July 5th, 2010

About Consideration

This is part of a series of articles about how Fight is approaching using some free advertising. It all kicks off here.

To get a better handle on what Fight might use advertising for, it’s worth taking a brief side trip on the nature of how people buy Fight’s “product” versus how people buy other kinds of products.

As I mentioned previously, Fight’s “product” is a high consideration good. That means that people put relatively more time and effort into evaluating whether or not to buy that good, and generally have more and stronger criteria that the product has to meet for it to be considered among the various options to buy. Cars, vacation properties, and colleges are all other examples of high consideration goods.

If you are in the market for these things, the odds are that you will spend some time comparing one against the other, and that some products that you COULD consider won’t actually be products that you DO consider because they don’t meet your minimum criteria. Worth noting is the fact that it’s not just cost that makes something high consideration. A product might actually be cheap but difficult to get (e.g. a free piano), or may involve continued effort on your part in some way (e.g. a dog).

Examples of low consideration goods abound, but some quick examples might be gum, a deck of cards, or an umbrella hat (some things just sell themselves). These things are generally so cheap you don’t think about them, easy to get (except maybe for the umbrella hat), and have very little in the way of long-term repercussions (except, again, maybe for the hat).