Dec 12, 2008 0
Shine a Little Light
Sometimes you have to invent the ruler before you can take measurements. When marketers decide how to explain the merits of a product, they look for words and concepts that they think will be meaningful to their target audience. Clorox “kills germs” and “whitens fabric.” Quaker oatmeal is “heart healthy.” For many products, these concepts are a no-brainer. Consumers have built-in benchmarks (cleanness, healthfulness, taste, calories, etc.) with which to evaluate products. For some products, however, marketers have to invent those benchmarks before they can boast about how their products measure up.
David Pogue, the NY Times technology columnist, has a great piece on this phenomenon as it applies to digital cameras. In “The Myth of Megapixels,” he chronicles the rise of the megapixel count as the red herring of digital camera specs. It turns out that comparing megapixels won’t help you find a better camera. Picture quality is dependent on lens, circuitry and sensor quality. A megapixel count tells you how many dots the image has, not how good those dots are. Still, camera marketers push pixels and consumers have long ago accepted this as the benchmark for digital camera evaluation.
The outdoor market is full of similarly questionable benchmarks. Some are imperfect but generally accepted, like temperature ratings for sleeping bags. Some are scientific but unhelpful, like the air permiability rating (CFM) some apparel makers use to describe a fabric’s windproofness. Read the rest of this entry »