Because Big Adam says so ...

The bargaining for Christmas presents has started early in the Wrighthousehold. For the first time ever, the games console is playing a majorrole

For parents up and down the country this is not likely to be received as earth-shattering news. Console envy is a common enough affliction among little boys. What does surprise me, however, is how a pecking order among the machines on offer has already been established in my boy's mind. He may not be able to tie his shoe laces or keep his mouth closed when he's eating, but he sure knows what's in and what's out in the games console market.

The bad news for Sega is that the Saturn wins the wooden spoon in the race to become cool console. So naff is the Saturn deemed to be by his peers, that my son would rather throw in the whole idea of a games machine for Xmas and opt for the mountain bike instead, rather than go through life labelled as a Saturn owner.

In fact, only the Playstation and the Nintendo 64 are deemed to be acceptable offerings. Megadrive, SNES or Game Boy are considered too childish. Jaguar and 3DO are complete unknowns, and therefore useless when it comes to gathering street cred points come Boxing Day.

Quite how the Saturn came to be a paragon of naffness in such a short space of time is, I think, a lesson for retailers about the fickleness of the general public and the mysterious way products shift in and out of fashion .

Ask my son why he hates the Saturn, and you will get these standard answers: "It's boring ... the games are crap ... the Playstation is much cooler ...

Big Adam says it's rubbish and he's getting a Nintendokoki7unrf 64."

Notice how easily the more empirical value judgements made here can be refuted: the Saturn is no more boring than any other console; some of the games are actually pretty good, and better than their peers on the Playstation. Notice, too, though, how difficult it is to counter the accusation that the Playstation is cooler, or that Big Adam's opinion is to be discounted.

We're living in a retailing world here where technical features and value for money take a back seat to kudos and style. Forget whether a thing is well built or well supported. Just ask will this product impress the customers' friends.

In this regard, Sony has to receive credit for the extremely smart way it wooed so-called opinion formers and style gurus during the launch period of the Playstation. The Playstation was seen at all the coolest places - groovy nightclubs, celeb parties, Glastonbury. And people who didn't like the Playstation were labelled as SAPS - bespectacled squares in suits.

In fact, the message was positively anti-computer. This was the machine for the rest of us (them), the normal people who had never thought of buying a home computer or a 16bit console because it was too nerdy.

Nerd. Anorak. Boffin. Propellor head. Tekkie. The advertising world has 1001 terms of abuse for the home computer enthusiast. Even that phrase - the home computer enthusiast - is hard to say without adopting a feint air of disdain and bewilderment, that anybody should be so sad as to devote their leisure hours to messing about with a PC.

Dedicated gamers, too, are generally portrayed as strange unsocialised creatures - spotty-faced boys usually - who sit in their bedrooms for hours developing unhealthy obsessions about guns, gothic horror and tekno music.

Normal people, it seems, don't have much time for computers or consoles.

Instead they watch TV, they drink beer down the pub, they go to the cinema; in short, they have a life ...

In its efforts to sell technology into the home, Sony has in fact embraced and encouraged all the above prejudices that have hampered the computer retail industry for so long. By doing so, it has shifted a lot of units.

But has it helped the overall credibility of the industry?

It really has been an uphill struggle to convince the general public that buying a computer doesn't automatically mark you down as someone slightly less interesting, likeable and cool than Jimmy Hill. And then along comes Sony reinforcing all the stereotypes and imposing a logic which states: "All computer owners are nerds. The Playstation is not really a computer. Congratulations! You are not a computer nerd."

A similar credibility gap is being built up in the internet market. Have you noticed the number of beer ads that have been dissing the web lately?

The message: "Stop staring at that screen and come down the pub with the lads, mate. Girls don't fancy net heads."

I can't help feeling that taking the piss out of some of your regular customers in order to impress another demographic group is a step backwards for the industry rather than a step forward.

As the little parable about my son suggests, for every "cool" Sony Playstation that you sell, there's a "naff" Saturn that you don't. And in the wider context, if the myth that computers are naff is continually supported by the industry that sells computers, people like me are going to buy mountain bikes for Christmas, not consoles.