A Snapshot of Today's Boardroom Meetings for Products

Suit 1: "The product will need to include 3 differentiating, stunning, and game-changing features that trump all other brands in order to increase sales and customer conversion rates!"

Suit 2: "But those features are going to cost a lot of money. We don't have that kind of budget."

Suit 1: "Ahhhh HA! Let me introduce you to Suit 3! He's drawn up a model I think you'll find quite appealing!"

Suit 3: "..."

Suit 2: "Cat got your tongue?! How are you going to profit off of manufacturing something that costs US more but sells for the same price?"

Suit 3: "...Simple. Engineer 2 of the "3 differentiating, stunning, and game-changing features that trump all other brands" in such a way that they have a 90% or higher chance of breaking within the first year or two and, in some cases, fluctuate between working and not working every 24 hours."

Suit 1: (shifts eyes to Suit 2) "...?"

Suit 2: "Products engineered in such a way that they are designed to break, eh?...(Stephen Hawking says mankind has at least 1000 years before it goes extinct, so resources won't be a problem. This would mean that our customers would inevitably be forced into a holding pattern of buying replacement products every year or 2, FOREVER!)...Suit 1, I like this guy. Suit 3. Impress me."

Suit 3: "I'm most happy to accomodate! Included with all of our products will be a leasing program..."

Suit 2: "I SEE where you're going! YES! Our customers will pay us to renew OUR products every 2 years, never reaching the point of actually owning the product themselves due to the planned obsolescence's exponentially downward-pointing curve being steeper than the steady path of the term of the lease, and given that they can gain access to this holding pattern even easier by pulling a good ole' bait & switch on them, preying on their impulse threshold by pricing entry into the leasing program within a barely-affordable range that truthfully is above our average customers' budget which we'll accommodate by stretching the term of the lease as long as humanly possible!

Suit 1: "This will, in turn, make their endless monthly lease payments seem like chump change, even to the most impoverished of our target market!"

Suit 3: "Our customers will actually end up feeling like they just got a DEAL when, in fact, they were legally...robbed. :) "

Suit 1: "PRECISELY! Why should these NUMBERS...er...*ahem* CUSTOMER'S own any of OUR stuff?! After all, it was OUR BUSINESS that paid all those SLAVES...er...*ahem* MANUFACTURERS to make our products! Why give away something WE paid for with our HARD-EARNED MONEY?!"

Suit 3: "Traditionally, businesses always just kept the money, but with this model, we keep our customers' money AND the very product they feel like they own."

Suit 2: "But it's too simple! It'll put a bad taste in our customers' mouths once they obviously catch on. You can't sell someone something and NOT GIVE THEM OWNERSHIP OF IT!"

Suit 1: "They won't catch on."

Suit 2: "What makes you think that?!! Do you take everyone for a FOOL?!"

Suit 3: "Classified studies we've obtained through Freedom of Information Requests prove that when you place anything that your standard citizen CAN'T afford IN THEIR HANDS, giving them the illusion of ownership by allowing them to do whatever they want with it, and they'll give you their hard-earned money for that illusory, vicariously-experienced ownership quicker than a dog to a steak dropped on the kitchen floor! BaBOOM!"

Suit 1: (shifts eyes to Suit 2) "...?"

Suit 2: "...?...?...?............well I'M LISTENING AREN'T I?! GO ON, BOYS AND GIRLS!!!"

Suit 1: "Suit 3...the last point."

Suit 3: "We've run a costly trial, filtering all of our "this-conversation-may-be-recorded-for-training-purposes" recorded conversations with our customers through advanced personality-determining algorithms and have discovered that our technologically developed and thus isolated average customer's daily sense of loneliness is far greater than their sense of frustration with our products having irreplaceable, addictive features that rarely work correctly.

Suit 1: "This leads them to spend 100's of hours each year on the phone with one of our customer service reps, thus alleviating their sense of loneliness, albeit painfully, which, amazingly, actually increases the reward-evoking dopamine levels in their brains in impressively larger, quarterly quantities."

Suit 3: "In short: Our customer's will be addicted to giving us money for nothing, save a small budget we've set aside for shrinkwrap, but exorbitant interest rates on top of lease payments will more than cover that."

Suit 2: "And I just happen to LOVE SHRINKWRAP! Suit 1, speaking of which, remind to tell you that bubble wrap story about the one-eyed broad in Vegas later... I'm giving you a raise, and please hire Suit 3 on your way out, by end of day. We're going to do a DEEP-DIVE on this EXCITING DEVELOPMENT first thing tomorrow!"