The importance of selective inefficiency

Readers of a certain age may remember choosing a cassette player in the 1980s. In theory the process was simple: we would have read reviews of competing devices in audiophile publications and then bought whichever device scored best in terms of sound quality, reliability and value for money.

Except we didn’t do this, did we? We went into Comet, looked at three or four examples we considered most attractive, and then pressed the ‘eject’ button on each of them. Invariably we bought the cassette player with the most elegant eject action. If it gracefully whirred open with a sweet damping movement, that was a clincher. Any device in which the cassette holder lunged open with a ‘clack’ was rejected as manifestly rubbish.

To understand this, you need to study the Kano Model, from Professor Noriaki Kano at the Tokyo University of Science. It has been refined over the years, but the essential observation is that different attributes of a product or service have wildly different effects on customer satisfaction, and that elements only tenuously related to a product’s main function may have an immense influence on whether people think it is good or bad.

Is this another example of human irrationality? I’m not so sure. The extent to which a business cares about the finer details of what they are selling is rather a good clue to the psychology of the seller; just as you get a better idea of a person’s character by noticing how they behave when no one’s watching, so you get a better idea of a business by judging the things it does which aren’t strictly necessary. I once met a brilliant man who owns a chain of hair salons: he spent a fortune installing marble lavatories in new branches.