Sometimes we are confronted with the fact that manufacturers don’t open  all the details about their product to the clients, don’t provide any product specifications that reflect products properties and characteristics at open access.

Typically, the reasons for such secrecy is:

  • manufacturer beleives that customers don’t need product information (before they buy something);
  • menufacturer or distributor is deliberatly hiding the information to get an opportunity to meet with the client (to influence the client);
  • understanding that the product has worse characteristics in comparison with the competitors;
  • the parameters cannot be set and vary according to the customer (this may be true for the weapons supplied to various parties, or complex equipment, supplied in different countries);
  • ordinary laziness and unwillingness to invest into data quality.

Fortunately, most manufacturers want to provide quality information about their products and willling make the necessary efforts  and willing to invest into data quality.

At the same time customers stimulate suppliers to provide quality information setting product information quality as the one of the selection criteria.


2 Comments

Axel Tillmann · 03/05/2014 at

One positive reasons has howver been left out.

You want to avoide false assumptions. I have often heard: “Oh I think you can’t do this / don’t have this feature……” Because they either didn’t read the hole content, or the marketing department found it wasn’t relevant in the overall content of a competing market, or many other reasons.

In a conversation, this can be avoided. In writing it is hit or miss. So not always it is about hiding and misintepretation, but about common business practice to not be counted out. Of course this is more true in B2B than C2C.

    Kate Koltunova · 03/05/2014 at

    We usually call “a common business practice” the situation that is determined by the market power of suppliers and customers in every particular case. It might be true that customers are happy with the limited product information they are supplied. But if they need more there is a solution to increase their power joining in the alliance. GPO (group purchasing organization) that are so common for example in US in some industries like medicine is a good example how customers could change the common practice using the power of collective procurement.

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