The Futurist: Why You Should Buy Middle-End Products
- September 20th, 2007
- Read 1213 times
- 6 Comments
About a year ago I was at a Bang & Olufsen store in Manhattan. Some guy with spiky hair and a Prada jacket walked in, and asked to try out the B&O A8 headphones. He put on the pair, listened to some extremely loud classical music, and, with a self-satisfied grin, said 30 seconds later say: “I’m sold. I’ll take them.”
Now the A8s aren’t the best headphones on the market, and the B&O price premium indisputably goes more towards design than performance. If I could shrink myself down Innerspace-style and enter this guy’s head, I imagine I would have not seen him processing the music he was hearing as much as the $160 price tag on the headphones (which is very, very low for a B&O product) and the $30,000 price tags attached to the speakers in the same room. In fact, I would wager money that you could have shoved $20 Sonys in this guy’s ear and he wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. What sold him was the environment, the imagery, and expensive suit on the salesperson. If you put any product in this environment and told somebody that it was premium, they would believe you. And if they are in the market for a high-end product, they might even buy it.
A few days ago I was fortunate enough to visit the Bose HQ in Framingham, MA, where I was treated to an amazing presentation by Bose founder Dr. Amar Bose. As he put it, Bose was founded on the fact that audio products with supposedly-top-notch specifications were not very pleasurable to listen to. As Bose described it, the company was born when he “realized specifications A) weren’t correct as printed, and B) if you met them, the sound wasn’t improved.”
Whatever one’s personal feelings on Bose are, I agree with him that, for most people, specs simply don’t matter much in terms of the actual listening (or, in the case of visual products, viewing) experience. What really matters is how good an experience you are expecting. So for companies like Bose, which is held in extraordinarily high regard by the general public, high customer satisfaction levels are at least partially the result of the simple fact that customers are EXPECTING good products, often through a mix of word-of-mouth, marketing, price tags, and product design–all areas that Bose rules in. In fact, a study that came last year showed that Bose was held in higher regard by the general public than any other consumer electronics company. Higher than Apple, Microsoft, Sony, or Dell.
Poor products are poor products and won’t fool anybody, but the difference in sound and picture between an average product and better-than-average one is often so minute, that most people are simply incapable of noticing if they aren’t trained to do so. As Dr. Bose told me, a speaker’s ability to process ultra-high frequency ranges doesn’t matter because “we aren’t dogs.” Furthermore, I’ll give you $100 if you can tell the difference between a 10,000-to-1 contrast ratio and a 20,000-to-1 contrast ratio on a TV (hint: the spec is inherently troublesome due to it’s method of measurement, but I won’t go into that now.)
So my message to the public is this: Unless you’re an acoustic engineer or Mike Kobrin, save your money and buy middle-end products. Look for ones with decent reviews, don’t worry about the brand name or how glitzy the storefront is, and never, ever trust the ability of your own ears and eyes to objectively tell you what a really great product is. Instead, trust them to tell you what products you really enjoy listening to and watching. You’ll be happier that way, and might even save a few bucks.
Seth Porges writes on future technology and its role in personal electronics for his column, The Futurist. It appears every Thursday and an archive of past columns is available here.
Chris Cronin (Who am I?)
9 months ago
What a great commentary! You are exactly correct. This extends not only to devices that are engineered past our ability to benefit from them (like vitamins into a body that already consumes more nutrition than it can process), but to products that simply do not enhance sensory experience as claimed.
Google this for lots of fun examples in stereo equipment alone:
stereophile site:randi.org
Eric (Who am I?)
9 months ago
Yeah, anyone who buys Bose’s line of hooey shouldn’t shop for expensive items. The problem is, their products are third-rate, not second rate. So even people who buy middle-leve stuff like Sony should stay away.
Chuck (Who am I?)
9 months ago
I agree that Bose products are less than second rate. First rate marketing, but poor products.
And I do agree that there are plenty of products in the middle ground that are the best bang for the buck.
I had a friend with more money than sense who was looking at speakers that were $10K a pair, he was convinced that this is what he should buy, I suggested a pair of Phase Tech 9.1’s at $2k, and he looked at me like I was crazy.
Well he managed to get both set of speakers to his home, the $10K pair and the $2K pair, he bought the $2k pair. Was there a difference? Yes, maybe, who knows. Where the speakers were positioned in the room probably made a bigger difference, in the end it was not worth the $8K difference.
Jon (Who am I?)
9 months ago
While this article is more or less correct, it misses one important point: many people WANT to pay for the environment, the imagery, and the expensive suit on the salesperson. The assumption that people are only looking for the best hardware isn’t always true.
A Bentley Continental’s steering wheel takes 8 hours to hand-stitch. Vertu craftsmen train for YEARS before being allowed to assemble the phones. Sometimes, good products simply aren’t good products unless they come with a good story.
Ken Sander (Who am I?)
9 months ago
right on, right on, RIGHT ON
Trip English (Who am I?)
9 months ago
Ken is quite correct, but still not complete. The mise en scene is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to building brands like Bang & Olufsen. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and Bang & Olufsen products simply last a long time. Their customer retention rate is unmatched at almost any price-point and after over 85 years, I think we can be pretty certain that it’s not a hoax.
It puzzles me that you can chastise Bang & Olufsen for being too well made, while a few months ago you chastised the iPhone for its inevitable, possibly planned, obsolescence. It doesn’t seem so much that you hold consistent positions, but rather practice the cheapest brand of wisdom: universal skepticism. That’s quite fine and we should count ourselves blessed that the internet has over-democratization punditry and criticism to the point that it no longer need be informed, simply produced. Bravo.
Quite honestly, all of my televisions are Bang & Olufsen. Not one was made more recently than 1987. All are constantly mistaken not only for modern televisions, but cutting edge at that. And they’re tubes! What matters truly, and any futurist worth his escape pod should agree, is not only that products remain working, but that they remain relevant. That’s admittedly a tall order for electronics where consumers are conditioned to accept disposability even in their high dollar purchases, but not an impossible one. What is truly stunning about a 25 year old audio video system is not that it is still running, but rather that anyone cares. Certainly a system that old gives little access to digital music, certainly isn’t high definition and by no means accepts contemporary means of connectivity, but this and countless systems like it are invited to overstay their useful welcome in well considered homes across the planet. They have long since paid for themselves and remained relevant, not in a general sense, but in a personal sense as their sound & picture quality form an emotional bond that “middle end” products could never hope for.
I would be a nervous futurist if the comments to my column consistently made me look this foolish.
Cheers.