responsible buyer pt2

The power of marketing is great and should be ignored for the most part. A marketer's job is to get you, the consumer, to want and ultimately buy a product. They go through this in many ways. Beats by Dre headphones took the world by storm. They started with Monster signing Dr. Dre for a contract to have his name on the headphones. They use cheap materials, make them look shiny and attractive, pay celebrities to wear them and putting them in every store. Consumers walk into a store and wow, beats headphones are the most expensive ones there, they must be good because quality = price, right? Wrong.
Next they turn on the TV and they see LeBron or someone else wearing them. If a pro basketball player wears them they must be good right? Wrong. Next they go online and read reviews from people who have only ever tried beats headphones and say they're good so they must be good right? Wrong. Monster played off the popularity like no tomorrow. They spread misinformation and once the trend set in the misinformation spread everywhere to the point where they had 50% of the market share. Any enthusiast will tell you they sound terrible. But just the sheer amount of reviews online from ignorant, irresponsible consumers saying they're good is overwhelming. This brings us the conclusion that popularity does not mean quality. Just because a bunch of your friends by a product it doesn't mean it's the right product for you, be careful of peer pressure!

Another common way for marketers to promote technological products is with gimmicks. It happens all around. In the audio world we have gimmicks like virtual surround sound on headsets, high end audiophile cables that supposedly make the sound better and these are just a few things. With phones you might have something like infrared transmitters.
Marketers will always look for gimmicks to put in a product to make them seem better but in the end they function the same and just end up costing more without any benefit to quality or utility.

I'll update more marketing techniques here later.

In conclusion I hope I've convinced you to be a responsible buyer. That means reading about a product before making a purchase to make sure you're getting what you want from it at a reasonable price. That also means being cautious of the information you receive regarding a product and avoiding spreading of misinformation due to post-purchase rationalization. I hope you'll start looking at advertisement techniques with more skepticism.

Thanks for reading, GL1TCH3D