Benson | # 161 | 2008-02-28, 23:59 | Report

I did indeed notice. That it is.
No, probably not. The ability to make a profit by marketing and selling, though, is simply a matter of degree. Marketing costs money, but increases the quantity or price you can sell at. If it doesn't increase it enough to cover the marketing costs, then you wouldn't do it, but that's no basis for a distinction of need types, since the marketing costs and gains are variable.

Does any product of which at least one person would buy at least one, with no marketing, supply an organic need?
Or does any product which can gain an additional sale by marketing supply a marketing-induced need?
I see no other ways to draw a distinction, except drawing arbitrary thresholds in the continuum between those. (Such thresholds are difficult to defend objectively.) They all may be forgone in favor of other expenditures, so marketing has some effect on all of them.
And it seems to me that the devices you're discussing (phones and tablets) are solidly in the middle.

So, I'd not care to put myself in the position of trying to draw lines in subjective places and argue their objectivity. It's a subjective statement, naturally. But the subjective opinion it expresses seems a healthy enough one.

ghoonk | # 162 | 2008-02-29, 06:18 | Report

My sentiments exactly. Talk is cheap when people don't have to pay for what they ask for.

Here's a worthwhile exercise for some of the people who demand PIM functionality -- why not put together a simple business case with pricing, market demand, revenue forecasts, development/marketing/headcount/support costs, EBITDA, ROI and see if it makes sense to build an application through a 3rd party contractor and see if it makes business sense to initiate development on such PIM functionality.

Trust me, it's a LOT harder than it looks, and many of us sometimes fall into the trap of believing that companies owe us something. Nokia has made good on what the tablet is supposed to do with functionality out of the box, and even left the platform open with SDKs that 3rd party developers could use to build applications by popular demand. That's a lot more than I could say for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. Both have great potential, and in some cases, even better than the iT based on my set of needs, if it weren't for the absence of more BT support (A2DP, DUN, etc).

fms | # 163 | 2008-02-29, 06:20 | Report

But it is such a basis. With organic needs, you do not spend money trying to induce a need. With induced needs you do spend the money, often not knowing for sure if your efforts will succeed. Money - no money. See the difference?

Of course there are such products. Coffins immediately come to mind for example...

Do not mistake marketing to advertise a product with marketing to induce a previously non-existent need in a product. These are two separate categories. The first one you always spend money one but the second one, as I said, is optional, unreliable, and often more costly. Remember, you are not informing potential customers of your goods but kinda brainwashing them. Mind control comes at a price

The threshold between $0 and $n>0 is hardly "arbitrary". You can test my statement by visiting a store without your wallet.

Correct, although it does depend on the device. A Nokia N95, for example, is purely a "lifestyle" device. Its utility to users exists solely in the mind of Nokia marketing department. Devices like Nokia E61 or E70 are mostly satisfying existing needs though.

As far as internet tablets go, they do appear to be utility devices although Nokia insists on them being "lifestyle" devices for some reason, and this is exactly why you see so many people in these forums complaining about lacking a PIM, an office suite, etc. I can only guess why tablets are marketed this way. Maybe because they are marketed under N-series label and N-series are considered "lifestyle".

iamthewalrus | # 164 | 2008-02-29, 09:29 | Report

I think the distinction between 'organic' and 'marketing induced' needs is kind of a forced one. What about 'culture-induced' needs? The point is that beyond food, clothes and shelter all needs are elastic. At some point (price, availability, coolness) people are willing to trade one need for the other. You can say that you 'need' a car or a cellphone, but that changes as soon as telepathy and teleporting comes along, or when living in small self-sufficient communities becomes the new thing.

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You could criticize Nokia for not meeting existing needs with the Internet Tablets, but really they are trying to make people trade existing needs (newspaper,phonecontract) for new ones (being always-online via wimax) and being the most experienced and best positioned in that newly created market by the time it becomes mainstream.
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Last edited by iamthewalrus; 2008-02-29 at 10:46.

fms | # 165 | 2008-02-29, 10:08 | Report

These are, by above defintion, organic because they have not been artifically induced in people, at least not by you as a company. It does not mean some other company hasn't induced them a while ago, but from your point of view as a marketer, they are organic.

