incentivized to provide products and services that people want.
s/want/are willing to pay for/.
all I can come up with is, People are stupid.
s/stupid/complicated/. but sometimes, yeah, stupid.
Consumers are stupid in that they’re inconsistent and uncommunicative about their true willingness to pay. It’s not clear before the kickstarter (or even after) how big the market is, or if pushing this product will have adverse effects on sales of related products.
Firms (and governments and other aggregations) are stupid in that individual incentives don’t match group incentives. A given exec is punished more for a mediocre product launch than they are rewarded for a successful one. Kickstarters are way higher-risk than any established company would take—a large percentage never ship.
Everybody is stupid in the way our preferences change in the face of new options—maybe it turned out that people buy less Tums overall when both normal and sugar-free are on the shelf. That’s a wild guess, but stranger things have happened in consumer product marketing lore.
Note that the amount of sugar in a tums tablet (0.75g − 1.4g) is not a problem, even for most diabetics, even if you need maximum dose (7 tablets) for a day or two. My actual guess is that they just weren’t selling enough to justify the expense of the separate production and distribution costs, and reputation concerns kept them from charging much more for the sugar-free variety.
s/want/are willing to pay for/.
s/stupid/complicated/. but sometimes, yeah, stupid.
Consumers are stupid in that they’re inconsistent and uncommunicative about their true willingness to pay. It’s not clear before the kickstarter (or even after) how big the market is, or if pushing this product will have adverse effects on sales of related products.
Firms (and governments and other aggregations) are stupid in that individual incentives don’t match group incentives. A given exec is punished more for a mediocre product launch than they are rewarded for a successful one. Kickstarters are way higher-risk than any established company would take—a large percentage never ship.
Everybody is stupid in the way our preferences change in the face of new options—maybe it turned out that people buy less Tums overall when both normal and sugar-free are on the shelf. That’s a wild guess, but stranger things have happened in consumer product marketing lore.
Note that the amount of sugar in a tums tablet (0.75g − 1.4g) is not a problem, even for most diabetics, even if you need maximum dose (7 tablets) for a day or two. My actual guess is that they just weren’t selling enough to justify the expense of the separate production and distribution costs, and reputation concerns kept them from charging much more for the sugar-free variety.