[legitster]

I really appreciate when brands just name things like they are.

Nothing is less fun than cross-shopping products and there are a bunch of arbitrary brand differences. "Precisions are their portable workstations. Latitudes are their ultrabooks. Duh! XPS is their premium consumer laptop!".

Marketing departments tend to get addicted to the smell of their own farts. But I don't think consumers care about particular sub-brand names. We already saw this a decade ago in the automotive space where manufacturers ditched their unnecessary marquees (Pontiac, Mercury, Oldsmobile, Saturn). And I think we will see this trend continue into more industries (like hotel chains).

[lizknope]

Product names make no sense. Some web sites make a "product selection tool" where you answer a bunch of questions and it tries to direct you to models that will suit your needs.

I was recently buying a Seasonic power supply. What is the difference between Prime, Vertex, Focus, or Core series? Then there is Prime TX, Prime PX, Prime GX. I have no idea what all this is. I ended up just picking something in the 800W range with the modular power outputs that I needed.

[kwanbix]

I call it the Toothpaste Dilemma: When you go to buy toothpaste, like Colgate or most brands, you're bombarded with so many options. It gets worse when you read the labels—everything seems either identical or has massive overlaps. It's frustrating and unnecessarily complicated.

[JohnBooty]

When you see this, particularly on supermarket shelves, this is a deliberate attempt to crowd out other brands.

You're focusing on the micro ("WTF is each one of these ridiculous micro variations?") and not on the macro (Colgate is absolutely dominating that aisle, and fully 75% of the toothpaste choices are Colgate while Crest and Aquafresh fight over the scraps)

    It's frustrating and unnecessarily complicated.

This is also by design, more or less. If you give up and "just grab one" you're pretty likely to pick a Colgate, since that represents 75% of the options available and it's also one of the oldest and therefore most "trusted" brands. You can't exactly go wrong with a Colgate, right?

Of course some people will rebel, and say "screw Colgate" and pick some other brand, and some people will just literally pick the cheapest option no matter what.

But again, if I'm Colgate or whatever their parent company? I absolutely love the way that toothpaste aisle looks. 75% of it is Colgate Red and I bet the sales figures hew pretty closely to that.

[kwanbix]

I imagine it works if they are still doing it, but I think is worst. As soon as a brand comes with simpler naming, it can steal your customers.

[rs999gti]

> I call it the Toothpaste Dilemma

It's called Tyranny of Choice - https://longevity.stanford.edu/the-tyranny-of-choice/

> Too many options can decrease the likelihood of making any decision at all

[kwanbix]

Good to know, thanks! :)

[legitster]

I legit use the term "Toothpaste Shopping" to describe any miserably complex shopping experience.

(Although ironically, toothpaste shopping is quite easy once you know the correct answer is "the cheapest brand at the store that has fluoride in it")

[extraduder_ire]

Unless you're looking for some other feature. Once I learned what novamin was, I started getting a toothpaste with that in it. I think only two such brands exist.

[cam_l]

>everything seems either identical or has massive overlaps

Whenever I find marketing copy like this, I use it to filter out the whole company's product lines. This heuristic never fails, because I don't even know what I am missing out on.

[yndoendo]

This is dependent on your filter.

I try not to buy big brand / mega corporate products. No Colgate or Crest and both own a number of the less known brands, those are out. This leads to only one or two options to choose from.

This is why I look at products manufacture not just their name.

I would really like website like https://isitbigbeer.com/ to help filter out all products and brands that hide behind multi-naming schemas.

[chrismcb]

Toothpaste shopping is easy. I pick the one brand that has a convenient non tube toothpaste (actually there are two, but I didn't like the taste of one) I thing I didn't understand is there are only about 6 of the non tube options and 1000 of the tubes. Do people really like to roll their toothpaste out of a tube?

[ChiefNotAClue]

Seasonic's product lines are relatively simple to figure out. They haven't changed in years, except with the addition of the Vertex line. At the very least, they're easier to understand than other power supply manufacturers.

Product Lines: Core (Budget) < Focus (Mid) < Vertex (Mid-High) < Prime (High), in terms of quality and features.

80Plus Efficiency: GX (Gold) < PX (Platinum) < TX (Titanium)

This is true across all of their product lines.

[imiric]

> Product names make no sense.

Why should they? Every company has different priorities, and it's on you as a consumer to get familiar with each company's product line before making a purchase.

Would you prefer it if all products were named "<company name> <thing>"? So in your PSU example, "Seasonic PSU"? Of course not, you would like to have more detail than that. So how about "Seasonic PSU 800W modular"? OK, that's better, but what if other consumers are interested in different product criteria? Should we just cram them all in the product name like sellers on Amazon do? That wouldn't be right either. So the best approach then is to segment your product line according to some criteria, and give different segments arbitrary names. This way customers can know what to expect, and which segment to focus on. It's important to keep this consistent, otherwise it leads to confusion, but in general it works fine IMO. I would rather have to choose between Seasonic Prime TX, Prime PX, etc., than Seasonic Pro, Pro Max, etc.

