• strategy+business , Thursday, December 4, 2008 11 AM

If you're as much of a sucker for industrial history as I am, you'll love Michael Schrage's piece about the importance of defining the rules of the game for new technologies. He begins by recounting how James Watt not only invented the steam engine but also the term horsepower. It became the standard measure of what the newfangled contraptions could do, making it easier to make the sale to factory owners whose prior frame of reference was, quite literally, the power of horses. Watt's "remarkably persuasive marketing metric" has long outlived any of his engines, Schrage points out.

Then there's Harley Procter, who came up the standard of "99-44/100% Pure." When I think about it a bit, "99-44/100% Pure" is like being a little bit pregnant, but some of these marketing slogans aren't meant to be thought about, even a bit. It sure worked for P&G; I don't even have to mention the brand name because you know it -- or you do if you were around when it was still advertising a bit and Google searches for "Ivory advertising" didn't come back with the words "vintage" and "niche brand" attached. (Okay, okay, I know there was no Google way back then.)

Then there's Will Carrier, who commercialized air conditioning largely by tying hot air to lower productivity in a 1911 academic paper (something anyone who's been in a three-hour brand strategy meeting can attest to). Not to mention Intel, which moved from MIPs ("millions of instructions per second ") to "clock speed" to describe the processing power of its microprocessors. Now that competitors have caught up and surpassed it in speed alone, Intel is attempting to redefine the category with the use of "multicore."

Schrage's insightful read, with some failed marketing-metric neologisms cited, too, concludes: "Oftentimes the best way to take the measure of a new market is to create a new measure for the market." ;

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