Why Won't James Dyson Explain How His New Fan Works? It's Driving Viewers Nuts!
By now, you've probably seen the TV ad for Dyson's new $300 bladeless fan. It's a piece of circular metal on a stand that somehow propels a smooth, continuous stream of air at you, unlike old-fashioned fans which cause a lot of "annoying buffeting." As James Dyson puts it:
Turn it off and you realize how unsettling it's been.It's hilarious that Dyson thinks being "unsettled" by an old fan is a unique selling proposition, but one bets against Dyson at one's peril: His super-expensive vacuum cleaners were a hit, too. The fan commercial, however, contains a frustrating flaw: The device contains no apparent moving parts and Dyson -- who appears in all his own ads -- doesn't explain how the seemingly inanimate object functions. Viewers are left to scream at the TV, "But how does it bloody work?!"
Turns out, this is not a small issue in Dyson's advertising; it's the entirety of Dyson's advertising. Although Dyson demands a hefty premium for his superior engineering, he resolutely refuses to explain in commercials how his gadgets work, even when their cleverness is the most interesting thing about them. Here's an old spot for his vacuum. We learn that it has "no bags, no clogged up filters," but not how a vacuum without a bag or filter could avoid spraying dust around your house.
I am not alone in this frustration. There's a charming YouTube video in which Dyson takes apart his new fan and describes exactly how it works. If you remember that old high-school physics lesson about how an airplane wing creates lift by creating an area of low pressure on its upper surface, the fan suddenly makes a whole lot of sense. It's basically a circular airplane wing that instead of flying through the air makes the air fly through it. Genius! And perfect for a TV ad!
But it's not a Dyson video. It was produced by the Daily Telegraph.
Dyson has no excuse: He knows we want to know how the fans work. There's a video of a balloon being pushed through a series of fans in Dyson's lab, produced by Dyson, which has gotten 708,438 views (but it doesn't explain how the fans work).
To give you an idea of how tone-deaf Dyson is to the level of consumer curiosity about his gadgets, the Telegraph's video has had 383,360 views on YouTube, whereas Dyson's TV ad garnered just 328 at the time of writing.
You've got to hand it to the company -- it's re-engineered passive-aggressiveness into a unique way of doing business.
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