Don't Buy iPods Because They're Not Korean

Apparently Korean producers of digital music players are beating a patriotic drum to encourage people Korean brands rather than the iPod.

First, to take the companies' side. Let's say your a Korean company. You know some Koreans might by the argument that they should buy locally to fend off the latest affront of those damn imperialists. If I were a Korean company and thought that would work and increase my sales, I'd do the same thing. That's the joy of a free market economy: companies can do whatever they want to if they can trick some unthinking consumers to make a few purchases. And that includes pretending there's some fuzzy nationalistic advantage to buying domestic at a higher price and/or lesser quality.

Then there's the obvious other side... buying because of the country of origin - as opposed to product quality - lets domestic producers sit more complacently with inferior products rather than stepping up to the plate and really competing with the threatening companies.

Let's not kid ourselves here though... Korea's not the only one to have companies jump on the nationalism boat to boost flagging sales. In particular, this sounds a heckuva lot like U.S. automakers' reaction to Japanese imports. U.S. automakers eventually decided to get down to business.

In the end though I question how effective this will be. Even in this era of Republican-induced hyper-patriotism, if you started flying the flag and telling American kids to buy Xbox instead of Playstation 2, how effective do you think that would be? I doubt it'll be much more effective in Korea.