Have you ever been shopping for a particular product and felt completely out of your depth? You might have been shopping for a car, a computer, a television; suddenly you are hit with a realisation, “Hang on a minute…. what’s the difference between this one and that one? They look almost identical. Okay, let’s look at the specs to see what the difference is… er, they appear to be made of the same stuff, they do exactly the same things, and the price is the same. Hmmm...” Even a price difference is not necessarily of any great help if you have never heard, or don’t have any previous opinion, of whichever companies make the almost identical products.Now, before you say it, I am not simply creating this issue out of thin air. We actually have experience of customers phoning us up to ask, “How am I supposed to know the difference between these taps? They all look the same.” I could very easily imagine that there may be some out there who might crassly suggest that this is simply down to a failure on our part to clearly explain and describe the products on our website. I would strongly contest this suggestion, not because it would be a direct challenge to my competence as a content writer, but because I have experienced this same confusion when shopping for myself.
A few years ago I was in the market for a netbook. I dug out my ‘savvy consumer’ hat, put it on, and jumped online to research what was available within my budget and also ticked the most boxes on my ‘I need it to do this’ list. I was soon confronted with a sea of apparently identical devices; all had the same specs with regards to processor, RAM, memory, screen size, etc. The only real difference that I could fathom was the brand name and the price. Now, I didn’t want to end up simply paying for a name – I was wearing my ‘savvy consumer’ hat after all – but I was also reluctant to choose a brand that I had never heard of simply to save a few pennies. In my spiralling confusion, I placed a phone call to my goto Consumer Technology Advisor; my brother. As I have already said, this was a few years back, so my memory won’t allow me to recount exactly what he said, but it was pretty much in the neighbourhood of, “You could save yourself some money today, but if you want to have anything more than an expensive paper weight in a year’s time, go with the better known brand.”
At the time, this felt like good advice, and it very well may have been (my netbook is still going strong). But the issue is not nearly as black and white as we may wish for it to be. I recently discovered that up to 25% of iPhone components are actually made by Samsung (one of Apple’s biggest competitors), and the engines in many Skodas are actually made by Volkswagen.
If my sources for the above are even partially accurate, how is the consumer to really know what they are getting when putting their trust in any one particular brand? Should brands matter at all? Should we just blindly put our faith in a brand because we have heard of it, and everyone else is buying it? Can we really depend on the past experiences of our friends and relatives to be an accurate representation of what we can expect to get from a particular company?
Back to the poor soul who phoned us after being hopelessly overwhelmed by the apparently endless sea of seemingly identical taps… The question arises of why do so many taps resemble each other quite so closely? Short of calling all of our manufacturers in to explain their own specific design processes, I am going to make the grand, and entirely speculative assumption that somewhere along the line, somebody hit upon a really great design for a tap, this design proved popular, then the classic idiom “if it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it” came into play.
I would suggest that there may be one ray of light for those up to their necks in purchase decision confusion. Retailers are unlikely to persist in selling shoddy or less than satisfactory goods over a long time, since this is likely to annoy and drive away their customers, and require them to deal with a constant stream of returned goods and complaints. Given this, we might expect a retailer with long-term experience in a particular field to be pretty good at picking out the best, most reliable brands and products to offer the consumer.
As responsible retailers, it is our duty to stock high quality products that provide good value for money to our customers. If we are doing this, the consumer will benefit in the end, despite whatever torturous decision making process they may have to endure. When all is said and done there may not be any easy answers to this conundrum. It may ultimately come down to the customer's own personal preference, and there can be no guarantees as to what decision they will make - even if they are wearing their own 'savvy consumer' hat.
