The mystery called consumer

Of all the great mysteries of the universe, none is more confounding than that of consumer behaviour. You would have thought that it shouldn't be an unfathomable mystery - after all you and I are consumers too.  But no. It is inarguably established that you can even hope to nail down the Higgs boson, but cannot begin to understand this mysterious creature called the consumer.

Take the example of the Missoni collection and the outage at Target yesterday. Missoni is an outrageously priced design house - designing everything from clothes to patio sets each costing hundreds or thousands of dollars. I cannot imagine why anybody should pay thousands of dollars for something that is essentially similar and available for $49.99, but we shall pass over that lightly. Target is a discount store in the US.

At first glance, its not sure what the two have in common - you would have expected that one would wrinkle its nose at the other and the other should be showing its finger at the worthy. But hey presto, the two decided that they would collaborate and launch a limited edition Missoni for Target range. This was on the theme of "zig zag" - apparently zig zag lines on your dress is high fashion. Instead of of hundreds of dollars, you could could get it for $39.99.

Target has been swamped. Its web site crashed. The demand for items was higher than on the day after Thanksgiving or Black Friday; days when Americans go bonkers shopping. Everybody , it seems, wants to buy. Social media is inflamed. That doyen of intelligent media, Twitter, is ablaze. Many criticised Target for not anticipating demand. Many others moaned and groaned. Some boasted that they could get in during the few minutes that the site was up . Some others tweeted that they would get Missoni supported unlocked iPhones. As this post was written, the Target site is still down.

I would have bet before yesterday that

•  Nobody in the US had heard of Missoni
• It didn't matter one bit whether the lines on your skirt were straight or zig zag , or for that matter, non existent

I would have, of course, lost the bet. I was dead wrong.

Ah the mysteries of that incredibly species called consumer !

PS- Regular readers of this blog might have noticed that this blogger is rather advancing from the status of  "Sartorius Ignoramus" :)

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Is the consumer a king or a tyrant ?

“Remove baby before folding the stroller “ is a famous example of the American legal system gone crazy. It remained an object of mirth until it became all too real last week. For, Maclaren, a small privately held maker of baby strollers was faced with a massive crisis on a similar sort of a problem.

Maclaren’s strollers are actually of a reasonably high safety standard. However it appears that when the stroller is being unfolded, if a child sticks a finger into the hinge, its likely to chop off the finger tip. This is not a state secret that normal human beings are unaware of. Any parent, however dumb, is well aware that if a child sticks its finger into a hinge, it will get hurt. However there was no warning on Maclaren strollers that children must be kept away when opening it. And the product is "unsafe". So the company is responsible.

There were 12 instances of such an event happening. The company is now recalling 1 million strollers sold in the US – or atleast providing repair kits to the owners. Now 12 cases in a million is 0.001%. The probability of being struck by lightning is higher. But never mind, the company is a big bad evil monster and so mob lynching is perfectly acceptable.

Reams of newsprint (or should I say, bytes) are being written on this case. Media has used “amputations from strollers”, “child amputation” and the like to lampoon the company. A million words have been written about the company being slow to react, PR disaster, etc etc. I haven’t read one word to say that perhaps this is a overreaction and the consumer is also, just a teeny bit, at fault.

I can understand when there’s a defective or dangerous product – the company must be taken to task. The product must be recalled immediately; period. But this is just a normal stroller – sure its safety can be improved by providing a protective cover over the hinge. But , by itself, the product is not unsafe. Is it then right to force companies to recall millions of products sold over a long period of time ? Today there is no choice for companies. Immediate product recall, whether justified or not, is the only sensible option – else the PR disaster will be so big that the company may probably not survive.

That doesn’t make it right. Where is the notion of sensible consumer responsibility ? One consequence of this is the silly sort of warnings (like coffee is hot) that companies have to print to "inform" consumers. How about differentiating between genuinely defective or unsafe products and ones where usage with common sense is perfectly fine, but careless usage will create a problem. Does a product have to be designed for the average consumer , or the absolute lowest common denominator?

The consumer is the king. I know. But what if he turns into a tyrant ?

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Cutomer Service is all about getting the boring bits right

Today's post is a guest post in Adesh Sidhu's blog - Not being Sarkari.

Adesh is an avid blogger and writes passionately about customer service. He is also an active member of the IndiBlogger forum.

Click here to read my guest post in his blog.

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