Bigger Isn’t Always Better

The airwaves are rife with political news, and it got me thinking about getting the message out.  Like many things, money pushes message.  The quality of the message and the quality of the product (or person) are not necessarily equal to the amount of time we get to see or hear about the product (or person).  Simply being the biggest or most talked about is no guarantee of quality.  Bigger isn’t always better.  I think if we could ask Goliath, he would probably agree.

How many products have dominated the market simply because the company pushing them had an almost unlimited marketing budget.  How many times have we purchased something from a company based mainly on brand awareness only to find that the item fell far short of our expectations.  Bigger doesn’t always equal better!

Business history is filled with products produced by large companies with huge marketing budgets that fell flat on their face.  Examples can be easily Googled, but for the sake of time, I’ll provide a few just to jog your memory.  Who can forget the Edsel, ENRON, the unsinkable Titanic, the Betamax tape format, Pan Am, Polaroid and Kodak, and most recently, the many banks and mortgage lenders that just about sunk our entire economy.

So why do the most advertised or most talked about products or political candidates often win the day?  Most of us are just too lazy to go after the facts!  We put way too much faith in the popular media, and way too little time into research.  There may have been a time when we could be excused for this approach, but now with so much information at our fingertips, we can, with modest effort, compare big companies and their products to their smaller competitors.  We can do the same with political candidates.  With apologies to the X-Factor, “the truth is out there!”