Creating Unique, Beloved Products in an Age of Sameness

At a Glance:

• Why anthropology is becoming an innovation superpower

• How to create tech with body and soul

• Returning to storytelling over features

I hung out with Ali Maaxa recently. She’s a cultural anthropologist who helps organizations understand the people they serve at a level they didn’t know was possible. And one of my fave people. 

My question, ‘How do you build offerings that matter in a world that is rapidly commoditizing?’ 

Seeing Underneath the Product

Anthropologists look behind the curtain to the life that eludes most of us. They peer into the rituals, emotions, and nuances behind people’s use of tools, systems, places, and each other. They see what’s going on. 

This perspective is the future of products that touch hearts, minds, and bodies—offerings that make people feel alive.

Here’s Ali on how to think like an anthropologist. 

Be a physical witness 

Enter your audience’s environment. Ali worked with a recycling provider to understand why people weren’t using the service. She visited fifty homes, including many people with disabilities. But it was one ten minute video of a blind woman trying to use the recycling bin and almost slicing her wrists on shards of glass trying to read the braille on the container–risking a trip to the hospital to recycle two bottles—that shifted the organization’s entire approach to their service, not just for blind people but across the board. Information they never could have gotten from call center data. 

Connect Mind to Body 

Consider what it feels to inhabit someone’s body while using the product. Like how the iPhone has an intuitive relationship to the hand, or how Slack has a conversational mode that mimics being together in a room, such as being tapped on the shoulder. 

Ali explained how our culture started to split the mind and body in feudal times, and how we have felt this harmful split ever since. But products with a sense of embodiment have quietly won marketshare and will thrive in the coming years. 

Connect Tech to Soul 

Ali talked about the Vocoder. This was military tech created during WWII that compressed voice signals so folks like Roosevelt and Churchill could have secure conversations. After the military lost interest, it got picked up by musicians like Kraftwerk and Afrika Bambaataa, who built a futuristic, alien sound into their music. That led to blending with auto-tune and inspiring a whole generation of “digital soul” with artists like Daft Punk.  

Humans naturally brought funk to the tech. This deep desire to incorporate bodies and “put the swing into the mechanized” must become part of your innovation. Put yourself into the actual room with the people to see how they want to weave humanity into the product experience. 

Learn Storytelling  

To be an anthropologist is to tell stories. Do quiet “ride alongs” to feel the movie of your buyers’ lives, from the setting to the emotional arc to the different players to the feelings in their bodies. Go beyond the mind and feel the human reverberations around your product. 

Ali, channeling Nietzsche, warned of our over-reliance on the “Apollonian” (control, order, logic) and forgetting the “Dionysian” (chaos, passion, desire). The beauty of human experience sits at the intersection. Or, to paraphrase Nietzsche, “Without the Dionysian, humans could not bear existence; without the Apollonian, we could not comprehend it.”

In a world increasingly dominated by automation and AI, the human is the advantage. Go back to what matters and meet people where they live: belonging, imagination, soul, Eros, meaning, embodiment. 

And let go of your ego to join the funk. 

With love, 

Dave  

Struggling with building competitive advantage into your products? Hit reply - I'd love to hear your story.

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