The Death Of Best.

While reading the insights of legendary adman David Ogilvy recently, I stumbled across a philosophy of his that shocked me.

He stated that marketers are wrong to emphasize “superiority.” What the majority of people in this world want is “positively good.” Not the best.

At first, I just blinked at the words. It was absolutely scandalous, coming from a leader like Ogilvy, who always gave his clients a first-class ticket through life. Mr. O was a visionary who prided himself on creating one of the classiest companies in the advertising business.

But then I suddenly remembered a very interesting conversation I had with a high-ranking adman recently. We were both judging the Cassie Awards, a marketing competition that awards quantifiable business success, not creativity, per se. We were talking about that thing that ad people love to talk about - “breakthrough work."

He said he was completely against it.

Now, you don’t hear many people say that in advertising. He said the demand for breakthrough work is debilitating. It paralyzes creative teams. He passionately believed the hunger for breakthrough work also causes the worst kind of collateral damage - it dismisses solidly effective work. This judge was campaigning hard for “good” work.

About a week later, I came across an interesting article. A company called Pure Digital took a hard look at the camera market, and saw that point-and-shoot cameras outsold SLRs by a colossal margin. Then they realized there were no point-and-shoot video cameras on the market, so they developed the Flip Ultra.

Pure Digital painstakingly engineered a lot of downsides into it.

The Flip Ultra’s images were low, low quality. It had a miniscule viewing screen. No colour-adjustment features. Rudimentary controls. Not even an optical zoom. But it was small, cheap, and so simple to operate you could figure the whole thing out in 6.7 seconds. Today, the Flip is the best-selling video camera in the U.S., commanding 17% of the camcorder market.

Sony and Canon are now scrambling to catch up.

When asked why the Flip is a success, Pure Digital said: “It’s because we have a better product.” Of course, when they said “better,” they meant “good enough.” Because that’s where the big market is.

Look at the MP3. It's a very lo-fi way of listening to music. But to the current generation of iPod listeners, that's the state of the art. They have been weaned on MP3s, and the sound they've been immersed in is lo-fi and crunchy and compressed. When I was in my late teens, all I could dream about was buying the best stereo money could buy. With speakers that towered over me, emitting sound that would bring Jimi Hendrix to his knees. My three teenaged daughters have never once asked me for a great stereo system, and they are continually plugged into their iPods.

Every year, an Ivy League professor conducts a telling experiment. He asks his first-year class which they prefer – the sound of MP3s, or that of vastly superior CDs. They overwhelmingly prefer MP3s. Convenience and portability of 4000 songs trumps great sound.

The low end has never been riding higher.

So let me ask you something. Do you have a family doctor? Did you make sure he or she was the best in the city? Have you ever renovated your house? Did you make sure you got the best contractor? Do you have an accountant? I’m interested to know what the best accountant in town costs.

The cold hard fact is that people aren’t that interested in the best.

Yes, sometimes it costs to get the best.

But that is not always the obstacle. As a matter of fact, price is rarely the barrier these days.

What consumers want is fundamentally changing.

They favour flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and shiny. They want positively... good.

As the New York Times said, “These changes run so wide and deep, they’re actually altering what we mean when we describe something as “high quality.”

Does that mean a “superiority claim” is not the powerful marketing tool it once was?

It’s an interesting question in a world where Good Enough is now more popular than Great.