Strategy > Product Description

VersaMe made an early-education wearable that would count the number of words a child heard throughout the day. Not WHAT the words were, mind you. It just counted how many of them there were. Parents would get detailed data in almost real-time about how many words were said, and when. So, what would you call that? A word counter might be your first thought.

Now think of a device that counts your steps. A-ha! Easy, right? A Fitbit or, step counter or whatever. Tons of them that exist. But you already know, after decades of education from various sources, that exercising is good for you. Even walking adds benefits to your health. So, steps x healthy = the more steps the better. Done. Good job.

WHAT DOES IT DO? So small, so cute, so frustrating to describe! AAAAAAHHHHUUUGHH! — **WHAT DOES IT DO?** So small, so cute, so frustrating to describe! AAAAAAHHHHUUUGHH!

But the vast majority of people don’t know why more words are good for your baby. When I started working on this, the best way to get people to understand the product (once you established it was a wearable for infants that improved Junior’s educational potential by counting the words he heard) was to say, “It’s like a Fitbit for words.” You could literally see cartoon lightbulbs go on over people heads.

But that’s no way to brand a product. You can’t rely on another brand name to describe your product no matter how different an industry it’s rooted in. This is a really stupid, hard problem. It starts to sound like a really mean logic puzzle when you get into it a bit.

Wearable Word Counter - Doesn’t explain the fullness of the system (hardware, mobile software, benefits)

Advanced Early-Education Wearable - Doesn’t say what it does.

Early-Education System - Well, it’s more than a word counter, but again, not very descriptive.

Wearable Word Tracker - Sounds like it keeps track of which words a baby hears

Also, the Starling didn’t record the words a baby heard. It literally just counted them. So words like tracker were verboten.

FINAL: Where we ended up on the redesigned packaging – complete early education system. Which was super accurate, but still a clunky mouthful. — **FINAL**: Where we ended up on the redesigned packaging – complete early education system. Which was super accurate, but still a clunky mouthful.

This kind of technology never existed for everyday consumers, so they had no point of reference to lean on to understand it. In the end, the closest I got was to describe it as an early-education monitor. And I thought that was SUPER close. After all, you use a sleep monitor to be sure your baby is sleeping enough. Why wouldn’t you use an education monitor to tell if your baby’s learning enough? I’ll always wish we had more time to reconfigure in this direction to see how this would have done. Never underestimate how hard it is to sell something no one has ever seen before. And know that the only solution involves repeated education, and time. And lots of both.