Random doesn’t mean uniformly random. As long as there’s some randomness, and people are more likely to stick with products which worked for them before, we expect drift toward the new design.
Marketing is important for any particular decision, but usually we wouldn’t expect one mousetrap design to have an inherent relative advantage in marketing over another; the marketing-relevant aspects are mostly orthogonal to the mouse-catching aspects. An incumbent company probably has a marketing advantage, but in the long run incumbent companies will adopt the new design, if they find that it sells slightly better.
With doors, the problem is quite different, because the person deciding what kind of door to install is often not the end consumer—especially for commercial properties—so the adopt-what-works force isn’t there.
Two things:
Random doesn’t mean uniformly random. As long as there’s some randomness, and people are more likely to stick with products which worked for them before, we expect drift toward the new design.
Marketing is important for any particular decision, but usually we wouldn’t expect one mousetrap design to have an inherent relative advantage in marketing over another; the marketing-relevant aspects are mostly orthogonal to the mouse-catching aspects. An incumbent company probably has a marketing advantage, but in the long run incumbent companies will adopt the new design, if they find that it sells slightly better.
With doors, the problem is quite different, because the person deciding what kind of door to install is often not the end consumer—especially for commercial properties—so the adopt-what-works force isn’t there.