The Myth of Consumer Empowerment in the Face of the Crappification of Almost Everything
Yves Smith says James Surowiecki is full of it, and that most everything has become crap. Commenters pile on:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/02/james-surowiecki-promotes-myth-consumer-empowerment-face-crappification-almost-everything.html#comments
Theres nothing like getting a missive from the alternative reality where neoliberalism works and all consumer problems can be solved by more diligent shopping (and remember, since we are all consumers first and citizens second, the corollary is that pretty much any problem can be solved by better shopping).
The current sighting is a story in the New Yorker by James Surowiecki, The Twilight of Brands, that tries to tell us, in all seriousness, that companies now have to be on their toes because consumers are more vigilant and less loyal. He starts with the backlash against yoga clothes maker Lululemon when quality fell sharply, and states his thesis:
Its a truism of business-book thinking that a companys brand is its most important asset, more valuable than technology or patents or manufacturing prowess. But brands have never been more fragile. The reason is simple: consumers are supremely well informed and far more likely to investigate the real value of products than to rely on logos. Absolute Value, a new book by Itamar Simonson, a marketing professor at Stanford, and Emanuel Rosen, a former software executive, shows that, historically, the rise of brands was a response to an information-poor environment. When consumers had to rely on advertisements and their past experience with a company, brands served as proxies for quality; if a car was made by G.M., or a ketchup by Heinz, you assumed that it was pretty good. It was hard to figure out if a new product from an unfamiliar company was reliable or not, so brand loyalty was a way of reducing risk. As recently as the nineteen-eighties, nearly four-fifths of American car buyers stayed loyal to a brand.
This is utterly backwards. The reason brands have become more fragile does not not reside in demanding, disloyal customers, but in short-sighted corporate behavior. Surowiecki does point to the early 1980s as the beginning of the sea change, but the driver was a shift away from businesses focusing primarily on good old fashioned success in the marketplace (via matching product quality/price attributes versus customers needs, improving manufacturing processes, looking for new product/technology opportunities, etc) to focusing much more on financial results as the key determinant of success. That orientation arose as raiders, later rebranded as leveraged buyout firms, and now private equity, took over companies, sold unproductive assets, piled on debt, and pushed hard to wring out costs. While many companies were so fat that a lot of overhead could be reduced without affecting production and marketing, the pressure to reduce costs soon moved into areas that involved manufacturing and product quality. Companies began subtly, and then more overtly, lowering product quality and running on brand fumes.
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Lifelong Protester
(8,421 posts)Old folks like me are rare, the ones who remember their parents getting an iron for their wedding and sending it off to college with you ( yes, a Sunbeam travel iron...)
Now it's all triple C: Cheap Chinese Crap
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)My mother still has (and uses) a bunch of appliances and cookware that were wedding presents from 1972(!)
canoeist52
(2,282 posts)A few years ago, we received a toaster oven as a gift. The first time I washed it, all the number and heat settings washed off. This was a name-brand Kenmore appliance. We've memorized the settings, 'cause we're not buying another one 'till this one doesn't toast anymore. Can't trust brand-names anymore. It's a crap shoot.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)Populist_Prole
(5,364 posts)Last edited Mon Feb 10, 2014, 04:20 PM - Edit history (1)
I've felt this way for years and grew more and more irritated as the whole "sell the sizzle, not the steak" meme began to take hold and get a life of its own. This was made worse, as the article correctly states, by the financialization of the economy where "Wall St" ( basically speculation ) went from being regarded as but a segment of the economy to "the economy".
Offshoring has thoroughly decoupled the notion/meme of "what's good for XYZ company is good for you". Brand names don't mean shit to me for the most part. I care not a whit if say, McDonalds or Coca Cola are successful world-wide, or if Buick is a big brand in China, establishing GM's prestige. If all that doesn't result in US jobs exporting to those places, then they can go out of business for all I care.
Herself
(185 posts)Crappification = Buy it, Buy it again, and Buy it again.
DamnYankeeInHouston
(1,365 posts)Singer machines are now plastic crap.
4dsc
(5,787 posts)This is what we should expect from a consumer society. But don't worry it's not sustainable and our grandchildren will find out how to live with far less crap then we do.