Klarinet Archive - Posting 000149.txt from 1994/12

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.EDU>
Subj: Re: Dave Kaminsky v. Dan Leeson
Date: Sat, 10 Dec 1994 10:43:27 -0500

Dave, thanks for your comments. Too many to address in a single note,
but you could not possibly be more wrong in your assumptions about where
I was hostile and where I was not. That may be how you read it, but not
how I wrote it. That doesn't mean I write badly or that you read badly.
It only means you missed my point or that I did not state it with sufficient
clarity.

I was dead serious when I said that LeBlanc's marketing was the best that
I saw. (Or I should really say that I think it is the best that I saw.)
I admire good marketing. You said I was being sarcastic. I can't figure
that out, but whatever you saw you saw. It is not what I said. In fact,
I don't know how to say that without you thinking that it might be sarcastic.
But I'll try again. I think that LeBlanc's marketing is head and shoulders
the best of the big three. Interpret that in any way you wish.

As for designing things based on customer needs, we are, unfortunately,
seriously in disagreement. Unless survey techniques have improved
by orders of magnitude, one is invariably going to get the wrong results
if one pays attention to them. They are more of a soporific than a useful
tool and give the impression that customer wishes drive the market.

The most famous case is that of the Edsel which was designed on the basis
of what customers supposedly wanted. But Ford asked the wrong question.
They said "What do you want in a car?" The question that they needed to
ask was "What do you think your neighbor wants in a car?" The survey
answer was "no fins, simplicity of lines, nothing radical." The survey
answer should have been (and why the Edsel went down the tubes) was
"big, fins, dramatic, image of wealth, more of what I have now."

The problem with surveys is that you don't know what questions you should
have asked until you have built the wrong product based on them. I can
think of very few marketing successes over the last 50 years that were
based on a market questionnaire. Marketing surveys are very new
and only since WW2 has their used become dominant, though, unfortunately,
rarely successful. In almost every case, the products produced
by following the supposed dictates of the customer was the wrong product and
it went down the tubes. Can you name one that was a success?

That is the problem in running
a business. It is not cut and dried by simply building a product to
customer wishes, because, most of the time, customers really do not know
what they want. It takes a genius to figure out what to do in a nubulous,
vague, imprecise arena, such as tastes in clarinet.

So I am sorry that you misunderstood both the tone of my comments and
the precise nature of what I was saying. I don't really mind if one accuses
my postings of being stupid (not that you did that), or if one suggests
that they are ill thought out (not that you did that either), but I really
object when they are accused of being hostile. That is not a characteristic
I subscribe to even when I am in strong disagreement.

Humor I believe in. Analysis I believe in. Contrast I believe in. Historical
comparisons I believe in. Accuracy and precision I believe in. Hostility,
I do not believe in.
====================================
Dan Leeson, Los Altos, California
(leeson@-----.edu)
====================================