Buying In - (Page 60) 60 rob walker proudly owning an object that expresses your interest in fine cooking—and not cooking with it. Or consider the sport utility vehicle. One reason SUVs became so popular is that they felt so safe: all that metal surrounding you as you towered over the punier cars all around. But of course, the data show rather convincingly that SUVs are far less safe than smaller cars. (And in fact, the feeling of safety may contribute to this, by lulling drivers into carelessness.) Before you blame this on big companies victimizing helpless, passive consumers from the old days before the recent revolution that gave us the power to hold them accountable, it’s worth noting that journalist Keith Bradsher tells a somewhat different story in his definitive book on the SUV phenomenon, High and Mighty. The SUV evolved largely in response to research into what consumers wanted and to what succeeded in the market. Carmakers conducted massive and detailed surveys, involving tens of thousands of consumers and research efforts “backed up by many interviews with consumers in focus groups,” on a scale that dwarfed such efforts by politicians or media outlets. Consumers wanted four-wheel drive even though hardly any used it; they wanted to sit high in the vehicle because it felt safe, even though it wasn’t. Auto executives seem to have been perplexed by and the engineers almost contemptuous of what consumers wanted—but of course, they sold it to them anyway and in fact crafted advertising that played directly to consumers’ dissonant desires. None of this means that faulty interpretation or delusion explains everything we buy. But it does suggest the complexity of individual-level consumer decisions. This complexity has always presented challenge to commercial persuaders. And as the more recent changes in media and technology in the twen-
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.