In many African nations, illiteracy is so common that food packaging doesn’t wast much space on fancy labels or brand names and instead focuses on having a nice picture of what’s inside so that people know what they’re buying. No wonder, then, that Nestlé had trouble selling its Gerber brand of baby foods in Africa. Perception is an important factor in the average consumer’s buying decision.
Basic perception tells us that there is a direct correlation between cost and quality. Cheap items are cheaply built and made of cheap materials, and thus don’t last or don’t work. This basic tenet of consumer wisdom has unfortunately misled us. Many products have actually failed to sell well until the price was raised to the point that buyers felt it was going to be of high enough quality to be worth buying. Deartháir filled me in the other day on his experience in electronics sales where the best TV’s in the store actually sold the fewest units – not because they were too expensive, but because they weren’t expensive enough. As the lowest priced TV’s in the store, most customers dismissed them as inferior and not worth considering.
With so many gadgets and electronics these days being re-branded items built by a few manufacturers, does quality truly correspond to expense, or are we just wasting our money?
["User Input" is the AtomicToasters Question of the Day™ asking you, the teeming millions, to answer our pressing questions.]
A startup I worked for had one product: an international phone line simulator used by payphone manufacturers to test their products (not surprisingly, that startup does not exist anymore). While the actual electronics inside it were quite cheap (a micro-controller plus a custom power supply), the company spent some serious money designing and testing the device. Obviously, the target market was quite small, so the per unit price had to be high. The first prototypes used simple off the shelf plastic enclosures which were fine. However, our boss asked use to use the heaviest metal enclosure we could find, to "give the customer the impression that they just got their money's worth". As a result everyone involved in the project was lugging boxes that were two to three times heavier than they needed to be! But the trick worked: our customers were happy to shell the "extra" money for a "heavy duty, rugged" device "assembled by hand in Switzerland"…
I suspect this box-of-European-steel marketing is the same reason that Volvo was able to sell a car with crank windows, manual cloth seats, mediocre air conditioning, and 114 horsepower for around seventeen grand – in 1989.
(Okay, so that was halfway between a LeSabre and a Fifth Avenue, neither of which is statistically likely to exist today. Not the point.)
I like to believe marketing is largely stupid, rather than outright evil. That would be true if we had the raw information to actually answer questions and distinguish between products. In certain areas, if you're willing to do a lot of research, this is already possible; take bicycles* and computers for example. Most people, including myself, can get overwhelmed by the obsessive attention to detail. But leaves me with a simple conclusion: Even if you just want to compete on price, you need to show both the similarities and differences between interchangeable products. Ideally, everything that matters will be similar, and the differences will be irrelevant. But don't insult me by just using big words like 'quality' and having nothing to back it up. 'anecdote' ≠ 'data'.
*Don't be like me: Bicycles are not like computers where you can save by building from scratch. Just buy a new or used one that's close to what you want and modify it.
I know with TVs that usually the major components are only made by 2 or 3 (or sometimes only one) different vendors and the dozens of manufacturers just assemble those components. There might be a little bit of difference between the top brands, but usually not that much.
Also it seems that many times the quality vs. price scale is a logarithmic scale. Just spend up to the point right before the curve slopes WAAY up and you will usually be well served. Or just try to pick up the really nice one used if it is something that depreciates really fast.
Not on topic, but I put this forward for your consideration…
A Sophisticated Bear With a Mustache Riding Abraham Lincoln With Laser Eyes Into Glorious Battle http://owl.li/4KpFJ