Do people just buy the cheapest laptops they can? Or is there more to it than that? In his blog article What every mass marketer needs to learn from Groucho Marx Seth Godin talks about how Groucho Marx and his brothers adapted to changes in the market – moving from film to TV when TV started to become popular.
The following statement from this article caught my eye though:
The masses don’t want a better PC laptop. They just want the one with the right specs at the right price. It’s not because people are selfish (though they are) or shortsighted (though they are). It’s because in this market, right now, they’re not listening. They’ve been seduced into believing that all options are the same, and they’re only seeing price. In terms of educating the masses to differentiate yourself, the market is broken.
This statement puzzled me because although it mentions the “right specs at the right price”, it seems to go on to be blame the customer for looking only at price. Maybe they do – that is, people believe that all options are the same, and they’re only seeing price – some of the time, or even a lot of the time, but I think there’s something being missed here: that is, the option available at the cheaper price might well be good enough for most purposes. To illustrate, let’s use the laptop computer example. Now, I reckon that most people buying laptops want to do simple things such as write letters, read/write emails, surf the web, and do basic accounts. That certainly applies to the people I know who own a laptop. It doesn’t matter whether it’s for personal or business use, the tasks I just listed account for the majority of laptop use – and for this type of use, a cheap laptop (such as the ones some of the supermarkets are now selling) is all that’s needed! No need for anything fancy or expensive.
Perhaps there’s something I’ve missed or not understood?
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I agree with you, as you might remember me trying to convince some software engineers in the past: “sometimes good enough is good enough”.
Better yet, as someone much smarter than me (Voltaire) said: “The perfect is the enemy of the good”.
As for Seth Godin’s post, yes I think you’ve missed his point, but made a valid and interesting one none the less.
Thanks for the observations John.
Re Seth Godin’s post: I’ll re-read it again tomorrow and see if it’s any clearer to me then.