Transcription
Lovely experiment is you go to people and say, "Here are 10 Sharpie pens, all black. How much will you pay?" You average the amounts out and maybe can be about $8 or $9 would be my guess.
And then you show a similar and identical group of people 10 black Sharpie pens and one yellow one or one green one. The amount they're prepared to pay is less because the addition of the rogue color makes the the product 10 black pens and one weird colored one is not cognitively comfortable for me to process.
Now, if an adman came along, what he'd do is he'd say, "10 Sharpies, free highlighter pen." The second you do that, now the yellow pen makes sense to me, and I'll pay more than I would for the 10 black Sharpies on their own.
There's a beautiful example of this from product design, which which is a case where you have to worship the man. I think it's um Marita from Sony. He commissioned the Sony Walkman. And he had a slightly selfish motive behind his desire for a Sony Walkman, which is he wanted to be able to fly from Tokyo to Los Angeles, I think, and listen to a whole opera on the flight.
The guys came back with the first Walkman design, and they'd added something. They'd added record functionality on the first Walkman. And they said, "Why did you put the record functionality on? I didn't ask for it." They said, "I know, but we looked at the basic um costings and you can basically add recording functionality to the Walkman for literally it's going to be a dollar per unit or some trivial amount like that. So why wouldn't you do it?"
And he said, "Get rid of it." He said, "But it's a dollar. It's nothing." And it lets you record. Get rid of it. And the engineers went away in a sulk. But he was absolutely right. Because he said, "If the Sony Wartman will play but will not record, everybody can understand what it's for and they can either decide I want that or I don't want that." Clear decision. Okay. Which is okay. It might be quite nice to listen to music while I'm mowing the lawn or whatever it may be or while I'm on the train on to work. I get that. I get that.
The second you add record functionality, that's the weird yellow pen. And it's people thinking, "What is this? Is this kind of a dictaphone? Is this for office use? What the hell's going on here?" Removing what is objective utility from a product can actually make it more desirable.