I have been involved in product design for several decades and there are some well established axioms or universal truths. Hidden costs that the customers do not perceive are worse than leaving money on the table, you make the SKU uncompetitive compared to other similar designs at point of sale that did not add the extra (hidden) cost.okgb said:there's the other side of the coin , especially in the building construction trades , to get from contractors
" ah , you'll never notice , or everyone does it that way , It doesn't make a difference or [ insert your own ,
and indeed , you get it inserted ! ]
usually , cause they want to get out as quick as possible with as much profit, with the least amount of effort
there is an element of this in every industry
When I first started designing products at Peavey in the mid-80s I had the luxury of being such a low cost manufacturer I could afford to put some extra stuff inside products mainly to please myself. By the 90's competition and Chinese manufacturing erased that low cost competitive benefit, and I had use a sharper pencil for my design/features (anything that cost money is a feature). This is not good or bad, it just is.
Long ago I learned to watch what customers do and ignore what they say. If customers actually did what they say, Behringer never would have enjoyed record sales from making Chinese versions of popular domestic products. Even Mackie was hoist on their own (petard) "Made in USA" marketing campaign.
When I was over the product marketing department I recall the difficulty my transducer sales manager had marketing the field replaceable basket for peavey speakers. It was an extra "hidden" cost that many customers did not appreciate when making price comparisons. It is hard to market a feature to a customer with a sentence that begins "when your speaker breaks....".
JR
PS: Speaking of trades I am constantly reminded of corners cut by the contractors who worked on my current house. Hopefully they are dead and gone by now.