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marketing?"
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And what of those loyal customers who don t happen to spend enough money to get into
a company s inner circle? "I rent cars from one particular company," said one man.
"You could call me a loyal customer. I never rent from any other company. But as I
learned on my last trip, I am apparently not one of the company s valued customers. We
were taking the van from the airport to the rental lot, and the driver asks, Who here is a
club member? Three people raise their hands and, one by one, get dropped off at their
cars. They get all this special treatment, and the rest of us are just sitting there looking
around at one another, feeling uncomfortable. Finally, one guy looks at me and says,
What makes them so special? I started to explain that those are the company s big-
ticket customers, that they spend a lot of money with the company. But as I was talking,
I was thinking, Hell, I spend a lot of money here, too. I should be a valued customer. But
instead, the company is making me feel like chopped liver. It made me really mad."
In their role as relationship partners, companies need people to think of them as
allies and friends; but more often than not, they come across as enemies.
Companies claim to offer solutions to consumers problems; but in fact, they are
creating more problems than they solve. Supermarket SKUs have risen to 32,000,
with more than 2,500 new products on the shelf vying for attention. Coke is available in
more than 50 product and packaging variations, Crest in 55. Snapple at one time logged
more than 70 flavor varieties on grocers shelves despite the fact that 6 flavors
commanded the majority of the company s sales. Some cable television systems on the
market today offer more than 700 different channels, though research has shown that the
average user is happy to handle 10.
Companies are trying to satisfy and log a sale on customers every desire or fleeting
whim. But customers view the scene differently. They see a bewildering array of
seemingly undifferentiated product offerings. Companies tend to center their efforts on
the potential advantages of being first to market with new, technologically superior
products. They view negative feedback from consumers as merely temporary resistance
to change. An alternative explanation begs notice, however: optimal levels of choice
exist, and current product policies consistently exceed those marks.
"I nearly cried the last time I went to buy something for my headache," one woman said.
"Did I have a tension, sinus, or recurring headache? Did I want aspirin, ibuprofen,
acetaminophen? Store brand or major brand? I don t know all the answers, but I do
know that my headache got worse thinking about them. I just stood there looking at the
shelf. I was paralyzed."
"I tried to do something about the chaos," another disgruntled customer recounted. "I
was being deluged by catalogs three, four, five a day. I was saturated with options. I
had to put a stop to it. So I called one company that I actually like. I asked where the
company had gotten my name. After a few calls, I finally got someone who could tell
me. It was another company. So I called that company. And so on, and so on. With
every call, I registered my deep disappointment that the company would sell my name
and my purchase preferences without my permission. No one seemed to care. The best
any of them could do was to agree to take my name off their list a change that most
said wouldn t take effect for about six months. Finally, I gave up. New catalogs kept
coming in. I was defeated."
Loss of control, vulnerability, stress, victimization: these are the themes that emerge
when we listen to people talk about the products they use, the companies that supply
them, and the marketplace as a whole. In fact, we are more likely to hear consumers vent
their frustrations about newly acquired products than we are to hear them extol their
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virtues. Control is experienced simultaneously as loss of control. Gains in efficiency are
offset by the creation of more work. Freedom of choice is interpreted as a bind of
commitments. These frustrations run deep, threatening the very quality of consumers
lives.
As one consumer said, "The answering machine is great. I catch all these calls that I
would have missed otherwise. I don t have to be home to receive calls. But at the same
time, I become a slave to that technology. The machine makes me come home and check
it every day. The first things I do when I get home: check the mailbox, check the
answering machine. And then you are responsible for returning all those calls. If you had
no machine, who would be the wiser? It s like a plant. You have to water it to keep it
alive."
"We got a weed eater, and what I have found in having that thing is that you tend not to
be quite as conscious about what you are going to trim," said another consumer. "My
wife planted little flower beds here and there, and around trees, and it was like, No,
problem. We have the weed eater! The problem here isn t that you bought a product
and it didn t do its job. The problem is that because the product made something easier,
you ended up working more than you would have before. The weed eater led to more
weeding! Most technological products do their jobs, and do them well, but they end up
generating more work."
The net effect is a consumer who is more likely to view companies as enemies, not
allies. Our research suggests that consumers develop coping strategies designed to
eliminate, minimize, or otherwise control the deleterious effects the marketplace has on
the quality of their lives. Consumers develop "purchase and consumption rules" to get
them through the day. They may refuse to set the clock on their VCRs, for example, or
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