[vel0city]

That's the thing though. I don't really want to have to know whether the Seasonic Prime PX is the same tier as the Corsair RM or the RMx or the RMe or the HX. None of those names gives me any indication of what the product actually is, and from a quick glance the letters don't seem to even directly stand for any particular feature.

Its one thing to have say a Seasonic 800M versus just the Seasonic 800 and know the "m" means its modular. What does it even mean for it to be PRIME TX versus a FOCUS GX or GM or then suddenly dropping the noun part and going straight to G12 and B12.

There are 8 different PRIME models with 25 SKUs in the PRIME model family looking at their site right now. And that's just one family of power supplies for one brand! There's another 11 Vertex SKUs, 33 FOCUS SKUs, 15 CORE SKUs. Why on earth would I care to get decoder rings for several different brands to cross shop?

[imiric]

> Why on earth would I care to get decoder rings for several different brands to cross shop?

Because products usually can't be compared spec-to-spec anyway. So even if you had to choose between Seasonic 800M and Corsair 800M, which might coincide on these specific criteria, how one company describes their product doesn't translate to how another company does. None of it would tell you which is the better product for you, which is ultimately what you want to know.

Consider CPU clock speeds, for example. The industry moved on from advertising MHz and GHz since they're not good indicators of performance. Consumers should also be aware of core count and types, cache size, power consumption, etc. Yet even if manufacturers embedded all of this information in their product names, CPUs from different manufacturers still wouldn't be comparable. So companies do their best to identify product lines internally, and give them somewhat consistent names.

I'm not saying that companies do a good job at this—most, in fact, make a mess out of it—, but I find that preferable to having obscure names like "Pro", "Plus", "Max", etc. with claims that it's simpler, when it's actually even more confusing than before.

[chrismcb]

Why is tx and px better than pro and pro Max? Typically pro Max is going to offer you more or better than what pro does. So pro Max tells me that it is probably better than pro (without designing what "better"is) but TX and PX which one is "better" and you can't always go by the price.

[dagw]

In this particular case TX and PX are referring to PSUs complying with certain third party certifications, and have a specific quantifiable meaning. So in this case Tx is always "better" (or at least not worse) than Px in a very specific sense.

[numpad0]

Often it's abstraction leakage. Prime and Core coukd be coming from different outsourced design teams. TX and GX could be different base design within same OEM. Or supplieed through same middlemen hence carrying same brands. Or each of groups meet certain internal criteria. Whatever.

Customers prefer segmentation by end result rather than by implementation details, and so corporate marketing divisions sometimes try that and group products by features it offers, but that often drive-by ruins product quality.

[yread]

Another variant of this is the washing machine nonsense:

Bosch WGG244ZANL

Which btw is a Series 6 machine (note the missing 6 in the type name)!

[cbsks]

That model number is actually super informative.

You have a washing machine, energy efficient, from 2021, model 24, 1200rpm spin speed, from the Netherlands.

https://splaitor.com/bosch-washing-machine-model-number-deco...

That doesn’t help compare it to other manufacturers, but it’s easy to compare to other Bosch washing machines.

[yread]

Strange, local shops show it as 1400rpm

[JohnBooty]

    Marketing departments tend to get addicted to the 
    smell of their own farts.

That's not necessarily why they do it.

    Pontiac, Mercury, Oldsmobile, Saturn

So part of the reason they do it is simply to flood the market. Imagine a world where GM has Saturn, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Geo, Chevy, GMC, etc. And Ford just has... Ford.

To a casual, who doesn't know or care that six of those brands are just GM nameplates, they just see seven options for a sedan. And if I'm GM, I certainly like the odds that they'll pick a GM even though I'm essentially just designing one or two sedans and then advertising them six different ways.

A simpler example (that somebody else mentioned down below) is toothpaste. There are like, ten different varieties of Colgate on the shelf. The point isn't that they expect me the consumer to know or care about the differences, or that they are so "addicted to the smell of their own farts" that they think there's a meaningful difference between brands of Colgate.

The point is that they want to consume shelf space, crowd other brands out, and send the message that they are the default, safe choice for toothpaste. We can say that's dumb, but I suspect the sales figures would tell us they're having some success with that.

[imiric]

> I really appreciate when brands just name things like they are.

Sure, but I find this branding even more confusing.

"Dude, you're getting a Dell!"

"Oh, neat! Is it a PC or laptop?"

"It's a Dell Pro... laptop."

"..."

At least with XPS, Latitude, etc., consumers were able to easily distinguish between models, after getting familiar with the product line. Naming all products "<company name> [Pro,Pro Max]" will always be clear as mud. Not to mention that "Pro Max Premium Plus Ultra" is dumb, in that Apple way. Apple is notorious for naming all their products the same, so consumers have to use launch years to distinguish them.

