What a WOW product really is?

The product designer or marketer who wants to design and sell a product should be aware of what Daniel Kahneman calls System 1 and what Seth Godin calls the lizard brain by highlighting more its animality than its cleverness. It is this system, this part of the brain that continuously processes information and makes fast preconceived assessments that lead to fast actions. This is the system that triggers the reaction of our hand when it approaches the fire. This is the part of the system we share with animals but ours seems to be more performant and happen to be understandable and improvable. The way this system works is that it gets a minimal amount of information and substitute it with other similar information which it knows. This process of guessing answers and interpreting them with similarity is called substitution. This is not to confound with product substitution which is a product design concept even if some key concepts about this cognitive feature of our brain plays an important role in product substitution because product designers try to emulate the features of the main product to make you believe or know that the products are the same. Better product designers build new products that interact with our system 1 or lizard brain, making us react faster than we should normally do without making analytical thinking which is the role of the second system of our brain. When cognitive science collides and intersects with product design and marketing, we should pry that the ones who get the key of this kind of knowledge be very ethical because this is a powerful tool that changes the behavior of crowds and culture, even an entire world.

A WOW product for instance is this product that has the ability to make your system 1, your lizard brain or your subconscious triggers rapidly this signal that will make you not only tell yourself, WOW this is an amazing product let’s buy it but do it almost instantaneously.