A Fresh and Important New Way to Understand Why We Buy
Why did the RAZR ultimately ruin Motorola? Why does Wal-Mart
dominate rural and suburban areas but falter in large cities? Why
did Starbucks stumble just when it seemed unstoppable?
The answer lies in the ever-present tension between fidelity the
quality of a consumer’s experience and convenience the ease of
getting and paying for a product. In Trade-Off, Kevin Maney shows
how these conflicting forces determine the success, or failure, of
new products and services in the marketplace. He shows that almost
every decision we make as consumers involves a trade-off between
fidelity and convenience–between the products we love and the
products we need. Rock stars sell out concerts because the
experience is high in fidelity-–it can’t be replicated in any other
way, and because of that, we are willing to suffer inconvenience
for the experience. In contrast, a downloaded MP3 of a song is low
in fidelity, but consumers buy music online because it’s
superconvenient. Products that are at one extreme or the
other–those that are high in fidelity or high in convenience–-tend
to be successful. The things that fall into the middle-–products or
services that have moderate fidelity and convenience-–fail to win
an enthusiastic audience. Using examples from Amazon and Disney to
People Express and the invention of the ATM, Maney demonstrates
that the most successful companies skew their offerings to either
one extreme or the other-–fidelity or convenience-–in shaping
products and building brands.
From the Hardcover edition.