• Kevin Maney, Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On and Others Don’t, New York: Broadway Books, 2009, 217 pages, $xx.00
The former head of AOL once told Kevin Maney, “A successful business must be either loved or needed.” That in a nutshell is the basis of Maney’s Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On and Others Don’t, a consideration of apparent paradoxes in consumer behavior and why companies that misunderstand them slide into oblivion, even if they have great ideas and plenty of money. The key, he says, is understanding the “fidelity swap” that drives the public’s purchasing decisions, and the humble recognition that your company really can’t embrace both things at once.
The two axes of Maney’s model are labeled “convenience” and “fidelity.” The latter takes some explanation. Fidelity typically means conformity to an ideal, and in this equation, it refers to the total experience of a product. It’s about actual and perceived quality. NFL coverage on TV, for instance, is a social opportunity and often a better way to see the game than sitting in the stands. That makes it “high fidelity,” and points out an interesting twist: while “convenience” encompasses cost — think Wal-Mart — high quality of experience often doesn’t require high cost.
Products and companies that are neither tend to get squeezed out. One example Maney considers is popular music. Fans will pay $150 for the experience of a live concert, but hesitate to spend $15 for the band’s CD; they prefer to buy 99-cent songs a la carte on iTunes, or pirate them from each other for free. MP3s played through earbuds are a low-quality substitute for vinyl LPs and the room-shaking woofers we set up in our dorm rooms, but the convenience factor has carried the field at that end.
Maney offers predictions on recent bright ideas. The overhyped Segway was marginalized before Paul Blart: Mall Cop made it the loser’s ride; it couldn’t replace a car for coolness or functionality, and even as an improvement on walking it takes away the ability to carry an umbrella or shopping bag — or even use the sidewalk in many places.
More surprisingly, Maney has doubts about Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader. Jeff Bezos’ team thought long and hard about why the book format has five centuries of popularity, even analyzing the smell of the experience (answer: it’s mostly glue, with a little bit of mold), and tried to make the device as simple and unobtrusive as the printed volume. But the high entry price is a barrier for capitalizing on the convenience of instant downloads, low cost new releases, and the ability to slip a library into a coat pocket. Kindle can’t make a statement like the books displayed on your desk, and no one in the waiting room can tell whether you’re reading the local sports page or Solzhenitsyn. Maney’s prescription: massive price cut, to push the Kindle solidly to the convenience pole.
It’s a simple concept but the applications are broad. Maney, who covered the technology business for USA Today, says his articles exploring the idea have prompted more reader response than anything else he’d written. He has watched many entrepreneurial start-ups, meltdowns, and stillbirths through the 1990s and beyond, and the book is full of conversations (and post mortems) with the founders and leaders of companies like Amazon.com, FedEx, Starbucks, Apple Computer, and Sun Microsystems. He goes out of Silicon Valley and the Pacific Northwest, though, and looks at institutions and agencies like higher education and the automotive industry.
He even opens the uncomfortable idea of people as “products.” “Chapter Twelve Point Five” offers his take on personal career development, suggesting that a talented guitar player might find more gigs (and higher pay) as an equally talented mandolin player, swimming in a much smaller pool of competition.
More troubling is the experience of the social services department in Washington, N.C. Local employers were hesitant to hire trained workers with disabilities, preferring the “fidelity” option of the perfect employee. However, reality dictated hiring workers who were acceptable and available. Social services found its placement rates climbed rapidly when it abandoned the “charity” approach to marketing clients, in favor of offering them as immediately available, good-enough workers — the “convenient” option.
Maney identifies a trap he calls “the fidelity mirage.: The mirage is the notion that a company can offer both a high fidelity, high-cachet experience and universal, mass market necessity. It doesn’t happen, he said.
Apple was the embodiment of cool until the iPod became a daily habit; the brand was rescued by the iPhone, but Apple has to remain a little exclusive, even a bit cult-like, to protect its identity.
The one application Maney doesn’t approach is national. Among the nations of the world, where would the United States fit on the matrix? Are we the “fidelity” nation, offering an experience craved by everyone, our freedoms and opportunities the products desired by anyone who can gain entry, a nation founded on distinct and carefully guarded principles? Or are we the ultimate convenience, offering easy access to loans, foreign aid, and welfare, with porous borders and a limp philosophy of tolerance for all comers and truth as you like it?
If we are driving toward the latter, as it appears, and “America” becomes a commodity-level experience no better than a dozen other mildly socialist democracies, will we find our position of “market leadership” taken by another nation unafraid to be truly exceptional — for good or ill?