Posted to News on 1st May 2012, 00:00
Learning the lessons of messing with vampires
The present Mrs Simms is very much a fan of the Twilight saga, having read all the books and dragged me to all the movies. Now I enjoy a tale a werewolves and vampires as much as the next man, but the Twilight series is all a bit 'teenage angst' for my tastes. Still, with babysitters rarer than hens' teeth (have you met my kids?), any evening out on our own has to be regarded as a good night out. Or so I thought until I saw the most recent Twilight film - Breaking Dawn Part 1. If you've not seen the film and don't want me to spoil it for you, look away now. For the rest of you, here's the two-word executive summary of what happens: absolutely nothing. If that's too concise, I can tell you that Bella, our dewy eyed heroine, marries Edward (the angst-ridden vampire), and has a baby. In a not-terribly-tense ending, the vampires come out on the porch as the werewolves turn up, they snarl at each other for a bit, and then everyone goes home. I may have nodded off for a while, but from talking to others who've seen the film it doesn't appear that anything else happened. So a story that I could have told in about ten minutes has stolen two hours of my life. Am I bitter? A little, yes.
>What really wound me up, though, was the way these books and films are messing with the genre. Since when did vampires not have to sleep during the day? How can they go out into the sunlight and just sparkle a little bit instead of spontaneously combusting? And what's all this nonsense about drinking animal blood instead of human? Vampires should be falling on necks, not falling in love. Bram Stoker would be turning in his grave.
>Now don't get me wrong, I'm not some luddite who thinks that if it ain't broke, it don't need fixing. But if you're going to fundamentally change your product then surely you have to make it better. I don't pretend to be any kind of marketing guru, but change for change's sake is surely never a good thing. Continuous improvement is a worthy goal, while continuous tinkering will just begin to irritate your customer base. Yes, sometimes you have to take accepted thinking and turn it on its head, but if the end result isn't going to be better than the previous generation, then what's the point?
>Of course it isn't always your own development of your product that causes the problem. Sometimes it's those copycat manufacturers who think they can take your idea, mess around with it a bit, and then present it as some fundamentally new idea that is their own unique brainchild. Imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery, but if the result is actually pretty poor then all it does is sully the market for everyone, turning customers away from a product type or solution that actually may well have far more excellent examples than bad ones.
>Perhaps, though, it's too much to ask that a single product should appeal to every customer. Maybe there should be different styles of products aimed at different demographics, or lower cost, functionally restricted 'lite' versions to meet specific market needs. I wouldn't argue with that, but surely these products need to be flagged up as such. A different style of product is not necessarily a worse product if it's meeting a specific market requirement, but customers need to be aware that they a buying something fundamentally different. In these challenging economic times, no one can afford to be alienating their customer base.
Mark Simms, 1 May 2012
