You say tomato, and I say tomato

Last Christmas the wife and I bustled our way around several department stores looking for a washing machine. Eventually, we bought one. I remember that we chose the one we thought we wanted and found a salesman who said something along the lines of: “A great choice, sir. I have one myself”.

Now, maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. I suspect, with my cynical hat on, that he was telling tales. But it made us feel re-assured that we weren’t making a dud purchase; and we wanted to believe him, so we did.

I’ll get back to the salesman in just a minute.

I was sitting on the tube last week playing solitaire on my Palm LifeDrive. A chap sat next to me and, noticing the Palm, asked me if it was any good. He’d been thinking of buying one and had browsed several websites, but wasn’t sure. I gave him the low-down: it’s a bit bulky, the battery life isn’t great if you’re using the wi-fi or bluetooth connection, but otherwise it does exactly what it says it does.

Then he asked me something that I thought rather odd: is it easy to use if you’re left-handed? It was odd because I’m not one of the 10% of people who are south-paws, though I was playing solitaire with my left thumb out of laziness.

The chap on the tube had seen someone like himself, or so he thought, a left-handed palm user (Hmm. That sounds like the start of a joke).

The one thing that was critical to him about the device didn’t even occur to me.

(I’ve checked out the palm website and it doesn’t even mention handedness.)

Which brings me back to the salesman. The salesman can’t possibly have owned and tried out all the washing machines on sale, and even if he had done, who’s to say that his ‘contexts’ or ‘criteria’ are the same as mine?

But, I’m sure that out there, on the web, is a left-handed LifeDrive user with an opinion that they don’t mind sharing with a stranger just as I did on the tube. In fact, I know that there are dozens and dozens of left-handed LifeDrivers out there.

That the marketeers can’t guess at the criteria which make or break sales of their product and don’t tackle what they would call niches is a lost opportunity. Retailers, connect your users together – they know more than you do!