Posted on Saturday, May 30, 2009 - 09:50 am:

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quote:

The ironic thing about the "speed-rating" sales pitch is that it is a sort of self-deprecation-marketing in which the misrepresentations about the vendor's own products are mostly negative. All of this vendor's cables, if they are not very badly produced, are capable (at the tested length of 2 meters) of supporting all of the protocols, features, and bitrates which the marketing materials would suggest require the very most expensive cable. By implicitly speaking ill of its own lower-priced product and suggesting that the product won't do things it's perfectly capable of, the vendor manages to "up-sell" the customer to a costlier product. In other words, it's all about niche marketing and price-points; it is all about figuring that someone buying an $800 television might be willing to pay $75 for an HDMI cable, while someone buying a $3000 television might be willing to pay two or three times as much; it is all about the hard-sell approach of "gee, that's a nice TV; you wouldn't want to hook it up with just any old cable now, would you?" in which a salesman tries to eye-roll and shame the customer into buying costly accessories.

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