I mostly agree with this article; although, I think a lot of this fanboy loyalty stems more from the learned stance from youth that you support "your team" regardless of its quality. This unwavering loyalty applies to sports teams and even to entire countries. Just as terrible management can make a team suck, terrible leadership can make a country suck and it's surprising how many "country fanboys" get irrationally upset when you bring objective evidence to the table regarding internal problems that are guiding it to failure. (ie. USA under Bush leadership) So, this blind loyalty to propaganda is a general societal problem or human nature problem more so than a business marketing effect. Only the independently/objectively minded personalities can escape it's effect.

One thing I disagree with is the attack on the "underdog" issue. I agree that all "saint underdogs" are likely to become "sinner leaders" but competition is so vital to control monopoly abuse that the underdog needs to be given special support. I also don't agree that underdogs have an equal and fair opportunity to compete against "goliaths". For one thing business monopolies are not effectively controlled by government as you seem to think. Once established, these monopolies have multiple "tools" at their disposal to control competitors that effectively forces the competitor to fight on their knees. 

In addition, "fanboy" support also can stem from near complete approval and satisfaction of a companies products and/or direction. While missteps are inevitable, it's important for customers to highlight the positive actions of a company in hopes that this support will guide the entire industry in a beneficial direction. I have been a temporary "fanboy" of all these companies at one time or another when they have led their industry in a positive direction that attempts to bring more options and benefits to the consumer but I never allow myself to become blinded by infatuation or loyalty. As you said, research is the most prudent way to shop but once you have found the current "best", there's nothing wrong with spreading the word with vigor. Fanboy support can help level the playing field for small companies with a great idea but small marketing budget to battle the media bombardment of the big companies. Thus fanboyism isn't necessarily bad if there is a justified reason to be a fanboy.

Great rant, with just one glaring fault - "Competition always appears".

Wrong. Intel has de facto control (via patents on the instruction set) over who can make x86 processors. The last (known) time that they granted someone the right to make x86 chips was over 10 years ago (to Centaur in 1995).

No matter how high the prices go on x86 chips, noone else can enter the market. If Intel's competition dies, it'll take a few years of Intel abusing it's monopoly position plus 10 years of lawyering for a new startup to get a license. The x86 processor market is really a classic example of a failed market.

As a side note, no-one has been granted an IA64 license. Whether this is down to lack of demand or refusal to supply is not clear ...

I'm not influenced by marketing - I just look at the benchmark results, the characteristics, and get the most powerful component for the best price my money can buy me.

Yes, I'm happy to have bought the Athlon Ghz model, but I'm also quite happy to have a Q6600 quad core now.

I'm looking forward to going to DDR3 next year. I'll do that with anything that can give me 100fps in Supreme Commander at 1920 x 1600 with full details.

Intel, or AMD ? Don't care. It'll be the one that gives me the best performance at the price I can afford.

I'm not a fanboy, I'm a power whore.

So sue me.

I would have substituted Marketing with TV, it sounds better and it’s closer to reality. Also the parallelism between Marketing and the different political forms is not so bad. On the other side the average man has the freedom of choice, he/she has the power to use the remote control or his/her veto of blame. How many of us have done that? 
Everything is political capital, everybody is a potential customer/sucker, why not take advantage of it? Is not what companies and individual do? As topic it starts with salaries and other employee’s benefits, working conditions, growing programs and ends with the lousy mischief done at the corner of the streets. 
There are any expectations to have an ethical society? We have a long way to go in order to achieve that! Fortunately each system has sooner or later its end, I wonder what will be next?!

"Marketing is human behaviour in other formats, not sinister mind control. Believe me, I've worked in marketing for 20 years, and if there was a simple way of getting people to do what we want life would have been a lot simpler."

Don't be so modest Sulis. Oh I know that you people agonize over how to pitch the latest product and spend sleepless nights worrying about successful marketing campaigns to keep your clients coming back. 

The reason marketing a specific brand is difficult is the plethora of highly sophisticated propaganda that every marketing campaign has to compete with. 

Sure, marketing is not a science as mentioned in the article, it's more of an art or more aptly voodoo. Actually nothing beats the original designation, Propaganda, in conveying the insidious, manipulative, malicious essence of the practice of marketing.

