Part II · Chapter 5 · The House · lesson 8
Engineered dissatisfaction
11 min
Builds on Why customers stay, and what churn does to everything
Part II · Chapter 5 · The House · lesson 8
11 min
Builds on Why customers stay, and what churn does to everything
A kettle that boils water. Another kettle, launched eleven months later, that boils water. Nothing measurable separates them. One of them is described as current and the other is not.
That is the cheapest product improvement ever invented, because it does not involve improving the product.
Four different things get filed under planned obsolescence, and only two of them are what people mean by it.
Genuine improvement. The new one is better. This is most of what happens.
Design life set by price. The cheap one wears out sooner because the bearing is plastic. Customers chose this, at the till, knowingly.
Repair made uneconomic. Parts unavailable, the housing glued rather than screwed, a diagnostic tool only dealers have. A working object becomes scrap because of a decision made in a design meeting.
The model year. Nothing about the object changes. The dissatisfaction is manufactured entirely in the description.
Start with the second, because it is the one most often mistaken for the fourth.
A washing machine at a low price point has a plastic bearing housing and lasts perhaps seven years. The same manufacturer's machine at three times the price has a steel one and lasts twenty. The cheap one is not sabotage. It is what a customer with limited money in a shop chose, against a more durable option that was visible on the next shelf and cost more than they had.
The uncomfortable version of this: buying the durable thing is cheaper per year and requires having the money on the day. Which means the customer who cannot afford durability pays more over a decade than the customer who can — and no manufacturer had to do anything for that to be true.
Case file
Composite, not a real person
Started by designing one very good stick blender and selling it through independent kitchen shops. Built a reputation for things that lasted.
Revenue tripled over the seven years. The brand is now stocked nationally. Reviews are noticeably worse than they were in year 5, and the founder describes the reviews as a fair criticism of decisions they would make again.
Five decisions. One of them is straightforwardly good for the buyer. One is straightforwardly bad. Three are genuinely ambiguous, and the founder could defend every one of them in a sentence that is true.
Predict
The model year is pure information. Nothing physical changed. And it works, on people who know it works, reliably enough that entire industries organise their calendar around it.
The reason is that satisfaction is comparative. An object is not judged against what it does but against the best available version of what it does. When a newer one exists, the older one has moved, without being touched.
This is the same machinery as the last lesson's redefinition of adequate, running on a schedule.
Check
Who pays. The buyer, in replacement cycles shorter than the object's physical life. Disproportionately the buyer at the cheap end, who buys the shortest-lived version most often.
Who benefits. The manufacturer, on the repeat purchase. The retailer, who needs a reason to refresh a shelf. And genuinely, buyers of the cheap end, for whom a shorter-lived product at a lower price is not a con but the only way in.
Who carries the risk. The buyer, who cannot see the design life at the point of sale and has no way to price it. And everyone, in the specific sense that a product's disposal is a cost nobody in the transaction pays — which is why this is one of the few areas in this track where regulation, rather than an informed customer, is doing most of the work.