Ultimate ebike brakes for Bafang!

Marketting isn't really about quality.

When people in large established corporations manufacture things they don't develop the product first, add up the costs, and then say 'we want X amount of profit' and use that as a multiplier to find the price of a object. Something like $50 dollars in parts, $25 dollars in labor... muptiply it by 1.30 for profit and you end up with a $100 product.

It's really customers that determine price, not manufacturers. It doesn't matter how much it costs to make or how good it is in reality. If customers are not willing to pay the price you need to make a profit then you simply are not going to make a profit.

So instead what they do is they do their best to figure out how much a customer is willing to pay for a product and then try to make that product that fits that price. The challenge for a engineer designing a product, then, is to figure out how to make it for that price point and still provide plenty of room for profit.

So if they figure that customers are willing to pay 150 dollars for brakes they'll make brakes for that much. If customers are willing to pay 500 dollar brakes then they'll make 500 dollar brakes.

If the manufacturer make something that is too expensive then won't be able to sell it. If they end up selling it for too cheap they won't maximize profits. So this pricing perspective is a very critical thing despite being so difficult to figure out.

And pricing preferences are a highly emotional thing for customers. They buy things that make them feel good about themselves. It's never ever going to be the case that a average person sits down and reverse engineers their bicycle brake system to figure out if it's a good value or not. They buy things to feel safe, or feel smart, or to impress their friends, etc. It's all emotional knee-jerk stuff.

Now if you are a bicycle mechanic or guy trying to sell bikes for a retail market then, yeah, you can and should take the time to figure out what is shit and what isn't. But the vast majority of people buying these things don't really have that skill set.

So it's the job of marketing to use propaganda to manipulate the perspective of customers so that they raise their pricing preferences. Which is what I was talking about in the previous post.

Personally I like Tektro brakes. I think they are decent quality and usually offer good value. But it's certainly unnecessary to spend 200 dollars or 300 dollars on a set of bicycle brakes for good performance or good quality.

/r/ebikes Thread Parent Link - biktrix.com