How to evangelize any product

Photo credit: Phandroid

Here are some tips on how to evangelize a product (whether it’s Apple, Canva or anything).

Make it great

It’s very hard to evangelize crap. It’s much easier to evangelize great stuff. I learned that the starting point of evangelism is a great product or service.

Position it as a “cause”

A product or service, no matter how great, is a collection of parts or snippets of code. A “cause,” by contrast, changes lives. It’s not enough to make a great product or service—you also need to position it and explain it as a way to improve lives. Steve Jobs didn’t position an iPhone as $188 worth of parts. Evangelists need to seize the moral high ground and transcend the exchange of money for goods and services.

Love the cause

“Evangelist” isn’t a job title. It’s a way of life. It means that evangelists must love what they evangelize. No matter how great the person, if he doesn’t love the cause, he cannot be a good evangelist for it. If you don’t love it, don’t evangelize it.

This has hiring implications too: a good education and relevant work experience are not sufficient. It’s just as important that an evangelist loves the product or service.

Localize the pitch

Don’t describe your product using lofty, flowery terms like “revolutionary,” “paradigm shifting,” and “curve jumping.” Macintosh wasn’t “the third paradigm in personal computing.” It simply (and powerfully) increased the productivity and creativity of one person with one computer.

People don’t buy “revolutions.” They buy “aspirins” to fix the pain or “vitamins” to supplement their lives, so localize the pitch and keep it simple.

Look for agnostics, ignore atheists

It is very hard to convert someone to a new religion when he worships another god. The hardest person to convert to Macintosh was someone who worshipped MS-DOS. The easiest person was someone who never used a personal computer before.

If a person doesn’t “get” your product or service after fifteen minutes, cut your losses and move on.

Let people test drive the cause

Evangelists believe that their potential customers are smart. Therefore, they don’t bludgeon them with ads and promotions.

Instead, they provide ways for people to “test drive” their products and then decide for themselves. Evangelists believe that their products are good—so good that they’re not afraid of enabling people to try before they buy.

Photo credit: Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas

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