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The informed consumer becomes the exhausted consumer Post-recession, value has never been more important for consumers across Europe,
leading them to cut costs where they can and turning many consumers into no-frills
types. And as their numbers have grown, so have their expectations. A smooth path
to purchase and edited product offer is no longer the preserve of boutiques and niche
brands — Europeans expect it as part of any no-frills offer. Now, “no frills” refers not just
to products stripped down to the basics, but to stripped-down purchasing processes too.
Europeans’ ability to spy great value has
only increased in the age of the “informed
consumer”, as they’ve armed themselves
with the feature- and price-comparison
details necessary to secure the best price.
But now consumers are shifting from feeling
informed to feeling exhausted. Yes, they
wanted to know all the necessary facts
to find the best value, but along the way
they’ve started to feel like they’re wading
through info — and like wading through
treacle, that’s a tiring process.
For no-frills consumers, it can be particularly exhausting, as finding a good deal takes so
much work. To find the cheapest energy package, consumers in the UK1 and France2, for
example, must unravel the mystery of around 100 electricity and gas tariffs. Customers
of budget airline Ryanair must traipse
through 17 steps to purchase a cheap
flight online. Meanwhile, supermarkets
fall over themselves to promise the
cheapest prices, yet layers of EDLP, special
promotions and loyalty discounts make it
nigh on impossible for consumers to be
sure if any retailer is telling the truth.
Keeping things simple helps consumers
make decisions, as pointed out by
Barry Schwartz in his TED talk “The
Paradox of Choice” in 2004 and again
Thrifty Europeans and the value of simplicity CEB Iconoculture’s values-data spotlights the importance of simplicity for thrift-
minded consumers in Europe. Simplicity ranks 24th of 91 values for consumers who
say “thrift” describes them, while simplicity ranks only 45th for all other consumers.
Simplicity — the hallmark of no-fuss, no-frills positioning — is the starting point for
winning over the time- and cash-crunched consumer.
Base: Total French, German, Italian, Spanish and UK consumers age 15+. Thrift-minded consumers gave a 6 or 7 for the value of thrift on a 7-point scale, where 1 means “not like me at all” and 7 means “describes me exactly.”Source: CEB Iconoculture Values and Lifestyle Survey, October 2013
Ranking, Thrift-Minded Consumers
Ranking, All Other Consumers
Difference in Relative Rank for Thrift-Minded
simplicity 24 45 +21
Marshall Segal, Flickr.com
by Sheena Iyengar in hers, “The Art of Choosing”, in 2011. Yet brands are still holding
on to the dream that was choice: making consumers earn affordable goods by working
through labyrinthine pricing policies, multilayered product offers and fussy purchasing
processes. Each click, each weighing-up of product options and prices takes time out of
consumers’ day, and with a growing sense of their own time poverty (whether they really
are super-busy or not), they expect every transaction to be faster and fuss-free.
CEB’s latest research, The Effortless Experience3, which explores
drivers of loyalty in customer service, points out that four out of
five triggers for disloyalty are about perceived effort on the part
of the consumer, while those brands which have
low-effort service interactions outperform the market by 31%
when it comes to repurchase and positive word of mouth.