Phonak has cranked up its PR engine for the launch of the snazzy new Audeo hearing aid family, scoring a beautiful piece in BusinessWeek magazine on the wonders of its expensive new digital hearing aids with their jazzy colors and names. BusinessWeek gives Phonak CEO Valentin Chapero a bully pulpit to promote his company’s strong financial performance and to tout Phonak’s contested acquisition of GN Resound. But he fails to mention what should have been the main point of the story — that manufacturers’ too-high prices are responsible for the slow growth of the global hearing aid industry. Chapero tells BusinessWeek that, in spite of the mushrooming population of hearing-impaired baby boomers, poor marketing and product development have meant slow adoption by consumers. He even makes the stunning admission that, “It’s very difficult when you are making a product that actually nobody wants.” He goes on to predict the situation will change when the hearing-impaired public discovers the “hip” new Audeo family and clamors to spend upwards of $3,000 per hearing aid, more than double and even triple what you pay for comparable digital aids from other manufacturers. While the article gushes over Phonak’s profit performance, it misses the main point entirely: that as long as the oligopoly of seven (soon to be six) leading manufacturers in the global hearing aid industry continue to charge thousands of dollars for a collection of digital components with an original cost of no more than several hundred dollars in total, growth in the hearing aid industry will remain stagnant, and millions of consumers will remain priced out of the market no matter how dire their need or how seductive the design of the manufacturers’ new products may be.