I take exception with Tom's post on good enough where he qoutes Debbi Fields "Good enough, never is." It's a matter of semantics. Good enough does *not* mean average. That's a common mistake. So the knee jerk reaction is to figure out what the customer wants and needs and to differentiate, we throw in tons of not-needed features to be different (thinking we are now "better"). And then we have bloated products. And no one buys them. So management comes back and says make average products at a lower cost. De-feature the good product. And maybe we increase the ad budget. And the death spiral begins.
Wrong, wrong, wrong!
The road to success is a combination of innovation (I agree on that) *and* elegance of design and function. But, you need to bind the problem set. Segment. You don't want an 70% solution of 100% of all known needs, instead you want a 100% solution of the 70% of needs. Which is "good enough". And that 70% changes for each segment.
But for that 70%, you need to innovate and deliver it in a new way to gain 100% of what that segment wants.
Let's use cell phones as an example. Some of us (a lot of us) use cell phone to make phone calls. That's what we want. Business class. Good voice quality. Good talk time. Durability. Image.
But just try to find a good, elegant cell phone which does this. Not possible. Some genius decided that only cheap phones should do this. Business people need to run Windows on their cell phone and have a computer substitute. And they crash. There are no elegant, get the job done, cell phones available anymore. Which is why I'm hanging on to an old Motorola CDMA flip phone with a metal case, hoping Cingular keeps running the old ATT -Wireless CDMA network and not forcing me into GSM. Same with the old Nokia candy bar business phones. They were the work horses. And you can no longer buy them
Look at Scion. Toyota understands this concept. Mazda gets it too.
Maybe we should too.
Hmmm . . . I guess I'm not sure exactly what you're taking exception to? I stand by my "good enough" rant, and it appears that others agree (this from Wednesday's Marketwatch):
"To attract a loyal consumer following, U.S. retailers must dare to be ... average? That prescription, along with the fact that shoppers prefer well-marked prices to low prices, and will select "good enough" merchandise over the "very best," stands out among the findings of a new study by AlixPartners."
Posted by: Tom Asacker | 05 May 2006 at 08:02 AM
Hi Tom,
It's a context thing. I'm talking high-tech and you're talking retail.
Hope that helps.
...Bruce...
Posted by: Bruce Fryer | 05 May 2006 at 09:24 AM