The real quote ascribed to Henry Ford in 1911 when he was selling Model T Fords was “you can order any colour you want as long its black”. Can you believe the audacity of the man? Telling his purchasing audience that he would dictate not only the price you paid but the color you got! Henry Ford was a veritable gold mine of quotable quotes. One of my favorites is “if I asked the buying public what they wanted, they probably would have said a faster horse”. Reminds me a little of Steve Jobs talking about his new mobile phone some years ago. He said “Sometimes you have to show people what they want.” Often true with a new, innovative product.
Ford wouldn’t have lasted two minutes in today’s world. Now we are offered a veritable rainbow of colors for everything we buy. Go to a paint store and look at the color swatch book. It’s bigger than most wallpaper sample books. Every product has a dazzling choice of color, customized for your individual taste. Contact lenses for your eyes come in different colors. The cosmetics counter at most department stores is bigger than our house.
So everybody is pampered with a vast array of products, custom colored and designed to blend or compliment your unique requirements. Except for hearing aids. Every hearing aid manufactured in the world today, by not a few but every manufacturer in existence, has the same reflective, plastic, shiny, white-ish tube. No exceptions. Actually these are hardly noticeable if your ear happens to be made of shiny white-ish reflective plastic.
Remember Yogi Berra, the great baseball catcher that was fondly remembered for his mangled metaphors? He might have said “Yeh, this hearing aid thing is just like Henry Ford and his Model T’s, its déjà vu all over again!”
Just in the nick of time, VANISH came along and rescued the hearing assisted public with a choice of colors designed to camouflage the BTE hearing aid transmission tubes. I’ll bet even Henry would be happy with that!
Thanks for your attention! And best regards,
Al Musser, founder of VANISH