I love how it's portrayed as normal human behaviour like your example of a restaurant and word of mouth and then the leap of logic that equates word of mouth support for a small local business with an international marketing campaign for megacorp inc. 

It's the antithesis of free choice. If free choice was how people decide what to buy advertising would not be the unrivaled industry it is today.

Thanks too to whomever mentioned the "vote with your dollar" canard. That's so endemic on fanboy sites. So you decide to switch to HP not to buy Sony while they are selling how many tens of thousands every day? At the end of the year they say, "whoa, look at March 3rd. John didn't buy from us. Instead of 523,641,554 we only sold 523,641,553. This is not going to go over well with the investors"

Not only is that scenario ludicrous, just know there is a person who decided they were going to stop buying HP and opted for a Sony that very same day. How does your vote against stack up now? 

Am I a victim? Of course, like everyone else. I felt like a traitor buying that 1st Intel cpu for my computer. I still feel a little guilty and it's almost a year later.

"Believe me, I've worked in marketing for 20 years..." 

In that case give me three of whatever you're selling please.


"...and if there was a simple way of getting people to do what we want life would have been a lot simpler.""

Based on this profound statement, I suspect that you're not trying hard enough.


Likewise, your Soviet Russia analogy makes about as much sense as a chocolate tennis racket. 

Sadly, I suspect I agree with parts of what you're saying. It's an indictment of human intelligence that it's easier to lower the expectations of your target market than it is to create a product that sells on the strength of its relative worth. 

But then again, it's also an indictment of modern morality that it's allowed to happen so shamelessly.

It's so well written that you can replace "company" by "political party" (and "performance" by "issues", etc...) and you get one of the best recent commentaries on the endless US election.

Serious, read again before calling me a cynic

We have a real urge to wake people up for the reality of Corporate America

First of all do I really afford the time of analyzing in detail with which product/brand should I go? Maybe I'll do that for 1-2 expensive products but when most of them share the same capabilities, then I'll go with my experience or gut feeling, if not ask one of the sell assistants, who with a large smile will point me to one of the most expensive products or one the boss recommended to sell as soon as possible. The way of choosing a product is relative, I can't always trust the list of so called specialists but I might take their advice at least when they have the knowledge and experience I need. Referring to software products, I would prefer to stick to a certain vendor mainly because of the increased level of interoperability between a range of products, look and feel, experience or learning curve. I put level of interoperability on a fist plane because there are still many vendors that try to keep their products closed for other vendors, gaining on the short term but loosing on the long run (see Apple and their iPods).

Often, not the best company or product wins, but the one who can take advantage of existing circumstances, for example of market needs (see Renault and its Dacia Logan), high level partnerships (products that come by default with other subcomponents), trends, and I think my list ends here. There are companies which are smart enough to create a need or trend (see Smart given as example in some Marketing study books). For the average consumer are enough the products with average functionality and quality, so don’t be upset the masses follow the trend!

Talking about corporations, their philosophy is to decrease the costs, increase, if possible, product’s price and vary the quality to a level acceptable for the market; of course that’s nothing new, however within this context there is no wonder when some of the companies loose because they don’t have the required mobility, management, logistic, etc. Most of the companies are trying to gain customers' fidelity increasing the quality and availability of services/products, increasing customers’ awareness or dependency to a product. It’s a question of image and mirage, holding the customer at a certain level of need.


There are theories about customers brain washing or about corporatist conspiracies, they might be possible tough we don’t have to go so far away as long as, using an expression from popular philosophy, “for each product there is a sucker to buy it” and sometimes even without smallest attempt of persuasion. To some extent there is also some lack of education (I wonder who would like us to be educated) or knowledge with respect to quality and analysis of products, though they don’t go along with any product. A few weeks ago I was readying in a Romanian newspaper that Romanians prefer green products even if they are more expensive, it can be given as an example of increased customer awareness; on the other side the number of people who continue to drink carbonated drinks and eat junk food is increasing.

Behind the marketing or managerial strategic plans are not necessarily “cold and calculated minds”, most of them are applying blindly what they learned in schools or what the competitors are doing. Such minds produce more chaos than diabolic plans and they are guiltier for the actual economical crisis than for our buying or persuasive behaviour. 

There are also some ethical questions related not only to customers but also to vendors’ own employees and working environment, though that’s another story.

Someone read this to Charlie, while the grownups are being deliciously rude about every side in whichever particular form of scumbaggery is at question today.

