jim dozier
Lieutenant Commander
- Joined
- Jan 8, 2003
- Messages
- 1,970
Re: 2 stroke oil, Topic will not go away !
I don't know why anyone is surprised at the degree of confusion and bewilderment on this issue. A couple of comments on why this issue will never go away as long as there are 2 strokes. (And if they go away the issue will be reborn with some other product).<br /><br />If you are selling a product in a market where there are many competitors and no real trade secrets there are only a few ways to distinguish yourself in the market. You shout really loud. You make product positive statements that can't be confirmed. You put it in attractive packaging. You price it competitively or you price it exhorbitantly hoping to associate it with high end value. You contract with a manufacturer for a stable piece of the market. You design small, poorly controlled, comparisons with pre-arranged outcomes that appear to show your product has some benefit that the other's don't. In short you do all the things that make buyers brand conscious and willing to buy the black bottle or the blue bottle over the grey one.<br /><br />What you don't do is set up well designed, unbiased (conducted by personnel with no association with the product), double-blind (where none of the personnel directly conducting or reviewing the results of the study know which product was used where until all the results have been tabulated), baseline controlled comparisons (a baseline comparison might be the base lubricant without the special additives in question) that pit your product directly against the other competiting products. And the reason is you don't wan't to spend a lot of money to determine what you already know and have successfully spent marketing dollars to convince the consumer otherwise, that the difference between your product and the competitor is small or unmeasureable and mostly in the mind of the consumer.
I don't know why anyone is surprised at the degree of confusion and bewilderment on this issue. A couple of comments on why this issue will never go away as long as there are 2 strokes. (And if they go away the issue will be reborn with some other product).<br /><br />If you are selling a product in a market where there are many competitors and no real trade secrets there are only a few ways to distinguish yourself in the market. You shout really loud. You make product positive statements that can't be confirmed. You put it in attractive packaging. You price it competitively or you price it exhorbitantly hoping to associate it with high end value. You contract with a manufacturer for a stable piece of the market. You design small, poorly controlled, comparisons with pre-arranged outcomes that appear to show your product has some benefit that the other's don't. In short you do all the things that make buyers brand conscious and willing to buy the black bottle or the blue bottle over the grey one.<br /><br />What you don't do is set up well designed, unbiased (conducted by personnel with no association with the product), double-blind (where none of the personnel directly conducting or reviewing the results of the study know which product was used where until all the results have been tabulated), baseline controlled comparisons (a baseline comparison might be the base lubricant without the special additives in question) that pit your product directly against the other competiting products. And the reason is you don't wan't to spend a lot of money to determine what you already know and have successfully spent marketing dollars to convince the consumer otherwise, that the difference between your product and the competitor is small or unmeasureable and mostly in the mind of the consumer.
