Selling audio to audiophiles, part 1: How it’s easier to sell snake oil to people who want to buy it. People like me.

The audiophile industry gets away with extraordinary money delivering ever more negligible improvements in quality. blog.mindrocketnow.com

Have you ever wondered why the high end hi fi industry exists? (If you have, then it’s patently not for you.) It’s for people like me – not because I can afford the exotic stuff, but because I can’t. I can’t but I still want it, so I buy the best thing that I can afford. So this got me thinking, since hi fi is by its nature subjective and intensely personal, what does “best” mean in this context?

In many respects, audiophile audio equipment (hi fi) is the perfect product to sell. Like shampoo, there are many “science bits” that make the case why a piece of equipment should be objectively better. The science is also invariably complicated, because it ekes out diminishing returns by addressing esoteric electromagnetic phenomena, so need to be explained to us by the product “scientists” thus arming us with social proof.

My favourite example of this used to be for audio cables. The marketing literature for the more exotic (eye-wateringly expensive) cables would confidently discuss skin effect and dielectric biasing as plausible justification. And when the science is challenged, manufacturers often fall back on ultimate justification: measurement isn't everything, it just sounds better.

So why do we do agree to have auditory snake oil sold to us? Because subjectively, there is a difference. Even if you’re the kind of person that levels small differences instead of sharpening them, given two reproductions of music sufficiently different in quality, even you can tell the difference. I have done comparative listening tests (not double blind, nor ABX – perhaps that should be the topic of another blog) and heard differences in soundstage, in delineation of instrumentation, in the shape of notes, and the space between notes. I’m therefore convinced that there are further improvements to be made, through investing in “better” equipment.

I also think that the difference diminishes with investment. And therein lies the cognitive dissonance. If I were to spend that much money on an upgrade, it must be better, therefore it is better. But amount of “better” diminishes as the amount of money spent increases – which normally makes me keep my credit card reluctantly in my pocket.

Don’t get me wrong, I still want to buy the esoteric milled aluminium boxes of audiophile goodness. But because I have to ask how much something is, not only can I not afford it, but it seems that I’m not the right type of person to own it. There is still a lot of snobbishness in this industry that makes me cross. But it does comfort me that there are people out there who do spend more than some mortgages on audio reproduction – and that they’ve just been parted from that money.

In a next blog, I’ll look at what “best” means in a digital audiophile world, delving into bit rates, bit depths, Shannon theorem, and delta-sigma signal processing - and why it matters.

More in this series: part 2.

Tech helping us to be different. Or at least shop differently.

Recent shopping trip at Oakley shows how tech can further personalise the experience, to make it more valuable. blog.mindrocketnow.com

My last blog entry was about how humans are augmenting technology to make the shopping experience more personalised. As a counterpoint, this blog is going to look at how technology is augmenting humans to make the shopping experience more personalised.

I recently returned from a trip to the US, the home of shopping. The favourable exchange rate plus sale prices enticed me into the Oakley store. I “needed” a replacement for my Ray-Bans which I’d lost the week before (I still have the case if you want a spare for your Wayfarer).

Oakley, like many fashion stores, has embraced personalisation as its key differentiator. There are sunglasses tailored to nearly every pursuit, including leisure. The sales assistant and I quickly concluded that Oakley didn’t do the lens that I liked in the frame that I liked (vented polarised user-replaceable in a large but unobtrusive frame), so we moved to the custom display cabinet.

The business opportunity in custom sunglasses is huge. Oakley has decided that allowing any combination of frame, lens, sock, bridge, icon, insert is worth charging a significant premium, and its customers agree. The number of possible combinations is bewildering and led me to a moment of too-much-choice-brain-freeze. (Thankfully, I was struck by some inspiration, and went with a classical Union Jack colour combination. It’s quite cool, even if I say so myself). The amount of stock required to fulfil the combinations is also bewildering. Lenses for Radarlock Path will not fit Radar Pitch frames. Those little “O” icons are also unique to each frame. Consequently, there are a lot of boxes of lenses and bags of little “O” in the back of the store.

