Someone who reviews various brands of watches including Casio mentioned, in a recent review of a G-Shock, a change which had been made in the watch. He said that he had urged this change in an earlier review. And he concluded that Casio were paying attention to his reviews and that this change in the watch was because of him.
This is one of many people who review G-Shocks as a full- or part-time job, part-time in his case. How many people? I have no idea, but it seems the number must be pretty huge. There are those like this fellow, who write blogs or present vlogs about watches, including G-Shocks and others. Some review G-Shocks and other electronic devices. Some are runners and review the G-Shocks made for runners. Some are divers and review the G-Shocks made for divers. Some are hikers, some are hunters, some write columns for men's magazines, etc, etc.
But even if we exclude all of the above and concentrate only on those who concentrate entirely on G-Shocks, and only those who do it full-time and have much larger audiences than this guy, there are so many blogs and vlogs that I couldn't begin to even skim all of the new posts from all of them.
And that's counting only the reviews in English. And without having gone the slightest bit out of my way to find non-English blog and vlog posts about G-Shocks, in just 3 months' time, the Great Algorithm has shown me posts in Japanese, Chinese, Indonesian, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Thai and Spanish.
And looking at things from Casio's point of view, I see no reason to assume that the English-speaking market is the most important one to them. It might be number 3, after Japanese and Chinese. And besides the significant languages of Casio's exports already named, let us not forget Hindi, Arabic, Russian and Portugese in markets which must be pretty huge. Before we get to who knows how many smaller markets. (Not me, is who. I tried hard to find out. This time I failed. Sorry. But surely a lot.)
And the fascination of G-Shocks, which would lead quite naturally to the impulse to blog or vlog about them, does seem to be quite universal.
My points? That it seems to me that the reviewer mentioned above has no way of knowing that he was the only one who thought of this particular improvement; that, given that probably more than 10 million G-Shocks are sold per year and given the high degree of involvement on the part of G-Shock owners, it seems unlikely that no-one would've independently had the same idea; and that Casio could've gotten the idea from all sorts of sources other than this reviewer.
In fact, Casio might not have gotten the idea from ANY blogger or vlogger. They do have employees working on things such as improvements to existing products. Presumably as least some of those employees do things other than reading blogs and watching vlogs, hoping to come across good suggestions.
In short, I think this guy is being silly. If I happened to know him personally, and he said in my presence that Casio were reading his blog and taking design suggestions from him, I would quickly excuse myself and run away as fast as I could, hoping to be out of earshot before bursting into laughter. Because I don't want to be mean.
If I did want to be mean, I would still run away, and not come back until I had calmed down, and then gesture for the guy to step aside with me, and mutter into his ear, "What you're doing here, coming up with improvements which Casio puts into place on G-Shocks? That's a job description. You're a design consultant. Do you have any idea how much money Casio makes with G-Shocks? And they're using you as an unpaid design consultant? It's not right, buddy. They should be paying you a salary. It's only right, what with you being a significant cog in the machine now. What I would do is, I would contact Casio -- no. I would hire an attorney and have him get in touch with Casio, and demand that you get a fair slice. It's only right."
It's a good thing I'm not mean.
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