Five Blades

In 1998 Gillette unveiled the Mach3. It is reported that the R&D of this new three-blade razor cost $750 million. It took another $300 million to promote it in the first year. Three-blade razor was long in the making: the first two-blade razor Trac II was launched in 1971. In between, it kind of looked as if adding new blades didn't make sense. 

Fast forward five years and all hell broke loose. In 2003 Shick-Wilkinson announces the Quattro, a four-blade razor. Lawsuits followed. Things were so hot in the razor business that it prompted the Onion to publish a brilliant satirical essay on the next move in the razor wars.  Needless to say, every prediction in the 2004 Onion article turned out to be correct. The razor in the picture is a five-blade Gillette Fusion launched in 2007.

Perhaps the most contradictory thing in business is that in order to succeed you must sell what customers want. "What they want" is not always the same thing that "what they need", based on the expert judgment. But if you don't sell what they want, someone else will, and you are soon out of business. Only by government intervention people can be enforced to accept something against their will. Experts' role is not to enforce but to persuade the public on what they think is really needed.

Now, cut-throat competition in producing what people want easily leads to madness. That is why there are such things as five-blade razors in the market. But it is no secret that marketing plays a crucial role in breakthrough innovations too, especially in consumer electronics and computer hardware. Enormous technical advancements in electronics have brought us the capacity to calculate, store, transfer and present information in ever increasing amounts, but it has been a marketing job to suggest why anyone would want to do so.

And sometimes these ideas are just crazy, at least until they become mainstream. Using computers for gaming must have been a mad idea in the early 70's. Cell phone users were ridiculed in the late 80's. And only rich and hip celebrity figures used Apple computers and drove Toyota Prius hybrids early in the 00's. But of course, it is hard to make a difference between things that are brilliantly mad and the things that are just mad.

Right now, there is an interesting gold rush on third-party iPhone apps. Apple has succeeded in creating both the technical platform and a viable marketplace where consumers actually buy stuff. I must admit that price plays a role here, as iPhone apps usually cost one dollar, same as the music tracks. Compare this to the Nokia S60 marketplace where stuff is either free or costs well over $10. I don't own an iPhone or know any good iPhone apps. In my opinion, most of them look absolutely crazy. But I could try one for a dollar.

-mika-