Cobb: Appliance World

� On the First Day of Kwanzaa My True Love Gave To Me | Main | Cobblers Alert: Dap & Kwanzaa �

December 27, 2005

Appliance World

There's only a very small difference between men and women. ah but vive la difference!
-- French Proverb, according to Pepe Le Peu

I just clicked on a banner ad for a Hyundai automobile. I didn't know it was a Hyundai. It looked luxurious. I'm sure you've made similar mistakes in the past few years. A lot of cars look like Mercedes. Jaguars look more pedestrian than ever. BMW goes into bizarre sharklike directions to distinguish their latest models. I hear that Chinese cars are on their way across the Pacific. (There has got to be a joke in there somewhere). What's going on here?

Not much I think. It's only something we in the advanced consumer class take a great deal of notice in. We are reading extraordinary arcane tea leaves, and we're very good at it. I am brought to mind of a dinner I bought for a cat from Finland in Long Beach a few years back. He told me he was raised on potatoes and soup, basically. So he always loved to come to the US whenever he could, so he could eat at our French and Thai restaurants. I told him that we are very addicted to money and spending, that's why we're an economic superpower. He couldn't believe it when I told him that the waiter in the restaurant would respect me more if I paid with a gold colored piece of plastic instead of a blue colored one. But it's true. We're like that.

Steve Jobs is still ranting about Objective C and the Next Cube computing club has finally called it quits. The PC is only about 20 years old and that's why Gerard is still having nightmares. But already an iPod is an iPod, unless it's a Rio or just some attachement feature in a Treo. There are fashionable computers and fashionable flash music players. That means the basic problem has been solved and now it's all about marketing. We do all the marketing over here in the US, we let our flunkies overseas do the building. That's OK. Without marketing, they're all appliances anyway. I mean, really is there a difference between a Dell desktop and a Compaq? Neither of those two companies do anything but assemble components built elsewhere and market them slickly. It's what America does best.

Marketing is an extraordinarily difficult thing. I really learned that back in 1999 and 2000 when I had one of those crazy Silicon Valley titles and wore blue shirts. Marketing is the art of convincing people that there is value in making a selection between rough commodities. It is the science of putting words in people's mouths and ideas in their heads. It's about selling concepts that contain products. Products are entiities that combine technologies. A good marketer makes people like products before they even exist. That we are capable of such magical mojo is testament to our greatness as a society, or of our credulousness, one. Still, if anybody could be a VP of Marketing, we'd all live in Lido Village.

But what's so special about Lido Village?

I would hope that I maintain a critical distance from certain marketing campaigns such that I can't be bamboozled as a consumer. But the scale of the enterprise of buying and selling is so vast that it's difficult to comprehend. There are whole economies of information out there that are difficult to parse. It's a full-time job just keeping up. And of course there's the whole economy above our heads. I mean, how could a guy like me tell the difference between a good yacht and a cheap one? For the man who cashes his paycheck at the liquor store, how could he ever distinguish between Schwab and Merrill Lynch? And yet there is marketing that I want too, because I like people like me and I want to know what they do. I'd like to know that I can be enticed by something that's good for me. And like other folks keeping up with the Joneses, I occasionally like to make jokes about people who buy goods from certain stores beneath my tastes.

But what if there was no marketing? What if we were only to get functional satisfaction from our consumables? What if products were only utilitarian, like the breakfast sludge eaten by the crew of the Neb in The Matrix? What if there were no sleek and sharklike, nor hooptie, nor mega tired, but only simply functional automobiles? What if everything simply worked and delivered no other kind of pleasure.. kind of like toothbrushes used to be? Blah. Might as well be Soviet, methinks. Furthermore, as loathe as we might be to admit it, there is an extra charge in knowing that there may someday be a new product that liberates us from the clunker we have now. That's why people are shelling out 600 bucks for a vacuum cleaner.

It's an interesting sport to check out the minute differences between products like cigarettes or shoes. There's really not a whole lot of difference between Nikes and Reeboks, but... hey, most of the time it's worth it.

Posted by mbowen at December 27, 2005 09:23 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.visioncircle.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/4766

Comments

Well, it's not all marketing. DESIGN is something else we are pretty good at. That's what separates an iPod from the other players. Who manufactures it is not really important because the manufacturing doesn't contribute much to the value chain.

That's one reason why the PC business is so tough. They took the user interface (the operating system) and standardized on one vendor and one product. The one area computer makers had a chance to differentiate, what the user actually sees, they gave away. There's little to separate one PC from another, they're all simply building a box to host someone else's product. How can you market that?

Granted, marketing can be used to create hype for a product where there isn't anything real to differentiate it. I think those cases are mostly in clothing and fashion.

You can't market something if it doesn't have some cachet. That's what good design provides. Design is what keeps something from being just a commodity.

P.S. The Dyson is a good example of something where there's a real reason to want one to replace what you have. I didn't pay 600 for my Dyson, but it was close. But - It's outstanding engineering that really works. I couldn't believe the crud that came out of my carpets (which I thought were clean).

Posted by: DC at December 27, 2005 10:09 AM

You are right about Dyson and design. But what about the Next Cube? It took a very long time, after the technology was baked, to establish a market for that kind of high end machine. Function-wise, it was nothing that Linux guys don't have today. There are a lot of good designs that sit on the shelf, and a lot of excellent technology that doesn't get applied properly because buyers are often not as discriminating as builders.

There are also anti-innovation forces out there because certain interests cannot or will not capitalize an updated business model. They market against superior design and win.

There are also a lot of inferior technologies and products that enjoy fat market share they don't really deserve. It often takes a huge event to change the public's mind about its naked emperor.

Posted by: Cobb at December 27, 2005 10:41 AM

I personally think that todays products are overtly technological, more than they should be. There's something that grabs me more in a product that just works, and works well, minus all the bells and whistles. I think manufacturers would make a killing just in the fact that they would save millions in marketing expenses. Also, what's wrong with having just a car that drives and does nothing else? Bring Yugo back!!

P.S. Dyson does make a nice product, I'll get one after I'm done paying off the Kirby G5.

Posted by: MichaelEmanuel at December 27, 2005 11:24 AM

My mother gave me her Kirby. The machine was already 20 some years old when I got it. I got rid of it about 3 years ago, after 30 some years of service.

The wife complained it was too heavy.

Posted by: DarkStar at December 27, 2005 12:10 PM

I don't recall the year, but every time I walked into a store I freaked. The first event happened in Rite-Aid; i think happened when I had a headache and was trying to decide what to buy. There were a billion different brands, at a thousand different prices, with a googleplex of different dosages. 80mg, 20mg, one-hundredth of a mg pills, the same formula, Isoprophen, with different brands. The headache grew worse while standing in the aisle.

Got the same thing standing in the cereal aisle.

Nearly went autistic when I walked into a 'Media Play' once - all this crap calling out to me like a croud at a baseball diamond all saying my name at once.

It almost makes one nostalgic for the Soviet system, or as Henry Ford famously stated, "any color you want, as long as it's black".

Posted by: Patrick Haggood at January 4, 2006 02:12 AM