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Competition has gotten unusually fierce in the last decade. It seems like we’re all working harder. I know that price pressures have never been stronger, as Wal-mart chases Mom and Pop’s out of business because they can’t compete on price. But it seems to me that the focus on price has left a casualty and a marketing opportunity.

This came to me the other day as I struggled for the 40th time to fix the picture on my TV. When I built my house, I paid extra for a subcontractor to pre-wire it so I could easily hang an LCD TV on the wall. (I thought that was pretty smart of me, considering I didn’t own one and couldn’t afford one at the time.) The builder, Toll Brothers, subcontracted to a company called LifeStyle Technologies. They were growing really quickly at the time, and had the contract to wire all 1,400 houses in my rapidly growing subdivision. What a deal, right?

Now, three years later, I’m crawling under my house trying to find the reason my picture is all wavy. As I follow the wiring, I notice this written on it: “Low voltage computer cable.” Low voltage computer cable? It was supposed to be component video cable, the stuff in the picture above. That’s all I needed.

LifeStyle Technologies used cheap stuff to save a couple of bucks. Now that I have to replace it, I see that 100 feet of what I need is only $73.00. I paid exactly 10 times that for the wiring. So what could they have saved by ripping me off with cheap cable, $20? 2.7% of what I paid them for the TV wiring alone?

Guess what? LifeStyle Technologies went from one of the hottest companies around 4 years ago to being out of business today. I guess that’s because the cut corners.

The BEST marketing strategy is word of mouth. Apparently, enough people spoke badly about LifeStyle’s practices to chase them out of business. I’ll be crawling under my house this weekend to wall-fish replacement cables.

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