Comment by gerbal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gerbal | Hacker News Reader

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For medium scale purchases with many interchangeable competitors, this may be true. But for cheap impulse purchase and for high-end commodities, brand still matters quite a bit.

Apple and Samsung are two great examples of higher end companies whose products aren't appreciably superior or inferior to most of their competitors, but through relentless advertising, they have made themselves seem distinct from their competitors.

A significant function of advertising is to reinforce decisions. Very few people buy a car because they saw an ad for it, or a iPhone, for that matter. But the ad serves to reinforce the decision of those who already bought the product, decreasing buyers remorse. It's the reason most higher end car ads are selling the idea of a car rather than the car itself. Ditto with the older iPhone and iPods ads.

And a similar thing is true for low end, cheap products. People buy Coca Cola over store brand cola because of the brand identity coca cola creates. They may be totally unaware of it, but it's just enough of an impetus to push someone to spend the extra $1.50 on a 12 pack of Coke vs another brand.

Apple and Samsung are two great examples of higher end companies whose products aren't appreciably superior or inferior to most of their competitors

I'm not sure this is true: Samsung is not a (particularly) higher-end company, and their phones at least are lower cost than Apple.

In the case of Apple, their phones were appreciably better up until two years ago or so. Their laptops have been physically better in fit and finish for at least a decade (http://paulgraham.com/mac.html).

I didn't mean that Apple doesn't make good products. They make pretty damn good products. But the products are only part of Apple's marketing strategy.

Much of what has made Apple successful is the idea of what a Mac, an iPod, or an iPhone is. For most of the iPod's lifespan it was not the best product on the market, it was just the best marketed. In the case of macbooks, the hardware has been roughly on par with equivalently priced competitors for several years. But they sell the idea of what it means to be a 'mac person'. They get you invested in the idea that macs are better regardless of the reality.

And that strategy is as much about reassuring people who already own Apple products (fighting buyers remorse, and grass-is-greener impulses) as it is about selling more.

For most of the iPod's lifespan it was not the best product on the market, it was just the best marketed.

I wouldn't say it was just better marketed, although that is true. It was also better designed, both in its hardware and software. An iPod in your hands felt and looked great and the scroll wheel made it intuitive to use. Anyone could easily pick it up and check out what you had in your library.

Before I had one, I had an iRiver iHP-120[0], which had a plethora of features an iPod didn't have. But it was ridiculously hard to use if you didn't know what you were doing.

[0] http://edmundstarbanks.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/iriverihp...

Indeed. I was once engaged on a project to develop a new personal media player. QA had quite a selection of other vendors' PMPs, so we could learn from their mistakes: and ye gods and little fishes, poor UIs were abundant, not to mention often sluggish to respond.

(Sadly, ours never came to be, but that's a long and occasionally hilarious - in the DailyWTF sense - tale. Suffice to say, if your application crashes on trying to close any file, and the vendor's recommended workaround is to never close files, get ready for interesting times)

Anyone could easily pick it up and check out what you had in your library.

This is subjective, of course. I'm lost every time I have to change songs on a friend's iPod classic :-). Give me traditional buttons or a touch screen any day.

> and the scroll wheel made it intuitive to use.

It was only 'intuitive' if someone showed you how to use it, which means... it wasn't intuitive.

They dropped that interface element quickly enough.

I too have never understood how the scroll wheel could be considered intuitive. The first time I saw one I was somewhat baffled until my friend showed it to me and even then it was always a struggle to control.

Intuitive (to me) would be the scrolling on other players...hit up it goes up one, hold up and it goes up increasingly fast. Maybe that's boring but it's completely obvious how to work it when you pick it up.

The scroll wheel was a gimmick in the tradition of the Apple hockey puck mouse, that was worse than the obvious alternatives (a regular rocker is much easier to use for scrolling through long lists) but people bought because they look cute and trusted Apple's supposed design insight.

> For most of the iPod's lifespan it was not the best product on the market,

I first learned the dubious value of reading off a spec sheet after I bought my first iPod. No wireless, less space than a Nomad indeed. But wireless and more space than a Nomad doesn't mean much when your UI and synchronization system is a steaming pile of shit that makes me die a little inside at the mere thought of having to use it. An iPod's specs may not have been top-of-the-line, but the experience sure was in comparison to the competition.

A more modern example is the Samsung Gear Fit that I've complained about previously. Lovely piece of hardware that stomps on everything else if one goes by the spec sheet. Unfortunately, Samsung produced a gigantic steaming turd of software (both firmware and more so on the client software side) that makes me regret that I purchased it. Sure, a FitBit doesn't even have a screen, and it's limited in its capabilities, but at least it works.

samsung's SSDs are way better than non-name brand SSDs.

Piggybacking this, Coca Cola is the king of marketing prowess, in part because the product stays the exact same (or 99.8% the same). It's part of their "moat." Tech can't do that, in my opinion almost by definition due to expected and continuous innovation -- you can't stay the same. You do see it sometimes in short bursts -- such as with the Thinkpad brand (but even that line will be short lived vs. Coke).

With Coke, they can then use that consistency on anything from Santa Claus to the Olympics to feed on nostalgia of that recurring same-ness -- they're investing in a lifetime of feelings, not a few years or months of popularity. Hershey's, Disney (high repeat visits), and McDonald's to some extent are other great examples of being able to leverage long term marketing on consistent or nostalgic products -- something difficult for tech to do.

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