| your mother said: If "wrong" is too strong a word, then certainly "right", being the antonym, is surely as strong! I gather by your statement then that you are a Nintendo fan, or only buy Nintendo consoles because both Microsoft and Sony are subsidizing the hell out of their consoles. However, even Nintendo advertises! I don't know how much money they spend on advertising, but I bet they do their fair share. Nintendo spends on advertising, yet they do enough R&D to come out with something like the Wii remote. However, if it weren't for their immaculate marketing strategy the Wii remote could be another has-been piece of hardware. Sony advertises everywhere. I never see a Microsoft or Nintendo ad over here (not the US) - only Sony ads. But! At the same time have invested millions, probably billions in Blu-ray, Cell, and PS3 - that certainly is a hefty R&D investment! Like you said, things aren't always black and white, and in this case R&D goes hand in hand with marketing and advertising. Think of it another way: If Nintendo didn't attend E3 and didn't have those silly "We would like to play" ads, I somehow doubt the Wii would be the runaway success that it is - hardly anyone would know about it! |
Obviously, if I never bought anything which was advertised, I wouldn't buy much of anything at all. That's why I went through the effort of distinguishing between a reasonable amount of marketing and a product driven by marketing. Perhaps I should have left out the advertising comment. I didn't really intend it to apply to the console market in particular, which is obviously what you thought I meant. Products driven primarily by advertising tend to show up in other markets, such as movies, music and junk food.
Basically, my point with both subsidized products and advertising is that there are hidden costs in the products we choose, and costs are always passed on to the consumer. A company which isn't earning a profit off your purchase today intends to earn a profit later, and expects those future profits to be greater than the up-front profits it would make. Getting a product for less than it cost to make sounds like a deal which is too good to be true, and such deals usually are.
You might have noticed that I'm ignoring your semantics-based arguments. That's because I find little value in disputes over semantics.
"The worst part about these reviews is they are [subjective]--and their scores often depend on how drunk you got the media at a Street Fighter event." — Mona Hamilton, Capcom Senior VP of Marketing
*Image indefinitely borrowed from BrainBoxLtd without his consent.
