A while back, I wrote about how marketing was usually a part of what makes a product good – and if something doesn’t sell well, chances are it wasn’t actually that good in the first place. This is extremely true for not-quite-ready-for-prime-time things like the electric car and the Apple Newton and other high-profile failures.

Ever since then, every time I’ve written about the profitability of a particular movie or product, I’ve gotten a comment along the lines of, “How does the success of this terrible movie/the failure of this good thing line up with your talk about marketing being a part of goodness?” So I thought I’d clarify.

First off, let’s get something clear:

Fans of any given thing are almost incapable of seeing the external flaws in that thing.

…Which is not to say that fans don’t bitch. Fans will complain endlessly that Band X’s latest album isn’t as good as Band X’s best album. That’s what fans do.

But a fan rarely sits down and says, “You know, despite the fact that this is their best CD ever, it’s still trippy prog-rock that’s remarkably puerile and hard to listen to.” And you’ll never hear a rabid fan of some marginal technology go, “Wow, this damn thing is so hard to use, I wonder why anyone even bothers.”

Fact is, most fans fall firmly into at least one of two camps:

The very thing that makes this item bad for most people is exactly what they love (overly-convoluted plotlines, unbelievable characters, endless tweedling and riffing on guitars), or;

They’re so in love with the good stuff that they’ll ignore all the bad stuff because OMG, CAN’T YOU SEE THE GOODNESS?

Hence, when someone tells you how utterly awesome something is, chances are good that they’re under its spell. The folks who loved the idea of the Newton would tell you endlessly how the handwriting recognition wasn’t that bad, and the OS was so elegant, and it wasn’t that expensive when you thought about all the benefits it brought.

Truth is, it was that bad. But they were so in love with the idea of a computerized pocket planner that they were willing to overlook its numerous flaws. Worse, they thought that everyone shared their inclination to crawl through hellfire and broken glass to have this techno-hardon.

Most people, however, don’t want to endure a product to get to its goodness. But rabid fans will, and do. You hear it all the time:

“If you get through the first season, you’ll see how amazing this really is!”

“You need to listen to this album a couple of times to really appreciate it.”

“The flaws really aren’t that bad.”

The fan logic generally goes, “This sandwich is made out of two halves of a bum’s shoe leather slapped around some peanut butter and jelly. But the peanut butter and jelly is absolutely delicious, and the shoe leather isn’t as bad as you’d think!” Which brings up the ever-wise quote: “You know, if you muscle past the gag reflex, all sorts of food possibilities open up to you.”

Plus, as I’ve mentioned before, products often fail to serve the needs they’re really supposed to. What something does may sound amazing on the surface, but actually if you look at what it does, it’s not as useful as the hype would have you believe.

Hence, I tend to be skeptical. If the Newton was as good as they claimed, why wouldn’t more people have bought it? If WebTV was as easy as its adherents said, why wouldn’t it have been a massive hit? Generally, if a product is easy to use and fulfills an actual need, it’ll sell. It’s not like the American public is against convenience.

Which leads into my second adage:

If it was a failure, chances are it wasn’t that good.

Which is to say that if “Golden Compass” was a really awesome movie, it’s unlikely that its box-office take would have dropped 66% (far more than the average of 40%) in its second week. I tend to think that if a movie was really satisfying, it’d retain its fans.

Now, there are a couple of correlaries to that. The first is that you can’t determine “failure” right away (except with techno-toys, which degrade quickly). The Princess Bride, Spinal Tap, and Office Space were all initial failures… But in the course of time, word of mouth got around as people went, “Hey, you really oughtta see this.”

Sometimes, it takes years for a film to acquire a sheen of goodness. Wizard of Oz certainly struggled along for almost two decades until annual TV showings made it a classic. But it rose to the top.

This is not to say that every good movie gets word-of-mouth and becomes a classic, nor that every classic movie is good. But as a rule of thumb, if there’s some forgotten film from 1972 that nobody’s heard of by now, there’s one of two options:

1) It’s an amazing classic that, despite the ability to watch it on TV endlessly, no one has appreciated, or:

2) A bad film.