Guiding me through this sales process is now much more time consuming too. The sales assistant suggested a number of frames to try out (suggest which I didn’t look too stupid in). We looked at some custom combinations online, to see what was possible at the garish end of the spectrum. Then he and I worked through how my Union Jack idea would translate into the components. I tried out a temporary arrangement, before verbally committing to buying the glasses. He then went out back to fit everything together, not a trivial task to get perfectly right. He demonstrated how the Radarlock mechanism worked. Even the ringing up of the stock items took a while. All in all, the sale took more than an hour of his time.

Oakley is a “lifestyle brand” and so people are buying an image of themselves as much as a product. However, at my age, I like to think that I’m not so easily flattered into buying sunglasses. So I think I enjoyed the whole experience because of the process itself, not how it pandered to my vanity. I came out of the store thinking that I’d made a really good purchase. Oakley had done their job well on me.

The technology enabler to this is the IT that Oakley uses to manage stock. It’s a neat trick to be able to carry more stock to enable this in-store custom service, without incurring a horrendous cost of unsold inventory. IT gives Oakley the ability to monitor stock levels in real-time, and to manage logistics in real-time, so have the stock for custom whilst minimising cost.

Soon, Oakley will be using more innovative technology to further customise its sunglasses to your peculiar foibles. It will outfit its stores with motion capture rigs that sit on the end of your nose, to accurately measure how sunglasses fit on your face. And it will also outfit the stores with 3D printers so that the mo-cap data can be used to design a bridge that will make the sunglasses sit optimally, whilst you wait. A little later, Oakley will fit out stores with laser etching machines, so your name can be etched onto your lens, further fuelling your vanity.

I got back home, and was impressed one more time by Oakley. I was able to register my new sunglasses online by entering a few details. Oakley was able to verify my purchase, enable a worldwide guarantee, and extend it to two years. All in exchange of my purchase details and my email address. Enabled by IT systems connecting pools of data to reveal value to both me and Oakley.

To conclude, I find that technology lowers the barrier to innovation, and innovation makes things better. Last time I found that humans make technology relevant, and to do things right. Which tells me that the road to success isn’t more tech or more people, but the best mix of both.

Computer says no. Human says yes.

It’s too easy for the answer to be no. That’s why there is real value in finding a way to say yes. blog.mindrocketnow.com

Do you remember that time when Mummy said no, so you then went to Daddy, who then said yes? (And then you got naughty step time from both for successfully finessing the approvals process.) It strikes me that there will always be a need for a service industry to facilitate this behaviour, to override the technology. Let me explain by way of example.

I’m in the process of booking our family holiday in October 2015. (Let’s gloss over the fact that I’m booking 16 months in advance, and why this isn’t necessarily an indication of a burgeoning organising psychosis.) Like with every of my shopping experiences in the last decade, I was fully intending to complete the search, evaluation and purchase steps of the buyer’s journey online. However, it turned out that the family holiday was more complex than the web sites could price up, so I engaged the services of our village travel agent.

That was the first surprise for me: that the travel agent still existed in this digital age. Certain parts of the job have changed: they recycle an order of magnitude more brochures than they give out. These days, they mostly conduct their business by email with travel agents of booking companies – agent to agent.

The service that they offer is that they will organise the holiday for you. They will take the input parameters of your budget, aspirational itinerary, and flexibility work through availabilities and constraints of terms and conditions, present alternative options, to create the best value holiday.

The very best travel agents will give you options that you hadn’t thought of (researched) yourself. And the most savvy travel agents won’t make the whole thing appear too straightforward to you, so that you see the value of their efforts.

It’s taken us three weeks to organise this so far, and we still haven’t completed the booking. Every time we think we’re there, a computer system tells the agent that the combination isn’t possible. But thankfully, every time the computer says no, the agent finds a combination that does work within our expectations. And that’s why humans are sometimes worth persisting with.