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| Questions of Apple, iPods and ethics on the sales floor | | Date Created: 20 Dec, 2005, 01:18 PM |
 I once humorously wrote to the New York Times Ethics writer, Randy Cohen, about an experience I once had in a Mac-only store.
I had made a few purchases from the store in the past, and on one occasion was directed there for an insurance claim. In all instances, their service was professional and the products competitively priced.
On this occasion, I was purchasing a small ticket item (headphones) when I overheard the conversation between staff and a customer, someone new to the Mac but who was looking for a particular solution offered by a particular product.
The salesman was trying to sell him an item which I knew to have been on the shelves for quite some time and was about to be superceded. I knew this having read the product manufacturer's own media release announcing the updating.
I asked myself what I ought to do - interrupt the sale to help a fellow Mac user from making a regrettable purchase, or simply ask another salesman in ear shot of the customer if Company X's new device was on order and when might it be on the shelves?
I bit my tounge, and said nothing. For all I knew, I said to self, the customer would have been utterly happy with his purchase, and maybe upgraded it a year later, happy to have had good use out of it. But what if it was me, another part of self said, making the purchase. Would I want a stranger to inform me of my potential folly?
The NYT Ethicist didn't publish my letter.
Lately, on each day in the lead up to Christmas, when I visit stores selling goods, especially iPods, I hear salesmen talking customers out of iPods. Even when they stock them.
And I haven't been able to determine the motivation, unless the profit on iPods is really that poor compared to iRiver's and Creative's wares. Even so, I would have thought the iPod accessory market was where the same store could make up its profits, since accessorizing the iPod is both easy to do and obviously popular. That a batch of early Nanos was so lacking in scratch resistance, and the accompanying publicity, was a real boon to the add-on market.
I hear sales staff justify their dissing of the iPod by focussing on what the others have which is absent from the iPod: built-in microphones, FM receivers that record, the ability to download more media options like WMA and WMV DRM files from local online music stores, DiVX and MPG1/2/4 and even "a better synching experience" on Windows. As if.
(The ability of other players like the new Creative challenge to the 5G to play a much wider variety of media looks good on paper. Apple has decided to use Quicktime/mp4/H264 as its engine. Let's call it product differentiation. Or product simplification, such that a visit to the iTMS gets you most of what you might want. I don't see Apple claiming bragging rights for any media which cannot be DRM'd, or has been used for sharing files illegally. It's current success with the iPod/iTMS must surely be based on convincing the music and now video industry that Apple's more benign DRM is effective for reducing piracy, yet making sales an easy activity for the consumer. That it only had a few % market share to conduct a legal download experiment has served Apple well. 2006 will be different however, with Apple's huge market share of downloads a challenge for the creative arts industries.)
The right cue to interrupt the mp3 player conversation between seller and potential buyer is harder to find than the one about the superceded product in my earlier example.
The appeal of the iPod is more emotional than merely describing its abilities, which on the surface does appear less than its competitors. I want to cry out, "Do you really need these add-ons built in? How often will you use them? Where will you source DivX? Will they make up for the lack of coolness, the iTunes synching seamlessness, the excellence of product execution, the others' lack of useful accessories", and so on.
These aren't easy things to convey to customers edging toward an impulse buy when you're a stranger. Maybe I ought to whip out a Mac User Group business card as evidence of my knowledge base, and invite prospective customers to a monthly presentation or even just tell him or her we discuss all things Mac and iPods regularly, both f2f and p2p, which he might not get with the competing products.
It gets really hard to keep shtum when the salesmen seems to have returned from advanced training in Microsoft-like FUD and basically lie to the customer:
"iPods break down all the time,
their batteries run out and can't be replaced,
they're flavour of the month and their popularity can't last,
Apple won't be around for much longer and then who will support you,
Do you want to be like everybody else (irony lost on said salesman)?
they're hard to use compared to iRiver
Apple's always changing models and outdating current ones"
So, no, I haven't gone up to interrupt this kind of sales talk, although I have been sorely tempted.
But I would like to ask these sales staff what device they would like to own, then sell on eBay in a year's time when a new model arrives. Not for the sake of being a new model, but a genuine improvement on the one it replaces. Go look at the prices iPods are getting, then compare them with their competitors.
Ultimately we're each responsible for our own decisions regarding purchases. But at time of good cheer and the desire for peace, I suppose the best I can do when visiting these stores is to have my iPod hanging out my shirt pocket, and if a customer asks for an opinion from me.
Hey, you don't want me to tell lies do you? |
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