The last 200 – 300 years have been characterized by a trend from the science of economics. Around the time when Adam Smith wrote the wealth of nations, it was specialization, rather than having each person make what they needed, they should become specialists at making one thing, and trade with other specialists. As time went on and the effect of the steam engine made the industrial revolution possible, it became scale economies, a trend that persists as central to many companies today. The 1960s and 70s were in many ways the age of “scientific management” and management fads such as “Total Quality Management” and “The Balanced Scorecard“. I suppose that in hindsight, the transition from a focus on producing a quality product, predictable operations, and little change, by way of management fads, was the introduction to the age of the marketer.
My reasoning behind this post is simple, as I was watching the recent episode of Silicon Valley, I saw once more the meeting between sales, administration and engineering within a business. These are the three parts of a business that can make or break it, but they are in fundamental conflict. While sales always want to sell the most, preferably in the easiest way possible, administration often view the company’s market value as its product, whereas engineers tend to be focused on the raison d’etre of a company, namely what it actually produces. Those who work in tech or production, will undoubtedly be aware of the problem with over-engineering, in that many engineers are perfectionists who, if left to their own devices may never decide to release the product to the public because it is not perfect, whereas sales and administration would rather release a product before it is finished if it will lead to commissions and market value. This made me think of various products I have purchased throughout the years, computers that last 8 years vs computers that break after 2.5, shoes that last a month vs shoes that last for years.
Engineering or Marketing
Part of this is related to value for money, which in essence becomes the trade of time vs time. In effect, how much time did I trade away in order to be able to buy this product, and how long was I able to enjoy it. This made me start to break it down in terms of a quality – perception setup, assuming that the total product value is 100, and it is composed of equal amounts quality of product and quality of marketing.
The trade off between resources spent on marketing vs resources spent on product engineering, is an interesting one in that they can each make up for each other. The major difference is that quality of engineering can be objectively tested, using positivist methodology, and will yield objective results. For instance, one could make a hypothesis about whether or not spending a certain amount of resources on engineering would yield a correspondingly higher product quality. Marketing on the other hand, tends be more suitable to be tested with phenomenology and while hypothesis tests can be used, more subjective approaches tend to be adopted such as focus groups or semi-structured/unstructured interviews.
Mercedes is a brand that has succeeded in both delivering high quality engineering and high quality marketing, however its perception as being of high quality comes from actually being of high quality. In this case, you have perfect alignment between the two outer points. A strong product leads to a strong brand, and they both reinforce each other.
The choice between marketing and product quality is time-dependent and investment dependent For instance, for short-term sales and valuation driving, marketing is superior as it is usually less resource dependent, and there is little chance to change the purchase. A product that you have to keep for 20 years, requires less focus on repurchase and more focus on first purchase.
If for the other hand, the time horizon is long, and repeat purchase is frequent, then the amount of chances your customer has to change their product decision is frequent. Therefore, by delivering a low-quality product, you increase the chance of the customer switching to a competitor. The moral is that the perception of quality only holds so long as the deliverable is not of sub-standard quality.
How this relates to the Red Pill
If we do a thought-experiment where there are two types of women, A and B, where B is an obvious lower quality woman than woman A, but has the ability to be perceived as of equal quality to A. This is often the case with the women I spoke about in my post on crazy women. I’m certain that all of my male readers can come up with a list of qualities that makes a woman a class A broad for them, and I’m sure that most of you can also come up with a list of qualities that make her a woman of the other variety. However, deception is powerful and a part of all human relationships, and women tend to be naturally Machiavellian. Thus, for a man to mistake B for A, could be a costly mistake, both financially and otherwise, in much the same way buying a product that does not fit the intended use and expected quality. For instance, if a man is looking for a reliable car, that gets him where he needs to go, gets good mileage, and requires little maintenance and upkeep, yet is somehow mislead into buying a car that burns fast and then fades away, it would be double-down, as he is not only down the money he spent on the first car, but also down the money he will need to spend on a second car in order to ensure that he remains mobile. Odds are that he would have known that a 1963 roadster with 350.000 miles on it, was a poor choice, or if he was convinced by the flashy salesman otherwise, he had options to get a second opinion. However, when we want something for the image, the flash and the perception, we tend to disconnect our critical minds.
