Engineering Design

Obviously, a product, when designed, should work well for the consumer. However, if this is already assumed, some consumers may base their purchase or preference on the “look and feel” of the product. As an owner of a few Apple products, I’m guilty of this, myself.

http://www.apple.com

Apple’s marketing strategy is that technology should be clean, quick, and simple. Even though I can build a computer myself with the same processing power and memory for half the price, being able to look at a crisp screen and have one wire (the power cable) in the back influences my decision.

Not that apple products don’t work well, I certainly think they do, but I’d argue that a lot of their customers buy it because they like the look and feel the most.

However, for consumer products, that may be precisely the point. Why wouldn’t I buy a product that makes me happy?

http://images.macnn.com/macnn/news/0709/ipodtouchreview/21-ipodtouch-home.jpg

Especially when it comes to consumer products, the look and feel of a product is especially important. For example, there’s a variety of products that can store my phone numbers, have a calendar, and play my music. The reason I like my iPod touch so much is because it’s simple-looking, clean, and shiny. Emotions are truly more powerful than anything else that people use to make decisions with.

Global Supply Chains are the systems that are in place that make our way of life possible. The traditional economic way of thinking about it is the principle of comparative advantage. Comparative advantage is the idea that countries can be made better off by specializing in one thing, and trading to get other things, based on what they have to give up to do so. For example, it makes more sense for the US to buy supplies from other, poorer countries, instead of diverting labor away from other, more profitable areas that we can do better than them.

In other words, we couldn’t have many of the things we do today if we didn’t have a supply chain behind them to get the materials. If we couldn’t trade with other countries to get these materials, we’d have to find them ourselves in the U.S., which means that the labor and effort that created apple, samsung, etc, might have had nothing to build off of.

It’s obvious that Global Supply Chains make the standard of living in the U.S. and other first world countries very high. This obviously comes at a cost, however. Often people in poorer countries are exploited in the name of competition and lower prices.  It often makes me feel bad knowing that the reason that I’m living a fairly comfortable life is because thousands of people in third-world countries are living an awful life.

Some companies are taking a step in the right direction, though. Fair Trade is a system set in place so that the consumer and the producer both know they’re getting a fair deal. Obviously, fair trade coffee comes at a higher price to the consumer. And if it’s up to me, so be it. As long as the markup is going completely to the growers, and not to some CEO in America, I don’t mind paying a dollar more for my cup of Starbucks.