People see energy star ratings and Amazon ads, neither of which emphasize lifespan, durability, or repairability. It's like the MHz wars for white goods.
The next level of information is Amazon reviews — generally dominated by people who just bought or don't even own the product... e.g. Nikon and Canon fanboys will go and sabotage the ratings of their arch enemy's products. If you're lucky you sometimes find a review by someone who has owned the product for a whole year.
The ease of price comparison has led to SKU-mutation where the same product is sold in micro variants. This also makes more thoughtful reviews, such as those by Consumer Reports, useless because they can't survey a product field or provide reviews that remain useful for more than a few months (when I subscribed to Consumer Reports I could never find their recommended products on sale -- never).
It's a situation in which rewards two kinds of players — long term brand/relationship builders who try to sell on repeat business based on trust, and short-term commodity-makers who operate on wafer thin margins and think of their product and customer relationship as disposable. Let's say Braun (or one of the other often unaffordably expensive German appliance brands) at one extreme and LG towards the other (there are far worse, LG at least is trying to be a brand).
People see energy star ratings and Amazon ads, neither of which emphasize lifespan, durability, or repairability. It's like the MHz wars for white goods.
The next level of information is Amazon reviews — generally dominated by people who just bought or don't even own the product... e.g. Nikon and Canon fanboys will go and sabotage the ratings of their arch enemy's products. If you're lucky you sometimes find a review by someone who has owned the product for a whole year.
The ease of price comparison has led to SKU-mutation where the same product is sold in micro variants. This also makes more thoughtful reviews, such as those by Consumer Reports, useless because they can't survey a product field or provide reviews that remain useful for more than a few months (when I subscribed to Consumer Reports I could never find their recommended products on sale -- never).
It's a situation in which rewards two kinds of players — long term brand/relationship builders who try to sell on repeat business based on trust, and short-term commodity-makers who operate on wafer thin margins and think of their product and customer relationship as disposable. Let's say Braun (or one of the other often unaffordably expensive German appliance brands) at one extreme and LG towards the other (there are far worse, LG at least is trying to be a brand).
So it's just like the smartphone wars.