Not saying he's polarised, but.. oh yes, I am. Rabid, foam-flecked fanboi. 

Was gonna make a smartass joke about silver screens, projectors and 3D displays, but it's probably too spoddy even for the Inq.

The core cause of "Fanboyism" isn't marketing. It's the need for critical mass.

Technologies that don't acquire critical mass *die*. In general there's room for one big winner, one struggling 2nd place, and any number of dead losers.

So let's say you're a programmer, and you try out a new language, and you love it. Now, if that new language is from Microsoft, which has declared it will be used to develop all new software, then you have nothing to worry about. But what if it has no big base of support? It needs to grow fast. It needs evangelists. It needs you to be a Fanboy. 

Secondly, you need to find other supporters of your endangered technology. You need mutual support, and you're lost in a sea of unbelievers. You need to stand out. 

People who use Windows or Intel CPUs aren't Fanboys. Why would they need to be? Those products have 90% of the market. Fanboys support AMD, or Apple, or Nvidia vs ATI, or Tivo. 


Let's not forget that fanboyism is very notably present amongst so called tech journalist, like say theinq staff.
And it competes in popularity with the work of creating fanboys for the companies, that is done by the same group often, tech 'journalists'..

firefox rocks!!

Vote with your dollar. And in this case, not voting or buying does actually count.

Marketing is a direct consequence of freedom of choice. 

One way to stop the pernicious effects of marketing on our feeble brains is just to stop all competition: how much marketing of anything but The State was there in Soviet Russia?

Although some brands can get away with sub-par products for a while (good brands are more 'sticky'), the idea that people will perpetually fall for it doesn't correspond to anything I've seen out there.

Does that mean that only the best gets to the top? Obviously, it doesn't. Having a pile of cash allows you to generate more noise than the little guys, and forces them to use their much more scarce cash to get any sort of hearing.

However, this general rule is being increasingly skewed by the internet. Blogs and review sites are able to get information out about smaller companies' products that you would never have heard about before. This is still marketing, even if some of it is generated by users.

The point about the underdogs is not that they somehow deserve to succeed, but that you as an individual have much more power to help them succeed. If there's a local restaurant that's really good but not critically recognised, it's likely to go out of business unless the customers who like it support it and tell their friends. It's in their interests to do this, otherwise they'll be stuck with a big faceless one. 

The idea that marketing is the cause of this doesn't reflect what I see. Marketing is human behaviour in other formats, not sinister mind control. Believe me, I've worked in marketing for 20 years, and if there was a simple way of getting people to do what we want life would have been a lot simpler.

I stepped into this article skeptical, but color me impressed. It's one of the smarter statements I've seen about technology, and it explains why I know iPod owners who had their new machine brick itself...and went out and bought another. And XBox owners who hit the Red Ring, shrug, and flame Sony for a while to make themselves feel better. 

I'm a PC gamer. It's a pain in the ass to always be tweaking, patching, fixing. I'd like to think if it ever got to the point where the hype was not worth the effort, I'd bow out. But even I can't claim to be immune.

Mission Accomplished: Saturation Bombing Successful

Marketing and public relations are only different, ''politically correct'' words for mass control and mass manipulation. It is used to induce fear, instead of knowledge, passion instead of reason and to replace ''need' with ''desire''. 

They don't care about what's best for humanity on the long term but how to imprison us all into a false reality, the illusion of short term, immediate and easy ‘’happiness ‘’ with all the very bad consequences that this philosophy imply.

They are worst than politicians, lawyers, insurance brokers and bankers combined, expect maybe for the democracy invader/parasite that are the power and money hungry lobbyist.

What a beautiful world… 

Ramon

This consumer society has an incredible momentum built upon and supported by marketing and governments who receive campaign donations from big companies. The person who figures out how to change this capitalist mass-consumerism society to something better deserves more than a nobel prize.

It is really annoying that every tech forum is full of flame wars between fanboys of AMD, Intel, nVidia....

/deep breath.

My name is Neil and I am a Fanboy.

Surprisingly well-written and lacking in satirical bite.
Also, very informative. I could see someone performing a fan-boy "intervention" using this as the script.
An an AMD fan-boy myself, I am humbled and shamed by being called out and shown for what I really am.

hear
[regards, a fanboy of inquirer rants, best in the business]