Who’s the boss?
March 16th, 2008 | by Paul |The Innovator blog at the Sydney Morning Herald (that’s Down Under to you) had an interesting post on the role of consumers in product development.
Basically, the tenet is that companies should listen to the consumers and be open to ideas and innovations from the outside. Sounds interesting. Reminds me a bit of when Homer Simpson bankrupted his long-lost brother by designing a car that had a horn which played “La Cucaracha,” but that’s an extreme example.
(Public domain image courtesy of Wikipedia)
I am intrigued by the concept, though. It’s good for business to listen to people rather than try to make a bad product and shove it down people’s throats with a glitzy ad campaign (I’m talking to you, every movie Will Smith has ever made).
Actually, that’s not fair. I liked “Men In Black.”
The whole thing reminds me of Bill Gates, who sort of looks like a Men In Black alien. If I’m getting the story right, Gates was going to spend tons o’ money to give computers to children in Africa. Then he visited Africa and scrapped the whole project, spending the money instead on helping them get clean water. He saw what the people really needed and didn’t go ahead with the preconceived notion he had. Good for him.
More amusing examples include the stories my sister tells of her days working at an ad agency. There was the man who wanted them to come up with a campaign for his luxury birdcages. He was unbending on the name he had picked out ahead of time - The Pecker Palace. There’s a similar story she tells about the company marketing a new brand of flavored soy nuts. They wanted to call them Numm Nuts, because they’re nummy.
I guess I’m torn on the concept of increased consumer roles in product development. I like that it might lead to products with actual, as opposed to perceived, need. On the other hand, it doesn’t really make much difference to me if a company thinks I need this product or some random dude thinks I need this product and suggests it to the company. I’m equally ambivalent.
The Innovator blog had an interesting quote from Henry Ford. He said that, if he had listened only to consumers, he would have built a faster, cheaper horse.
Now, I’m wary any time that strike-busting antisemite seems to make sense. He’s a bad man. Read “The Flivver King.”
Either way, there’s going to be more crap on the market. It seems from the Innovator post that businesses will benefit from listening to people or “making the consumer boss,” but do you think we, society as a whole, will benefit from products being based on public perception? Will the public help create morally better products than the businesses would alone?
It’s not on the same level as newspapers running stories not on import but on how well they’ll play with single women aged 18 to 35 who make $50,000 to $100,000 a year or other such crap, but it’s always interesting to read about the arguments behind what some have termed “the death of authority.”