way to a stand-out demo.
What are your favorite demos, and why? I'd love to hear from you. Post a comment or send me your feedback at http://www.BDTI.com/Contact.
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