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#down. Most of the rest is on doctors, soldiers, teachers, pensions, and businesses doing deals with each other. But, those doctors are all consumers on the weekend, and those B2B transactions ultimately end in consumer spending; Toyota isn't going to buy \u00a330 million of car door handles from a supplier if it doesn't end up in them selling cars to consumers<\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\nAs our economist friends tell us, one person’s expenditure is another person’s income. That huge torrent of consumer spending doesn’t pour off the edge of the Earth, it all winds up as income for someone. And if you want to be one of those someones (or help your employer to be one) then it might be a good idea to learn a little about how consumers do their buying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“But ah ha!”, I hear you say. “How complicated can it be? Just make a good product, and then maybe tell people how good it is!”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That’s a lovely and inviting story. But before we settle fully into its warm embrace, let us take a quick field trip back to the year 1980. So cast your mind back, please, to a time before the internet, when “streaming a show” meant poking an antenna out of your house so that your TV could pick up whatever slightly grainy image your local big broadcaster was choosing to beam (remember, this was before the internet, so if you wanted to know what shows were going to be on, you had to look it up in a little paper booklet they sold). If you wanted to watch anything that wasn’t being broadcast at that specific moment, then you needed to buy a videocassette machine. These stored videos on little reels of magnetic tape, and there were two formats of these on the market: Format A ran on machines made by Sony, and had the better picture quality. Format B was invented by a company called JVC. It launched a year or two later and compensated for its worse picture quality by having a longer run time and being a bit cheaper.<\/p>\n\n\n\nYou might imagine that most people would want the one with the better picture quality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
They did not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You might imagine that the one with the better picture quality would at least end up with a substantial chunk of the market share.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It did not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Sony version was almost entirely gone within a few years, while JVC’s rival ‘VHS’ format machines sat in tens of millions of living rooms for the next two to three decades. Their reign ended only when DVD players were invented and eventually became cheap enough to dethrone them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Why did this happen? There are a few reasons, but one of the most important was the difference in their recording time. Sony’s machines could record an hour of TV, whereas VHS could record nearly 2 hours. That might not seem like a big deal at first, but this was long before the internet so people weren’t recording 30-second clips of cats doing amusing things. They mostly wanted to record movies and professional sports games. Movies typically run for 90 minutes, and sports games are at least that, if not longer. This difference in run time was not just a boring technical specification, it was a critical difference to the consumers trying to use them – a 1 hour of recording meant you missed the end of your movie and the whole second half of the game. Sony caught up to providing 2 hours eventually, but it was too late by then. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I humbly submit to you that learning about consumers can matter. A lot. And if you don’t believe me, perhaps you would take it from a Sony executive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Why did Sony’s machines vanish completely?<\/h5>\n
Sony could have been Pepsi to VHS’s Coke, except for one thing: “market lock-in”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you had a Sony player then it could not play VHS tapes, and vice versa. If you wanted to rent a movie (which was the main use for them), then you would have to travel to a nearby retail shop, and they would have to give you a physical copy of the movie that you wanted, in the format that your player worked in<\/strong>. So your selection of films was never going to be great (your local shop only had so much shelf space to carry movies), but it got worse when half the cassettes in the shop were going to be the wrong format for your player. Once VHS started to become somewhat more popular, rental shops quickly started to favour their larger audience segment by carrying mostly VHS tapes. People with Sony players saw their small choice dwindle to nothing, and eventually, they gave up and got a VHS player like everyone else.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIf that sounds like a weirdly pointless history lesson, consider that a similar thing is happening right now, except with social media networks. You might not like Tik Tok or Twitter or Facebook (etc), but if the people you want to talk to are all on that platform, then you can’t really move anywhere else. Nobody would see your posts, and you wouldn’t see theirs. You, too, are locked-in, right now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This also means that your brilliant ideas for new and better social networks (which I’m sure you have) are never going to get built. I mean, you could spent time and money making it, and it might function great, but who would switch to you? Not many people if it meant not being able to talk to their friends, who are all on the other networks! So the social media platforms we have now aren’t necessarily the best ones, they’re just the ones that won early, and we are all stuck with them now – no matter how well or poorly they are run (they will fete their CEOs as geniuses regardless, and pay them enormous stacks of money – decide for yourself how sensible this is).<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
insight<\/h3>\n\n\n\nThe unexamined life is not worth living<\/p>Socrates (attributed)<\/cite><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\nThe things you own are not the most important thing about you. Well, hopefully not! There should be many things that matter more – what you know, who you like, who likes you, what you do with your time, the list can go on. That said, what you own probably matters more than you think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here’s a quick thought experiment: Pick another person, and mentally switch possessions with them. You get their clothes, their living place, their sleeping space, their computer, the contents of their kitchen, their mode of transport. Does that feel strange? Does your life change? Now try it with a few other people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Also, consider: what if this person is a different gender than you? A very different age to you? If they live in a developed country? A developing one? Would you lead the same life if you were living in a small village with only a few hours of electricity per day? How would it change what you do in the hours of your day?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So the things you own are hopefully not the most important thing about you, but they do intersect with almost all of the things about you. If you understand enough about how someone acquires and uses things, then you know quite a bit about them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But! knowing these things about a person isn’t as simple as taking a list of the things in their house. Think about the things you own: How did you buy them? Did you spend all day shopping? Did you stop by a shop on your way home? Put it in an online cart? Did you ask someone first? Did you read the reviews? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That was just how you got the thing, though. Now think about how long you have owned them? How do you throw things away? Do you throw out a shirt when it has a small nick in it? Do you try to repair it? By yourself? Do you wait until it has big holes and\/or stains? Does it depend on which shirt it is? Who gave it to you? Where you got it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Do other people do this too? Do they go to the same places? Do they go through the same steps?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Consumer behaviour may not be AT the heart of what it means to be human. I sincerely hope it isn’t. But it isn’t so very far away from that place either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
References<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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{4193465:SK5MMGMP}<\/span>\r\n\t\tapa<\/span>\r\n\t\tdefault<\/span>\r\n\t\tasc<\/span>\r\n\t\t<\/span>\r\n\t\t<\/span>\r\n\t\t<\/span>\r\n\t\t<\/span>\r\n\t\t<\/span>\r\n\t\t<\/span>\r\n\t\t<\/span>\r\n\t\t<\/span>\r\n\t\t<\/span>\r\n\t\t0<\/span>\r\n\t\t<\/span>\r\n\t\t395<\/span>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
CB is more than anything else in business school. Don’t believe me?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":396,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"chapter":[7],"exclude_from_index":[15],"class_list":["post-395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","chapter-0-intro","exclude_from_index-exclude-from-index"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=395"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2058,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395\/revisions\/2058"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=395"},{"taxonomy":"chapter","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/chapter?post=395"},{"taxonomy":"exclude_from_index","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exclude_from_index?post=395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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