My business and personal interest has to do with consumer electronics and technology of all types (car, home, audio, video, computing, communication, etc.) On the business side my clients are companies like Sony, Pioneer, Panasonic, LG, Samsung, and others like them, who make these products. It may surprise you to know but they do not spend nearly as much money as you might think, researching what consumers want. Instead, they invent it, generally in Japan or Korea and if it is at all successful there, they bring it to the rest of the world. And as little as they spend, retailers such as Best Buy, Circuit City, etc., spend even less trying to find out how to please shoppers.

The penetration rates of purchase (the percent of the population who buy each product) might surprise you as well in that they are much lower than you might think. This is sort of “good news” for the companies who make and sell this stuff because it means it could be much better if they could only figure out what they are doing wrong in terms of marketing and retailing their otherwise good products. Volumes could be written about what that is but for starters, our work shows that they dramatically over assume what consumers know/don’t know, want/don’t want and when we don’t buy they think it is because we have made a conscious decision not to. In my experience we don’t buy because they have not given us sufficient reason to do so.

What do you think?