People don’t always buy the best product. They more often than not buy the one that looks like it’s worth more. That’s why your competitor’s visually sleek version is winning over yours, even though yours might be engineered to last longer, perform better, and deliver more overall value. The market’s perception of your product almost always beats out raw performance.
The Hard Truth About Perception
Let’s use the coffin industry in Canada as an example. Two coffins sitting side by side. Both do literally the exact same thing, with the exact same purpose, and the exact same outcome. But one is a plain pine box, unfinished, with no fancy pillows or puffy stuff, and basic rope handles. The other coffin is polished, features a rich lacquered finish, is trimmed in gold, and is padded in velvet. Even though both serve the exact same purpose. Which one do you think sells for more? Sure, you can say the more expensive one uses finer materials, takes more care and hardware to build, but you would only be partially right.
The simple pine box might sell for around $1,000 CAD. Swap in hardwood, padding, lacquer, and some brass trim, and the real cost to build it might only double. But what is the end retail price? That can jump to $6,000–$8,000 CAD. That’s not the functionality or the materials alone driving value; that’s pure market perception.
That’s exactly how market perception works—design shouts, and engineering whispers. In a consumer market, a noisy marketplace, whispers alone usually don’t stand a chance.
Why Engineering Alone Doesn’t Win
Buyers aren’t engineers. They don’t know about:
- The countless hours you poured into testing and tolerances
- The materials you sourced with painstaking care
- The performance metrics that make your product superior to others
What they do notice:
- How it looks in the first three seconds
- How it feels in their hands
- Whether it looks like a “premium” choice compared to the rest
Good design sells trust, and trust helps to sell the product.
The Frank Lesson for Product Leaders
If you’re spending all your money on R&D and leaving the product’s overall design as an afterthought, you’re basically digging your own grave. (Yes, a coffin joke, however distasteful). The market doesn’t reward just the most functional; it also rewards the most wanted.
Engineering excellence without strong design is invisible. Design excellence without strong engineering? That can still sell, for a while at least, and that’s exactly why there are so many garbage products out there.
What You Can Do Right Now
You don’t need to outspend your competitors. You simply need to out-design them.
- Invest in design early, not at the end of development
- Make sure your product’s look matches its performance and brand
- Think like a buyer, not an engineer, because buyers don’t buy tolerances, they buy looks and confidence
Your competitor’s product isn’t better; it just looks better, and until you truly understand that perception drives your decision-making process, you’ll keep losing to the competition’s louder, flashier packaging. Master this logic, and you’ll be able to gain the advantage over your competitors effectively.
Are you thinking about how you can make your next product even better? Reach out any time to us to have a chat about where your project is at, get a no-charge product consultation to gain insight, advice on next steps and more confidence about what you want to bring to market.