I’m simply arguing that #2 is far more likely than #1. (And again, if people are Big Fans, they’ll consistently overlook a thing’s glaring flaws in favor of the good stuff in the middle.)

A failure in the short run indicates that it’s probably bad, though it could just be misinterpreted. A failure after twenty years almost certainly indicates crap. (And by that, I mean failure – we’re not talking “Criterion’s releasing an edition,” I mean, “You can find it on a 99-cent DVD.” But see my next section on “good.”)

But let’s also define terms, since “good” is kind of a lightning rod:

For the purposes of this rule, “good” means that it satisfies the needs of the people who use it, and “successful” is defined as “the percentage of people who would be satisfied by that thing who purchase it and like it.”

Here’s a trick question for you: Why do you watch movies?

Me? I watch them to have my assumptions questioned. I like movies that play with moral ambiguity, that leave me wondering, that have me on edge because I don’t know what will happen next.

I am not your average movie-goer.

In fact, I’m in the minority. Most people go to movies for two hours to forget about their troubles and to see a story where good guys are good, bad guys are bad, and everything turns out okay in the end.

The needs that would satisfy me are not generally the needs that would satisfy the general public. To me, a movie like Transformers is okay… But for most folks, “mindless robot-smashin’” is exactly what they want on a hot summer evening.

Whereas “No Country For Old Men” is one of my favorite movies this year. It hasn’t earned a fifth of what “Transformers” did. So is “No Country” a flop?

Nope.

In terms of the audience it could reasonably expect to get, both movies have done well. For a movie designed to appeal to cinema nuts, $33 million is a phenomenal number – especially given that it has no Oscar nominations. That to me indicates that “No Country For Old Men” is probably at least worth seeing, whereas something aimed at roughly the same market that flopped (like “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” or “The Martian Child”) probably isn’t that great.

You have to take into account the audience when you’re accounting for success. The most successful Jazz album still won’t outsell the best-selling Rap CD (unless it’s a really terrible week). But that doesn’t mean that Jazz is worse than rap – merely that it appeals to a different audience that has different needs.

Now that’s tricky, because of fan mentality. Based on my past askings of “What music should I listen to, given that I like X and hate Y?”, fans are almost invariably incapable of separating their tastes from the tastes of others. Whenever I say, “I fucking hate prog rock, but give me a suggestion as to what I should buy on iTunes,” people go, “You know what you’d like? Coheed and Cambria. Because I like them, and therefore you will!”

“Good” does not equal “quality.” “Good” means that it serves whatever need someone’s looking for, which is entirely different. McDonald’s serves the need for cheap, reliable food, but it’s definitely not gourmet.

There are all sorts of niche markets. But my rule is this:

Whatever’s on top in that niche market is generally the most likely to be satisfying.

It gets split sometimes, but let’s take a really niche market: Wes Anderson movies. Wes Anderson’s a really niche director, creating sad movies that I adore. And I’d be willing to say that his best-selling movie is (adjusted for inflation and DVD sales) is most likely to be his most satisfying movie.

Likewise, the prog rock scene? Don’t follow it. But if you look at the top-selling prog rock bands, in terms of making prog rock people happy overall, the best one is likely to be at the top of the charts.

Is that an iron-clad rule? Absolutely not. There may be some crazy band somewhere that never got traction; I don’t assume a perfect market that raises the best to the top by default. But I am saying that if they are on top, chances are good that they’re servicing whatever need that segment of the industry needs, even if you don’t understand why.

I hate romantic comedies. But I’m betting that the best-selling romantic comedies are the ones that satisfy the ones who do like them, as well as probably some splash damage in satisfying a handful of people who don’t like romantic comedies. And so forth.

It gets tricky sometimes when there’s no market. I like weird music – Zappa and They Might Be Giants and so forth. They’re all unique, and thus there’s no umbrella of “weird fucking music” I can turn to. Sometimes, your tastes are so unfulfillable that there’s no way of grouping it properly.

But in general, all I’m saying is that the best-selling items are most likely to give the people the experience they want. That experience may be the complete opposite of what you want. It may even be an experience you don’t want other people to have.

But there you have it. My take. We'll see how well it satisfies.