[legitster]

If you find this branding more confusing, then you are probably not familiar with laptop shopping in this segment.

Here are all of the 2024 models available: Latitude 9450, Latitude 7350, Latitude 7350 Ultralight, Latitude 7350 Detachable, Latitude 7455, Latitude 7450, Latitude 7450 Ultralight, Latitude 7650, Latitude 5550, Latitude 5455, Latitude 5450, Latitude 5350, Latitude 3450, Latitude 3550.

You have to memorize what you are looking at - the first digit is the model line, the second digit is a reference to the screen size, and the last set of digits a reference to the model year.

So "Dell Latitude 5450" conveys all the same information as "2024 Dell Pro 14" Plus". I'm not sure what's controversial about that change.

[imiric]

I'm not a Dell customer, so I'm not familiar with their product lines, but from what you say "Dell Latitude 5450" is indeed clearer to me than "2024 Dell Pro 14" Plus". I can get familiar with the number scheme and infer that higher numbers indicate better performance, larger screen, etc. "Pro" and "Plus" will always be meaningless and arbitrary.

[vel0city]

> infer that higher numbers indicate better performance

But bigger numbers don't always indicate better performance. A Dell Latitude 6420 (a Sandy Bridge) is much slower than a 5420. Same with a 7320 versus a 5440.

[imiric]

Then that's a confusion the manufacturer should address. Consistency and clarity is key. But it's not solved by scrapping all of it in favor of "Plus", "Pro" and "Max".

[vel0city]

Here's four potential model numbers/names.

Latitude 6420

Latitude 5540

Inspiron 5555

2011 Dell Pro 14"

2024 Dell Pro 15"

2024 Dell Pro Max 15"

Which ones are the recent bigger laptops? Which is the older smaller laptop? Which is better, Inspiron or Latitude? Which is better, the Dell Pro or the Dell Pro Max? Which naming scheme makes these things way more obvious?

[numpad0]

> Consistency and clarity is key

For manufacturing, yes, absolutely not for marketing.

"Dell 2024 Super Max Pro Ultra Plus New Premium" is objectively better for confusing customers and tricking them into purchasing products sold at higher price and worse value proposition.

[Ferret7446]

I think those kinds of model numbers are fine, as long as it's prominently explained somewhere and I don't have to chase down some forum post from a few years ago because the company can't be bothered to explain its own products to its customers.

[vel0city]

> consumers were able to easily distinguish between models

I don't think I could ever remember which of the Inspiron or Latitude lines were supposed to be higher end without looking at the magazine and seeing the prices. I just kind of assumed "Precision" meant their high-end workstations. And I'm someone who fawned over computers and gadgets my whole life.

[karmakaze]

Yeah you know it's bad when "Laptop" literally has to be in the proper name, e.g. "Microsoft Surface Laptop Go" because the "Microsoft Surface Go" is a tablet computer line before the successful branding got applied to regular laptops.

The worst I saw was single-use coffee packets for the hotel room coffee machine that comes in regular and decaf (with brown or green color stripes to distinguish them)... except the green is regular and brown is decaf.

[xnx]

Apple has its share of naming problems but not attempting to artificially split their laptop product line between consumer and "enterprise" is something they should get credit for.

[legitster]

One half of their product line literally has "Professional" in the name.

[lotsofpulp]

But the quality of components in an Air versus a Pro is presumed to be the same, just the specs are different. So all you are doing is shopping for the screen size, screen type, storage size, RAM, weight, etc that you need/want.

Whereas, with a Dell or HP, I would have to figure out which models are going to be built with cheaper materials that will wear out or have a higher chance of breaking.

[spogbiper]

naming aside, Dell (and other PC manufacturers) split enterprise from consumer for a number of reasons that make sense to me. the two markets have different requirements. enterprise needs a different OS license for one. Buying a fleet of X hundred or thousand devices vs one PC introduces concerns and requirements that home users just don't have and shouldn't pay for imho.

[pc86]

I mean they do have "Air" and "Pro" monikers for the laptops, as well as a page dedicated to helping you choose which one to get - https://www.apple.com/mac/best-mac/ - so they're not using "consumer" or "enterprise" but it's still there.

[chrislongss]

With one caveat - Air is very popular in the enterprise world. It's just so much lighter! And powerful enough to handle the vast majority of non-eng tasks.

[xnx]

Right, but Apple's naming does seem to differentiate between real hardware differences vs. artificial software ones (e.g. how much crapware is preloaded).

[ghaff]

Well, except it's thinnest and bigger (with probably more ports though probably still not enough).

[tim333]

I kind of like the way Apple does it - when the M1 came out you could get the air or the pro and that was it. And the difference was simple - basically the pro was chunkier with a fan and a bit faster. With Dell I'd have no idea which one to get and what was good.

[Lio]

I think problem is not so much having named product lines but having too many overlapping product lines.

Having loads of random product numbers is really no better than named ranges.

If you only have 3 product lines then people will learn the names and can understand the differences when shopping.