Chapter One The Fidelity Swap We constantly, in our everyday lives, make trade-offs between the fidelity of an experience and its convenience. It happens when we decide to watch a baseball game on TV instead of going to the park, make a phone call instead of meeting face-to-face, eat fast food at McDonald's instead of a nice meal at a restaurant, or buy $300 noise-canceling Bose headsets instead of using the inexpensive earbuds that come with the music player. Businesses, nonprofits, and governments make the same kinds of trade-offs in their buying decisions. The way those trade-offs work and play out in the marketplace is the key to countless business successes and failures. This is the fidelity swap. This fidelity swap has been going on since humans invented commerce. But the role of technology today accelerates the whole process. There are five key concepts behind the fidelity swap: Fidelity versus convenience. Fidelity is the total experience of something. At a rock concert, for instance, it's not just the quality of the sound--which often isn't as good as listening to a CD on a home stereo--but also everything else going on. That includes visually seeing the band, the lights and effects, the crowd around you, even the fact that you can later tell people you went to a particular concert and saw The Who, or Coldplay, live. It's all part of what makes up fidelity. Convenience is how easy or hard it is to get what you want. That includes whether it's readily available, whether it's easy to do or use, and how much it costs. If something is less expensive, it's naturally more convenient because it's easier for more people to get it. In music, a downloaded song from iTunes is tremendously convenient--available anytime, easy to use, and inexpensive. It is, however, relatively low fidelity--a downloaded song file typically has ten times less audio information than the same song on a CD. Consumers constantly trade fidelity for convenience, and vice versa. Once in a while you may go to an astoundingly inconvenient U2 concert simply because the fidelity of the experience cannot be replicated. Most of the time, however, we'll choose the low-fidelity, high-convenience experience: listening to U2 on a digital music player stuffed in a pocket. But our fidelity-versus-convenience decisions are not static. They change with circumstance, sometimes moment to moment. And people with different priorities--those who have more, or less, discretionary income, those with more or less time on their hands, different age groups--make different trade-offs. The tech effect. Technology constantly improves both fidelity and convenience. If a product or service is the highest fidelity today, technology and innovation will soon make it possible to create a product or service of higher fidelity. The same is true of convenience. These boundaries move over time. Nothing about the fidelity swap stays fixed. The fidelity belly. Any product or service that is neither extremely high-fidelity nor high-convenience risks sinking into what I call the fidelity belly--the no-man's-land of consumer experience. It is a land ruled by apathy. No one gets very excited about a product or service that has so-so fidelity, and is only somewhat convenient. This is the problem movie theaters are falling into. It is the same problem hurting music CD sales. Because the tech effect keeps expanding the outer edges of fidelity and convenience, it expands or redefines the borders of the fidelity belly at the same time. The expanding belly swallows products and services that don't improve and keep pace with technology advancements. The fidelity mirage. Contrary to what many businesses want to believe, achieving both high fidelity and high convenience seems to be impossible. It looks tempting. Some companies believe they can get there, and life will be beautiful. But as Excerpted from Trade-off: Why Some Things Catch on, and Others Don't by Kevin Maney All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
