Although nowadays all companies should report back about technical parameters and specifications to such institutions as FCC, CE, PCT etc., it seems like the product marketing is not regulated this strictly. This, in turn, arises the problem of information asymmetry and customer misunderstanding. The concept means that among two parties, let’s say customer and a commercial organisation, the latter possess more information on a product or service. As a result, it leads to an imbalance or exploitation among in this relationships and may have severe consequences.
The brightest example I can come up with is iPhones (actually all the other Apple products, but in this blog post I would like to focus on one product). When you go to check out the battery life of the newest iPhone 13, you see something like “Video playback:
– Up to 17 hours” and “Audio playback:
Up to 55 hours” what are these measures? How many hours of music playback does it take to call grandma or should I calculate all the 15-seconds videos I watch on TikTok to get the battery size?
In a normal life you measure a battery life by mAh, like all the Apple’s rivals do. In my personal opinion, Apple does not specify or provide the specific information on their website or ads, as it is usually smaller in Cupertino’s products.
And what we have at the end? A customer that can only imagine amount of music they can listen to. Obviously, they can check regulatory institutions or bloggers, whose interest lies in covering and providing related information on those details. However, it is some other kind of a research, while Apple is always possess the complete information on battery, showing consumers only the fruity parts of the product.
However, battery specification is not the only case here, for instance, same iPad models have different RAM values, depending only on the size of build in storage, imagine that the only way to check it out is to use regulatory database. Therefore, the conclusion is that Apple benefits of the information asymmetry framework, selling and promoting their consumers only a part of the information, while possessing with a full knowledge of a particular product.
It is a really interesting insight, I have never thought of it despite being an Apple user for so long. However, I fully agree that Apple should be more transparent when communicating such specific information. Thank you for sharing!
Perhaps this could be explained by the tendency of loyal customers to neglect such aspects in their favourite brands…
What do you think about this as a potential explanation of how Apple still gets aways with such behaviour? Would that also change your purchasing in the future?