Product or Support?
If you are faced with a dillema to choose, which one will you prioritize on buying or choosing a product: the quality of a product itsself or rather the support that comes with the product? Is it the tangible asset of the products such as its feature that influence your buying decisions or is it the intangibility that surrounds the product like how good is their support system, or how great does its community has in store.
It’s not a black & white world afterall, you said to yourself. So it’s probably the perfect blend between the product features and and the support that surrounds it that affect your buying decisions, you continue. I can’t agree more with that but as always, there are factors that supercedes the other. In this case, what affect you the most. The product or the support?
For me, it’s never the product. It’s always the support (or other factors) that surrounds the product that made me choose to buy that product. Take example my choice on choosing Wordpress instead of Movabletype as my blogging engine. Back-to-back product-wise, Movabletype is far more robust than Wordpress especially with perl-php blend for the templating system. But I still choose Wordpress instead because there are great communities that built around it which I can gather more support than when I choose Movabletype.
Or for another down-to-earth example, why do people always choose Nokia as their first choice for mobile phone. They know that there are currently so many people using the brand that it made the brand lost its prestige, and yet people kept buying Nokia. Is it better than the other mobile-phone manufacturer? Does it has a better design? Or is it cheaper?
Xelibri has a better design than Nokia, arguably Samsung and Sony Erricsonn or Motorola have a far better technology than Nokia. Not to mention that Siemens BenQ can easily beat Nokia in the pricing game. And yet people still buy it. From my simple observation on people’s buying pattern regarding their choice of mobile-phone, they choose Nokia simply because it has the best support.
Good resell price, easy to find service center, friendly after-sales, but not because of the product. It’s true the product has a decent quality and it’s also true that the product has a very easy to learn interface but that’s not what drive people to buy Nokia in the first place.
It’s a business of service anyway :-). If you wanted to read the original idea that sparks this entry, you can visit this link.
Okay, I follow the link to the original just like you said. Hm, the url do seem somehow familiar to me. Hm. I wonder why.
Oh, it’s *mine* hehehe. Nice post. It makes me wonder why I chose WP over MT, or Sony Ericsson over Nokia, Mac over PC (not yet), or more, Premier League soccer over Italian Serie A, Adidas over Nike, dogs over cats. Are there any patterns yet? :)