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Comment by foerbert | Hacker News Reader

Particularly in the context of washing machines, I find this a little hard to swallow. What constant innovation is needed here? The product is infrequently replaced, and mainly just needs to do the one thing it already does.

Sure you have changes - you end up with a few major variations like top- and side-loaders and all that. But the old style doesn't fall off the face of the earth. And companies have plenty of time to simply watch and imitate.

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Don’t mistake your product preferences for the average consumer.

Some people will select a washer based on the available color scheme or some “anti-bacterial” setting.

Or it can be as simple as “that washer is 20% cheaper, I don’t care if it doesn’t last as long”.

This is bit of a chicken-or-the-egg question - which came first, those customer preferences, or advertising insisting you 'need' the stainless steel washer to keep up with the Joneses which created the customer preferences.

It is, but it’s also likely a consequence of increasing disposable income. These appliances are also much cheaper (as a percent of income) than they used to be.

They went from “major purchase that should last a decade” to “we’ll get a new one if this breaks”.

Agreed and your comment reminded me of an old documentary about Edward Bernays the nephew of Sigmund Freud that heavily influences companies around the world in marketing and PR opaganda. [1] The video is black-and-white and long but I would suggest the first hour or so is worth the watch. It makes many cases describing how people are convinced they must buy the thing they don't need.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s [ video ]

That's kind of what I mean though. None of those are particularly innovative and certainly aren't going to end up somehow protected. It wouldn't be hard to just follow along. In the time it takes to do that, a small fraction of the user base will have actually purchased a new machine. The majority of all customers will never even know the other company actually came up with that cool color scheme/whatever first. Not that they'd care if they did.

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