We had a meeting today where we debated some of the key goals for an upcoming community initiative, including the usual suspects:

Building loyalty
Reducing support costs

Boosting net satisfaction
Acquiring new users
etc.

Ken Levy was there – he cut through that and locked on to the real manna: “We’re trying to build passion.” Wistful thoughts of Kathy Sierra immediately passed around my head…

But that got me thinking – what does “passion” boil down to? Where do you begin? Kathy and Dan have many more eloquent and well constructed thoughts on this on this, so I figured I would bring it down a notch on the maturity level, away from any hint of intellectual discourse towards a raw, gut feeling:

F**king cool!”

That’s where passion begins. Those are the words I want every user of my product to utter. Ideally followed up by something like:

“Dude, you have to check this out. It’s so f**king cool!

I don’t want their reaction to be a measured, rational, dispassionate analysis of why the product is better than the alternatives, how the cost is more reasonable, feature set more complete, UI more AJAXified. I don’t want them to pause to analyze the boring feature comparison chart on the back of the box.

I want “f**king cool!” Period.

I want that pure sense of wonder, that kid-at-airshow-seeing-an-F16–on-afterburners-rip-by-so-close-it-makes-your-soul-shake reaction, that caress-the-new-Blackberry-until-your-friends-start-to-question-your-sanity experience. I want an irrational level of sheer, unfiltered, borderline delusional joy.

That is where passion for a product starts. Yes, it only gets you so far, and then actual product quality, support, stickiness, strong community, etc come into play. But true passion begins with the two most wonderful words a marketer can hear a customer say:

“F**king cool”

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