How to Engineer a Product

A long time ago I read a Malcolm Gladwell piece about Ron Popeil, the television marketer. It made a point about capitalism that I've thought about from time to time ever since.

Let's start by imagining a company designing a product. Let's say it operates in a competitive sector, so it has to cater to consumer tastes. (Even monopolists have some incentive to cater to consumer tastes, but it will be clearer for a competitive or at least quasi-competitive market.) As a starting point, we can imagine that the company designs its product to maximize its usefulness to customers, but limited by some kind of budget constraint. So for instance, an engineer might determine that making the walls of the product out of stainless steel makes it durable and easy to clean, and this may be justified by the cost of the steel. So the firm incorporates this change to its product design. And more generally, this is the sort of change the firm is looking for. Design innovations should generally look like improvements noticeable to the consumer (even though the consumer may not understand the engineering considerations involved).

But with a little more thought it becomes clear that there is another category of design change that we should expect to see from time to time: one that doesn't improve the product except maybe by lowering its price. An engineer might determine that two materials are equally functional in the final product, but one of them makes the product much easier to assemble in the factory. Or there might be a custom part used in the product that can be replaced by a standard (and therefore much cheaper) version, and this might be worth it even if it makes the product slightly less functional. The cost savings may or may not be passed along to the consumer.

So now we've got a potential source of compromise in terms of product quality. You can imagine products getting worse over time as engineers develop more and more cost-saving techniques. Also, material costs change over time, and so do labor costs, and so do shipping costs, and so on. So optimizing the product design becomes a matter of chasing a moving target, and something like the deregulation of trucking could end up influencing the design of consumer products. At this point engineering has become quite a bit more difficult than simply making the best possible product subject to a budget constraint.

We can introduce another complication, consisting of a difference between what is best for the consumer and what the consumer perceives to be best. Or, similarly, consumers may have aesthetic tastes that, if catered to, compromise the functionality of the product. To make it even more complicated, perhaps only a subset of consumers have these beliefs or preferences, while the rest are agnostic (or perhaps have correct beliefs about product functionality). In that case you may simply write off the deluded and/or idiosyncratic consumers, but conceivably you may decide it's more profitable to manufacture an inferior product (from the viewpoint of some or potentially all consumers) in order to broaden the market for your product.

I hope it's obvious by now that it is potentially a very tricky thing to design a product. Of course you have the option to manufacture multiple versions of the product, in order to satisfy different segments of the market, but this comes with its own costs.

None of this is my point, though. As Gladwell points out in his piece, one of Popeil's big insights was that product design and marketing are not distinct. You don't design the best product possible and then figure out how to market it. You design the product to make it easy to sell.

This is subtly different from my earlier point about consumers' aesthetic preferences. What I am talking about now is not just giving the product an attractive appearance, but giving it attributes that specifically enhance its marketability as opposed to its functionality, cost of manufacture, or conformity to consumer tastes/beliefs.

The example from the Gladwell piece is the large, slanted glass door on Popeil's rotisserie, which allows the television audience get a good view of the food cooking inside. This may or may not be a desirable feature in a rotisserie, but it (apparently) makes it easy to persuade television audiences to order the product, and that makes it good design from the business's perspective.

What is a consumer to make of this? I don't know. I think you should be at least a little uneasy about a product that has been designed to push your buttons. And I think it's reasonable to worry about the compromises that have been made in functionality simply to sell you the product. (Remember, we're specifically talking about enhancements to the product's marketability, not to its appearance once purchased. Though I suppose serendipitously these could sometimes be coextensive.)

[Edited to add: A great example of this phenomenon is the shiny red apple (Red Delicious?) that became ubiquitous in the United States. It looks like the prototypical "apple," shiny and red, with few blemishes, but it tastes like cardboard. Of course this product was not designed, but it was subjected to selective pressure, which amounts to the sane thing.]

Now consider that this is how ideas work. What makes for a successful idea? Well it might contain truth and therefore perform some useful service to the people who believe it. (I guess this is pragmatism.) Or it might flatter people's prejudices, or it might simply be beautiful to them.

But ideas can also simply, by design or by luck, have features that make them attractive to adopt without any other usefulness. Once this occurred to me I began to see nonsense everywhere, nonsense with "viral" attributes. We all believe others to be vulnerable to manipulation but we believe ourselves to be impervious to it. It doesn't seem possible that we can all be correct in this belief.

Now I should note that our prejudices and our limitations of intelligence and patience are probably enough to ensure that nonsense will flourish. You don't need this virality concept, this idea of building an idea to make it maximally infectious to the human mind. But it doesn't help, and anyway for whatever reason the world is full to the brim with nonsense, and this makes life much worse for most people, but I guess better for the Ron Popeils of the world.