Marketing-driven standards: virtual standardization

Abstract

We introduce a view of " standards " as driven by the power of marketing. The value of any such standards is questioned , their use deplored, and the challenge is offered to computing professionals to resist such deception. Many organizations take the short-term view—throw money at a problem, make incremental changes instead of reassessing strategies, choose the cheapest solution now—the time horizon is the next quarter's bottom line. he marketing industry capitalizes on the short-term view by promoting into mass markets products that really are short-lifetime products, or quick-fix solutions, or competitor-response lookalikes, or market share placebos. Individuals do not even have a short-term bottom line to consider when making a purchasing decision. Value-for-money and return-on-investment are very rarely considered. Rather, the important factors are whether or not the product is affordable and useful. Marketing to the masses profits from this by setting prices to " what the market will bear " and by highlighting new features and ease-of-use when promoting a new product. The success of such marketing results in a popular product that can become so popular as to be considered a standard. Thus the appearance of marketing-driven standards. Marketing-driven standards are not so much what the user needs, but something that a powerful marketing campaign leads them to believe they want (often for mostly the wrong reasons). Why else would the public queue up before midnight of August 23, 1995 to try to be the first to buy a copy of a software product that was never expected to be in short supply (and in fact turned out to be in rather plentiful supply!)? This was particularly evident in New Zealand where, because of the location of the International Date Line, such customers could claim to be first in the world. We can take it as given that marketing people, successful ones anyway, are of above average intelligence (by some definition of intelligence, say creativity). So their target audience is necessarily of slightly less than average intelligence (using the same definition). This is an unfair game, which explains why marketing tends to win more than lose. One might argue that marketing includes itself in its target audience ; i.e., they start to believe their own hype, but all this means is that the target audience is of average in-telligence—so it is still an unfair game. Marketing-driven standards are not to be confused with market-driven standards. Market-driven …