Buyer's Guide For Consumer Electronics

Nowadays, consumer electronics are a part of everybody’s life, no matter if we want it or not. It is impossible to imagine a person who does not have a smartphone or laptop, so the size of this market is enormous. Most of the manufacturers use advertising, marketing campaigns, and various tricks to encourage customers to buy their products and buy a lot. Let us have a fresh look at the consumer electronics market to understand what buying strategies you can use there.

What Do We Buy?

When people buy any product (not only consumer electronics), they evaluate product attributes, the price, and what they feel about the product. Then they make a decision based on these parameters and select one product that matches their needs. All these concepts are valid for consumer electronics too, but there is one more factor that the buyer should take into account — it is depreciation.

Products with slow depreciation lost 10-20% of the price annually. These products can serve their owners for 5-10 years without significant expenses. Kitchen appliances and household electronics are great examples of such products.

On the contrary, products with fast depreciation usually lost 30-50% (sometimes up to 70%) of the price annually. Such products are useful only during the 2-3 years and have to be replaced or upgraded when this time exceeds. These are mobile phones, tablets, wearable electronics, many laptops, and other complicated electronics.

Buying Strategies

The first and most apparent strategy is buying the best products. It means that a customer purchases the best possible products on the market for any price. These are new products made by the top manufacturing brands in the segment and produced this year. The main idea of such products is that they can provide excellent performance and fully use all built-in features no matter the cost.

The opposite strategy is to buy the cheapest products. A customer buys the product with the lowest cost, usually several times cheaper than the best product. These products often have poor performance and a limited amount of features. These can be either new products from low segment brands or heavily used best products with ended support period or close to it. The main point of buying such products is to get the minimum required amount of features for the lowest possible price. Sometimes it makes sense to buy several such products to compensate for their drawbacks or issues.

The final strategy is to buy financially efficient products. It means that the owner has to calculate depreciation and usage cost of the product. Then he/she buys the product that satisfies most of the needs and has the lowest usage cost over time. These can be new products from the previous year or generation or little-used products in good condition. The main criteria here are to get the acceptable performance and most of the features for a reasonable price.

How To Buy

Let us split all customers into several groups (segments) and check which products are suitable for most of the customers in each group.

The first group is professional users. These people know what they need, and they have an exact list of requirements and features. Such customers may use any combination of depreciation and strategy as long as it fits in their budget. The obvious choices here are the best products with slow depreciation and financially efficient products with fast depreciation.

The next group is average users who use electronics a lot but do not rely on it most of the time. These people may not need all of the features, but they still want a functional and relatively efficient product. Such customers usually buy financially efficient products with both slow and fast depreciation.

The final group here is occasional users who use electronics only from time to time and do not need most of the features. These people should buy the cheapest products with fast depreciation and financially efficient products with slow depreciation.

The following table summarizes this information.

	The best products	Financially efficient products	The cheapest products
Slow depreciation	Professional users	Average users Occasional users
Fast depreciation		Professional users Average users	Occasional users

We can see that there are two gaps here, and both have a reason why regular customers may not buy such products. The best products with fast depreciation are usually costly and lose their value quickly, so this is a terrible investment. The cheapest products with slow depreciation do have a little sense as customers prefer to pay more and buy financially efficient products instead.

So, every time you want to buy some consumer electronics, have a look at this table and use this information to get what you want.