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> The problem is not that people don't care about quality, it's that they are not competent to judge it and marketing does the rest. I disagree with this. Jus
by braza 2y ago
> The problem is not that people don't care about quality, it's that they are not competent to judge it and marketing does the rest.
I disagree with this.
Just a small background: I was around in some of the cultures that value quality (e.g. Switzerland, Germany (in some aspects), Nordic countries, etc.), and the biggest issues that I have with the modern concept of quality are 1) quality is not property anymore but instead is something that "someone needs to tell you 'cause you're not capable to see for yourself" and it gives not only a lot of avenue for status signaling but as mechanism that I call "veil of sophistication and exclusivity," and 2) due to the economies of scale, lack of education in terms of taste (aesthetics), and due to the number 1) most of the quality industry became a pervasive mechanism to place huge premiums that does not match with the marginal utility.
One simple example that I can think of is about the car industry, specifically the German auto industry for luxury cars.
With the new competitors from China and the US, several people are perceiving that, in relative terms, those new competitors are bringing more perceived and felt quality in comparison with the European brands.
Some editions of Mercedes you pay more than 100K in a car with a lot of plastic in its finishing, very dubious vehicle dynamics (if you're outside of the nice german/european roads) or if you need to operate in the 40% vehicle performance, awful spare parts coverage outside of Europe, and way inefficient (due to sandbagging and green washing) engines in terms of performance x value.
I can go on and on bringing several examples of this "Premium Scalping" in a lot of products: Beer, Wine, Fashion Industry, Watches, etc.
- prmph 2y agoI'm not sure how you are disagreeing with the comment you are replying to. > With the new competitors from China and the US, several people are perceiving that, in relative terms, those new competitors are bringing more perceived and felt quality in comparison with the European brands. So you agree that when people can actually perceive quality, they car about it, right
- dnate 2y agoDidn't you just prove their point / agree with your post? The German car pricing example fits right in the "people can't judge quality adequately and marketing does the rest" narrative: People buy overpriced cars that are not actually high quality. or You/marketing are telling me about how these chinese cars are higher quality and I should by them. While most people have no Idea whether "green engines" are good or bad. I could take your word for it and believe that they are inefficient. But that sounds bogus given that efficiency is a cornerstone of "green".
- palata 2y agoIt feels like we are not talking about the same thing. I totally agree with you regarding "luxury". Buying a luxury Swiss watch can be somewhere between status signaling or art; you don't need a luxury Swiss watch to get sufficient time precision. But I was talking about quality: how does one compare two laptops costing respectively 400$ and 800$? It regularly happens to me that friends ask help choosing a laptop. Sometimes they blindly trust me when I say "in your situation, I would buy that". Often though, they're more like "okay but you like computers so of course you would want a 'rolls-royce', but for me I think the cheaper one will be enough". Where actually my opinion was that both are not good enough for me, but the cheaper one is a piece of crap for everybody and the less cheap one is good enough for this particular friend. The thing is, I can't blame them for not knowing how to compare two laptops. And the one thing they understand is price: they see two laptops that look similar, and one of them is half the price. The assume similar quality and therefore go for the cheaper. Again, it's not that they don't care about quality, it's that they fail to estimate it.
- redviperpt 2y agoI'm not sure computers are a good example, there are objective tests that can be made to compare two computers, or at least numbers to point at to explain to your friends why one is better than the other.
- palata 2y agoAre you sure? Before buying the laptop, which test can you (or some reviewer) run that will say if the keyboard will start having issues after 6 months or if the lid will break after 10? When you look at the numbers (I presume you mean the number of CPUs, their frequency, the amount of RAM, etc), on the paper they all have something similar. How do you know if one has higher-quality RAM than the other? There are lines of products (like macbooks or thinkpads) where you can check the quality of earlier models, but macbooks and thinkpads are on the higher end. My friends who want Windows don't go for thinkpads...
- vel0city 2y ago