Can we say goodbye to
the Rolls Royce Mentality?
A softer economy isn’t
All bad for Corel users
There are many things that have me shaking my head in disbelief these days as I watch the nightly news or my preferred Sunday morning talk shows. One of them is the weekly debate about whether this country is or is not in a recession. This is particularly absurd because a “recession” carries with it a specific definition—two consecutive quarters of negative growth—and so there should be no debate. It is doubly absurd because we do not need a label to ascertain the health of our economy.
It reminds me, if you’ll pardon the digression, of the glory days of the San Francisco 49ers, in the 1980s, led by football expert Bill Walsh. The Bay Area sports columnists had an affinity for using the word “genius” to describe Coach Walsh, but they wouldn’t so much come out and call him one as they would publicly speculate as to whether he was one. Is Bill Walsh a genius?, they would regularly ask. Or must you be a rocket scientist to get that moniker? Calling for that reverse on fourth down—that was the work of a genius. But what about when he had Joe Montana run a bootleg with just 45 seconds left to play—that wasn’t very smart. Maybe he isn’t a genius after all. Mr. Walsh's intelligence was akin to a commodity being traded on the stock exchange: one day he was a genius, the next day just ordinary.
Sorry, but it just doesn’t work that way. He is what he is, irrespective of the label that is prescribed to him by those in charge of passing them out. And so, too, does this apply to our nation’s economy. We do not need to have a label affixed to it for us to know that the situation has changed, and I would just as soon not be privy to the nightly debate as to whether we are or we are not in a recession.
I also would prefer not to be asked to believe that our economic downturn is exclusively bad news. Granted, our 2300-square foot home in Silicon Valley is no longer worth a million dollars, and our modest portfolio of stock holdings is, well...we won’t go there, okay? But do you know what else I see? I see:
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Fewer cars on the road.
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Teachers, police officers, and firefighters actually having an opportunity to live in the communities they serve, instead of having a 90-minute commute from the few towns they can afford to live in.
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Interest rates as low as they have been in almost four decades.
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Small businesses having a much easier time hiring part-time help, and people with higher skill-sets applying for those jobs.
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Homeowners with home improvement projects more able to find a general contractor offering friendlier estimates for the work.
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A healthy humility settling in over people who, just 18 months ago, were obsessed beyond obsession with the potential for mind-boggling wealth.
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And an opportunity for Corel Corporation.
Simply put, for how long will entry-level graphic designers be willing and able to pony up the dollars that Adobe and Quark software commands before taking an earnest look at CorelDRAW and VENTURA Publisher?
Corel’s chief competition has enjoyed a juggernaut of acclaim and status, and on both counts, Corel has suffered as a result. It is beneath the intention of this column to question the success of Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, Framemaker, or Quark Xpress. These programs deserve the acclaim they have earned, whether from programming prowess or marketing might. But their status as expensive, valuable, and coveted commodities...that is a dynamic worth scrutinizing.
It’s commonly referred to as the Rolls Royce dynamic: The more expensive a company makes a product, the greater the propensity for consumers to perceive value in it, and the more they tend to crave ownership of it. Adobe prices Photoshop at over $600 and packages it as a stand-alone, premium application. And it is a must-have item for most graphic artists. Would it have been any less of a product if it were priced at $295? How about no extra charge at all, as is the case with Corel PHOTO-PAINT? Of course not, but it would have been perceived as less of a product. I experienced this phenomenon first-hand when I opened my consulting practice. My $45/hour fees were too low for me to be taken seriously by many of the businesses in San Francisco. Doubling my fees resulted in a doubling of my client pool. Was I any smarter? Well, charging double turned out to be an accidental stroke of brilliance, but was I intrinsically smarter because I was more expensive? Of course not.
How long can companies afford to subscribe to the Rolls Royce methodology of buying software? Buying according to the standard I understand, and Corel will be fighting that battle through the life of its software. But perceiving value solely as a function of price—the sign of the times must be a death knell to that way of thinking. Corel would do well to capitalize on these shifting priorities.
This is destined to be a column full of digressions, so here is the next one. Do you remember the presidential election of 1988, when Vice President George Bush defeated Governor Michael Dukakis? Bush prevailed because, among several factors, he managed to turn “liberal” into a dirty word. He accused Dukakis of being a liberal. He called him a “card-carrying member” of the ACLU.
Dukakis took the bait. First, he denied it, rolling out several examples of conservative measures he took in Massachusetts. Next, he orchestrated a photo session in which he rode in a tank, wearing a combat helmet. Then, he shot himself in the foot in his robotic response to CNN’s George Bernard Shaw, who began one of the presidential debates with a question that personalized the candidate’s position on abortion (“If Kitty Dukakis were raped...”). And finally, he succumbed to an overly-rehearsed response about how he was a liberal “in the tradition of John F. Kennedy,” whatever that meant.
To this day, I sit in amazement over Dukakis’s acceptance of the negative connotation of the label. What’s so bad about being liberal? Why did Dukakis allow Bush to cast it in such a bad light? Why did Dukakis vanquish his soul, and practically his entire platform, to run away from the word? Why did he have to disassociate himself with the ACLU, and what does it even mean to be a “card-carrying member”? Don’t all members of clubs have cards? Would it have been any less horrific if he were a member of the ACLU but he didn’t keep a membership card in his wallet? (And to end this digression before it gets too absurd, did anyone ask Governor Dukakis to furnish the dreaded ACLU membership card?)
Referring to CorelDRAW as well-priced software has been akin to George Bush calling Michael Dukakis a liberal. What’s wrong with aggressive pricing? Nothing, unless you couple it with the program’s permanent residence under Windows—then, the label is born: CorelDRAW is a tool for amateurs. The company has spent nearly a decade running away from the label.
It’s time to stop running. It’s time for Corel to stop allowing others to place labels on it. It’s time for the company to play to its strengths, rather than shy away from a perceived weakness. There has never been a better opportunity to extol the virtues of a product that sells for less than half of its competition. And I’d volunteer to write the ad or Web site copy:
Just because you are cutting back
doesn’t mean you have to settle for less.
Look what $495 can get you...
CorelDRAW does not have to retreat from its status as a card-carrying Windows program with a low price tag, even as it courts the Macintosh market. Let’s see CorelDRAW maintain a more upright posture and embrace all of its virtues, most notably its price. And with a new version of VENTURA Publisher on the horizon, the time to launch this campaign is right now.
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Bring back some bullet points. Yes, the Cowpland era permanently soured us on ads with bullets, but there is a tasteful way to list features, especially ones that the competition does not offer.
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Show how the shortest distance between two points is through Corel software. None of Adobe’s or Quark’s programs offer the customizability that DRAW, PAINT, and VENTURA have, and that could be dramatically shown with a bit of simple animation at corel.com.
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Drive home the value of the bundle, with integrated programs that offer a common interface.
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And showcase the price. Don’t just proclaim that DRAW is $395 cheaper, show what you can get for like dollars. For the price of Photoshop, you can buy DRAW and PAINT, as well as a scanner, a drawing tablet, and a digital camera. Sounds like the perfect entré to a bundle with a hardware vendor or two...
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If Corel wants to have a label associated with it, how about this one: The maker of software that is ideally suited for its industry and perfectly priced for the times.