You can be a highly analytical, intellectually endowed person, yet make a mistake of this magnitude, because you select to rely on your perception over the reality. Therefore, while knowing yourself and your requirements are paramount central to being able to make good choices. Even more important is your ability to reason from an elimination perspective, where rather than finding reasons for why you should select a given course of action, you attempt to find reasons why you should not.
If one evaluates the course of a relationship it is not uncommon for both men and women to be their representative rather than themselves in the initial stages. After those initial stages, they gradually reveal more and more about themselves to the other person, often as a function of familiarity, but also a result of having secured the initial investment. Many men who decide to adopt Red Pill Principles, and learn game to secure their oneitis, end up in such a situation, where after obtaining the object of their affection, they immediately revert to their “real self“, at which point, the woman leaves them. However, the incentives to do just this is even higher for women, if a woman can secure a marriage and/or offspring from the male, then she has lined herself up for a payday, or potentially 18 years of paydays if there is offspring.
Thus, the consideration for men is whether they are merely perceiving her as a high quality mate as a function of her performance, or whether she is actually a high quality mate.
Summary and conclusions
I’m a firm believer in that stereotypes and generalizations are forms of human pattern recognition that aid us in creating heuristics, which in previous times allowed us to make life and death decisions rapidly. The ability to make these rapid decisions was a survival advantage, and thus was reproductively beneficial. This is a mode of thinking, which while highly practical and quick, is not one that it suited for delayed gratification and critical evaluation of options. As a species we are prone to a range of cognitive bias, we are hardwired for a life in the wild not hunted by predators, we are built for scarcity of choice, not a plethora, and finally as men we are built to take a shot at reproduction, rather than carefully consider it. However, a male’s reproductive reasoning is based around a world where there is no child support, where running away 100 miles would be enough to never be caught by your ex-lovers tribe, and where the prospect of death was so ever-present that “long term” carried the meaning of “until the next meal“.
As a species we frequently died at less than 35 years of age, which means a generalized 15 – 22 years of active reproduction before embracing the ever-lasting sleep. For a man making the choice of product, the question would be “if I don’t take this option, will I ever have another option?” not “if I take this option, will I get saddled with 18+ years of child support“. Simply put, reproduction was an end with no thought to the consequences. However, in the world we now live, child support and divorce law has drastically altered the consequences, and thus the downside of the evolutionary programming for males.
For females, legislation has been put in place to ensure that they do not have to consider consequences as much. Deadbeat dad laws, various social programs, and divorce law ensures that a man alone must carry the majority of financial consequences of poor reproductive decisions. As I wrote in “The Concept of Reproductive Rights” there should be no such thing as “accidentally” becoming a mother, hardly even such a thing as an accidental pregnancy. I would argue that such things do not exist, the question is one of conscious intent or subconscious intent by the female. Did she intend to get pregnant in order to secure herself financial support from the man and the state, or did she subconsciously do so?
In the age of the marketer, the risks have steadily increased for men. Our society to larger and larger degrees venerate and worship instant gratification, “YOLO”, and various other rationalizations in order to not think of consequences.However, teh ability of a female to market herself has also increased, helped not only by social programming of men into the “Blue Pill” perspective of soul-mates, romantic love and the images they are bombarded with daily of what a relationship actually entails. The feminine imperative, is hard at work demonstrating that “true love” means she is in control, she gets what she wants, and if you do anything for yourself then you are a selfish bastard for doing so.
Expect her to stay in shape? Then you are shallow, superficial, a body shamer, fat shamer or various other names. Expect her to do anything inside the house? Misogynist pig, caveman, relic, or bastard. Steady increases in female marketing technology such as the introduction and popularization of Spanx, increasing amounts of make-up, plastic surgery, and various other new technologies are invented and exist to reduce the need for the women to be quality, yet enable her to look like quality. In a hook up culture, each hook up is potentially a loaded gun with 18 years of payments to be made. This is not to say to never have one night stands, but more to give someone pause before they end up sleeping with the woman who has 4 kids by 4 different men.
You may go for flashiness in apparel, your car or you house, but go for quality in a female. Beware of flashiness sold as quality.
A note:
I recently launched a Patreon page where I will be posting additional content every month for those who support me and I will do a Google Hangout for the highest tier Patrons (limited to 10 people).
I’ve also had some requests for consults, which I’ve declined up until now, but due to demand I’ve chosen to open up for doing some consults on request. For details please check out my Consulting and Patreon Page
As always you can buy my book Gendernomics at Amazon.com as both paperback and Kindle
