Gollum reminds us that the strongest products change the way customers talk about them.
Watching The Hobbit film series with my daughters, I thought about how much is packed into a single term of endearment from Gollum.
“My Precious.”
The way Gollum speaks to The Ring captures ownership, identity, and dependence in two words, expressed instinctively.
That’s what great products do when they land properly (minus the creature’s disturbing croaky voice).
They reshape language so customers move from describing a product to relating to it in a personal way.
You see this clearly with iPhone, iPad, and iMac.
“My iPhone” became the default because the product embedded itself into our daily life in a way that felt deeply personal and essential. That’s doubly possessive.
MyPillow leaned all the way into this instinct, making the ownership language explicit and easy to adopt, with arguably the most up-close-and-personal product we ever own.
Gollum … I mean Mike Lindell … built a $300 million empire on that.
This kind of language communicates something deeper than personal preference.
It reflects attachment, and beneath that sits the power of loss aversion.
Gollum’s own fixation is driven by the fear of losing what he profoundly sees as his, which turns the object into something obsessive and irreplaceable.
There’s of course a boundary to pay attention to.
His world narrows around a single object, creating intensity alongside fragility.
In product terms, that’s what happens when something becomes too central without flexibility or room for substitution.
The opportunity sits in the mechanism.
Identity, ownership, and the instinct to hold onto something that feels like yours are the levers doing all the work.
Where in your product are customers starting to speak about it as something they own rather than something they use?
I wonder what J. R. R. Tolkien would think of our monstrous obsession with devices?
Want to make your product irresistible? That’s what we do as product marketing consultants at Graphos Product, helping innovators turn need-driven ideas into market-ready successes.