Blogger Drew McLellan has recently shared his discontent with his cleaning company. According to his post, Don’t add frill until your core is rock solidstates , although the company puts so much effort in little useless details, it does not do things right. To be honest, I am not surprised by the existence of companies that seem to be obsessed to offer products or services that create value added to their customers and forget about the quality of them. In fact, I also observed such a trend in the extra hot sauce industry.

Notwithstanding chilli sauce contains pepper, vegetables, water, salt and xanthan gum there exist a large number of small producers that compete among each others to gain hot sauce consumers that are fed up with the commercial and tasteless Tabasco sauce. Here is where product differentiation comes in. Most of the producers use different chilies such as bhut jolokia, jalapeño, habanero or chipotle but some of them also make use of extravagant marketing techniques. For example, Crazy Jerry’s produces the “brain damage” sauce that comes with a brain shaped bottle cap. Also, Rasta Fire sauce maker introduced the “ass reaper” sauce that has a plastic skull in a dark cape on top of the bottle. I wonder if all this weird names and bottle thrills would actually make a better product.

Fortunately, not all the companies are like McLellan’s cleaning company, Crazy Jerry’s or Rasta Fire. Pagani is a car manufacturer that produces high end super cars. Their best seller is a one million dollar car that has no radio or CD player, Bluetooth, air conditioning or airbags. They believe that the experience of driving should be based on three main pillars; the driver, the road, and the machine. For this reason Pagani got rid of all the unnecessary thrills that could distort this practice. While this is an extreme example, it proves how crucial is to develop a product that satisfies the needs of the customers without adding fancy paraphernalia to try to make them look better products.