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Panning the Blog
12/30/2003

To be honest, I'm not as surprised as some that pan blogging attracted so much interest. It's a topic that's interesting almost in spite of itself — if the right angle is taken.

Fritz Schranck likens the discussion to manly discourse about tools. He goes on to offer such a discourse on the relevant attributes of various pans. For my part, although I use pans pretty much daily, I'm not a picky cooker — much as I'm not a picky tool user. Whatever comes my way and works, essentially.

What I found fascinating about the pan question wasn't the cookware itself, but the processes behind the facts that are observable to the customer. Companies tend to prefer to avoid guesswork, which means that there is research and debate behind every decision. If there's a $70 price gap between two items that aren't clearly differentiated, you can be pretty certain that a group of executives sat around a table, at some point, and batted around various considerations. Furthermore, to inform their discussion and, subsequently, to enact their decisions, employees further down the ladder spent their workdays on various matters ultimately resulting in this marketing mystery.

In our specific case, not only does the fact of purpose present us with a brainteaser of sorts, but the nature of our more-usual discussions on politics, religion, and other weighty matters can be exercised and displayed in the application of our thinking to an entirely separate, relatively mundane matter. Me, I just like to think. In my reactions to others, I often find it enlightening when they discuss matters with which I am familiar in my daily life. What input would Peter Jennings be able to offer in the pan debate? Who knows. But whatever he had to say (if he would discard his image long enough to comment) would surely tell his viewers something that isn't as immediately discernible amidst his usual content.

Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:55 PM EST