Economic cargo cults

One thing that never ceases to fascinate me:

Small, thoroughly unremarkable companies try to emulate wildly successful ones by copying some tertiary, sometimes even actively annoying property.

Take Apple and its near-religious obsession with packaging. Their boxes are sturdy, elegant, and engineered with the kind of care normally reserved for spacecraft or Swiss watches.

So naturally, companies selling $9.99 gadgets have concluded that this is the secret sauce. Not the product. Not the ecosystem. Not the brand. No, clearly it’s the box.

What they fail to realize is that I keep an iPhone box because the device inside retains resale value. The packaging is essentially a reusable shipping container with aspirations.

The cheap gadget, on the other hand, has the resale value of an expired, half-eaten sandwich. Its box is therefore not a feature but a long-term storage problem. A nearly indestructible one. I suspect some of these packages will outlive civilization and be excavated by future archaeologists, who will conclude that we worshipped mediocre Bluetooth speakers.

Another favorite is the imitation of Google’s customer interaction model, or rather, the strategic absence of it.

Companies observe that Google doesn’t talk to its customers and infer that this must be part of the winning formula. What they miss is that Google succeeds despite this, not because of it. When you control half the internet, you can afford to be aloof. When you sell niche SaaS to 50 customers in a easily offended corner of Germany, less so.

Yet here we are, with companies proudly offering the full “Google experience”: no support, no accountability, and a contact form that disappears into a small, silent void, presumably to be studied later by theoretical physicists.

It’s a bit like copying the table manners of a king while lacking both the kingdom and the food.

I suppose this is the corporate equivalent of a cargo cult: build the runway, light the torches, and hope that success will land.

Do you see those as well?