All projects: Gel, Jobs, Gootodo, Games, Uncle Mark, Goovite, Blog, Bit Literacy
Nestle and the paradox of choice
Whenever I shop for hummus or cream cheese at my local grocery store, it's almost impossible to find the regular kind. Not the five-spice hummus, the red-pepper hummus, the lemon hummus; and not the salmon cream cheese, the strawberry, the nonfat, or any of the other 10 varieties - I want the regular.
Most of the time, in fact, I find that the hummus sold out, and only the varieties - which no one wants - sit there on the shelf. So I buy nothing.
My interview with Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice
Now there's an international case study on the topic. Swiss company Nestle, which is known for its steady, responsible CEO Peter Brabeck, took an unusual detour into a business fad and paid the price.
From Flavored U.K. KitKats leave Nestle with bad taste:
Nestle [applied] to KitKat a marketing strategy that is becoming increasingly popular at food companies world-wide: extending a popular brand into new flavors and styles. The world's biggest food company brought a hotshot executive in from Australia in 2003 to find ways to add variety to the basic KitKat brand in the U.K.
Over the course of the next year, the company rolled out a dizzying array of new KitKats. For the summer months, it launched strawberries and cream, passion fruit and mango and even red berry versions. In the winter came "Christmas pudding" and tiramisu, which contained real wine and marscapone. Even though Britons never fully embraced the Atkins diet craze, the company launched a low-carb version.
The experiments flopped. In just two years, KitKat's overall sales in the U.K. dropped 18 percent, to $253 million for the 52 weeks ending in April. Nestle recently abandoned virtually all of its exotic flavors. The executive in charge of the gambit has been replaced. And Nestle's experience has become a lesson in the perils of trying to push new versions of much-loved brands too hard. "You could call it hyperventilation," Peter Brabeck, Nestle's chief executive recently told reporters.
(Thanks, kottke)
Do you really find it almost "impossible" to find regular cream cheese? I am a fan of Barry Schwartz book, but I would be surprised if you couldn't find regular cream cheese among all of the flavor choices. As for hummus, there doesn't seem to be an agreed-upon name for "regular" hummus. Some call it tahini flavor, or garlic flavor, among names like "original."
It happened to me today. I went to the store to find regular Frosted Mini Wheats (on sale). They had Maple Brown Sugar, Strawberry, Vanilla, and 2 or 3 others. But because there was so little shelf space (and inventory space) for each one, they ran out of the regular one by 10am.
Ironically, the others were still completely full, suggesting that most people want the regular one (like Kit Kats).
And since I am a 100% maximizer, instead of settling for one of the other flavors, I spent 15 minutes at the customer service counter getting a rain check so I could get the sale price on the regular kind when they come in next week.
So what's causing this? It doesn't seem likely they're going for the next big fad since it's just variations on an existing product. Is it because they're going for the long tail? (Personally, I prefer the Maple Brown Sugar Mini-Wheats.)
Mark,
Wonderful example, wonderful post. The sad truth is that nothing's free. There's a real price for enabling the "long tail."