Why stop there? Who needs clothes and shelter? All you really need is food and a mate

All of this is irrelevant if you define "organic" as "naturally occurring due to some circumstances out of your control". It is not necessary to further narrow this category down to humans' primitive biological needs: to a car salesman it makes no difference whether his customers eat cars, hump them, or use them to drive to work.

free | # 166 | 2008-02-29, 10:10 | Report

I don't think writing a PIM is that hard, compared to say writing device drivers..
Needs a really good conception, a lot of specifications and clear interfaces to other programs. The latter is not easy when you exchange with undocumented softwares. Thank god TCP/IP is standardized..
Sure it needs a lot of coding but I'm not sure the complexity is that hard.

And no, I won't code it

ps: Personnaly, I don't need a PIM on the IT. Just to say that priorities of some are not priorities of everyone. I would prefer a window manager, I mean a real one where you can move windows. I'm very impatient to see what Nokia's doing with Qt

Keep on talking about organic needs, very interesting..

Benson | # 167 | 2008-02-29, 17:38 | Report

My point here was that whether you lose money total is no basis; if you talk only of whether you spend any money in a particular expenditure or not, that's certainly as valid as the defininition of the expenditure in question.
Ah, I think we find the crux of our disagreement! I sede them as the same. (I'm trying for two wordings here; the first is how I think of it, and close to mainstream economics terminology. The second is the "needs" terminology we seem to be using in this discussion, but I'm trying to say precisely the same thing from both perspectives Except perhaps for singular exceptions (like urinal-drinking fountains) most people would rather have any given product than not, if there were no costs. That is, they place some value on it; or, it fulfills some need of theirs. Marketing of all sorts (in my view) is trying to increase the value they place on it greater than the price you're selling it at. Or, trying to increase the priority of that need so that they will pay that price.

How do you distinguish between these two types of marketing? Do you consider that no-one would want (even with no cost) a device fulfilling only a marketing-induced need, in the absence of marketing? Even your urinal-drinking fountain would be desirable (with no costs) because you could use it for either a urinal or a drinking fountain, both of which are nice to have about.

Agreed. But anything in the middle is arbitrary, and you can see why (lumping advertisement with need generation as I do) I saw you as drawing some line some vague place in the middle of marketing.
<shakes head> Any device's utility exists in the mind of the users -- that's why they buy it. If they discounted it to $5, they couldn't produce fast enough to keep them on the shelves. That means lots of people (some having never seen Nokia marketing ads) would actually see the device as fulfilling a "need". I don't know; I don't sort devices into lifestyle/utility. I just look at how well I would like the device/how useful it would be. Then again, I'm not among the complaining voices you mention, so maybe this explains something.

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Last edited by Benson; 2008-02-29 at 17:47.

fms | # 168 | 2008-02-29, 18:11 | Report

Umgh... no, not really, definitely not all people and not any product. The reality is not as simple as your macroeconomics book.

People only place value on a good if it either fulfills their need or can be exchanged for other goods (i.e. can be used to conserve value).

In one case, you inform people of a good they can use to take care of their existing need. In another case, you are trying to tell people they have a certain need they do not know of. The second case is much more risky and uncertain.

Not necessarily. If a good does not satisfy any existing need (organic or artifically induced) and cannot be used to store value (i.e. can't be resold or exchanged later), it has no value. Period.

Benson | # 169 | 2008-02-29, 22:27 | Report

The reality is that simple; people are greedy. Note that I said no costs, not no price. So if you have a finite-capacity house, or even finite time in your life, that assumption is invalidated; but in many cases the approximation is good enough. When the time, storage, or other costs stop being negligible, then people might not want it. But people are greedy packrats. And it's a good point that this is macroeconomics, so not all people; just enough that we can treat them as a homogeneous mass of greed. So if it fulfills their or anyone else's need, sure.
How do you tell these apart, without asking the person who designed the marketing campaign? In both cases the ad says "Buy this phone because you see this cool person doing cool things with one" or something like that. You can say they differ thus, but if the ads produced are the same, then perhaps both of these are two goals, which marketing is always trying to accomplish both? (I guess I can see a few limited examples of the first one; radio stations and food advertising come to mind.) But almost all marketing I see is trying to persuade people to make purchases they wouldn't otherwise make, not just to purchase from one company rather than from the competition. How can you tell whether they are trying to create a need, or raise the importance of an existing need? Certainly, but you haven't shown one example yet that fits that. A product no-one would take, even with no costs associated? You refuse to acknowledge that there is a latent "need" for any function a device can have. These needs are just not considered important until marketing efforts to emphasize their importance.

Benson | # 170 | 2008-02-29, 22:29 | Report

Just realized how long we have been going back and forth; barring some spectator encouragement, perhaps we should drop this discussion.