Avoiding the Trap: Modern Consumer Product Marketing

The State of Modern Marketing

Marketing is perhaps a business's most powerful tool. It's how products and services are conveyed to the general consumer, the press, and investors. Technology companies attempt to use certain strategies to mislead consumers into purchasing a product that they may not necessarily need or want.

Often, this may include the usage of buzzwords to make a product or service seem more appealing, or the implementation of gimmicky functionality. Two prime examples of this, are just how many products must now be tied to gaming in one way or another, or the inclusion of LEDs in absolutely every type of computer component and peripheral that you can think of.

Sure, those ice blue LEDs may look cool (pun intended) in your black computer case, but ask yourself if they're truly necessary. It costs next to nothing for manufacturers to incorporate LEDs into a computer component or peripheral design, but once that product enters retail, you as the consumer will be paying an additional $15–30 for the very same thing. In what other sector is a 1,400% markup deemed acceptable? And what even is a gaming backpack?

Compressed Product Stacks

Today's consumer product stacks consist of multiple tiers, each with multiple individual products. Oversaturating the market with a plethora of options results in great choice for the consumer, but a pricing structure that's incredibly compact. This is especially true for processors and graphics cards, whereby each $50 step progresses the product stack into the next product, or even the next tier of products.

You may ask why this is relevant. The goal of this article is to help you prioritize your budget towards a computer configuration with which you'll reap the most benefit. If that truly means purchasing components, each with their own LEDs, then by all means have at it, and enjoy. However, in contrast, if it means obtaining the greatest performance from your budget, you'll want to continue reading.

Getting the Most from Your Budget

As previously mentioned, product stacks today are so tightly packed that there are now products available with very small incremental steps in price. While one RGB product may not affect your overall budget too drastically, consider the effect with multiple RGB products.

For the sake of an example, let's say that you're considering a motherboard and system memory, both equipped with RGB lighting. Together, these options may cost between $40–50 more than equivalent products without RGB lighting. At this point, a sensible alternative route might be to focus that money elsewhere into your budget allocation.

You may instead afford yourself the ability trade that RGB lighting for a more powerful processor, or system memory with faster transfer rates and/or reduced latencies. Better graphics card options may also open up to you. These are all highly beneficial in maximizing performance from your budget.