20 minutes. That’s how long we have with a consumer before they max out trying to get a new-fangled electronics gadget to work. Once they’ve hit the 20 minute wall and let out a cathartic profanity or two, consumers simply give up, chuck or return the product and move on.

That’s one observation in a report just released by eMarketer called "Consumer Electronics Online: Converged or Confused?" The conclusion, according to eMarketer analyst Lisa Phillips, is “People love to buy (gadgets), but they can’t get them to work.”

Convoluted technology is certainly at the heart of the problem, but the buck really stops with the communicators who rep these products to consumers.

Rather than making tech accessible and -- big concept here, usable -- many PR and marketing types fall back on the jargon and buzzwords of the tech industry when promoting products.

I’ve written here before about this issue and the need for communicators to build a bridge from techie innovation to consumer ease-of-use. The eMarketer study is just the latest example of tech marketing's inhumanity to man.

There’s a lot at stake, to the tune of $190 *billion* in 2007 in purchases for digital home entertainment products. And yet eMarketer found that two-thirds of the consumers it polled didn’t even know the meaning of the term “digital home.”

Knowing we’re working off that 20-minute clock, PR needs to reset the lexicon of tech marketing and ensure that people find digital gadgets approachable, emphasizing benefits rather than features. That covers everything from the time someone first kicks the tires and samples a product at retail (when you have more like 20 seconds to set the hook) to that moment of truth when they boot, initialize or otherwise flick the ON switch.

The brands that crack the code of speaking to consumers in non-tech terms, through the reference-based channels they trust most, will be sitting in the gadget winner’s circle.

Just imagine how Apple’s wildly popular iTunes would have been received if they positioned that service as an alternative to peer-to-peer file sharing consistent with the constructs of digital rights management and intellectual property protection available over broadband…

Is that the sound of crickets I hear, or just a ticking clock?