One Nation, With Niches for All (the 'choosing/choice' society)

[rodeodance]

One Nation, With Niches for All

By STACY SCHIFF
We used to be one nation, undivided, under three networks and two brands of toothpaste for all. Today we are the mass niche nation.

June 11, 2005


E. B. White claimed he knew his wife was the girl for him when she referred to dental floss as "tooth twine." I take his point. I also tried to buy "tooth twine" recently. By any name, that is an exercise in frustration, or affluence-induced A.D.D., or option overload. If there is plain old standard issue dental floss out there, it is on the shelf with the all-purpose running shoes and the unadulterated, adjectiveless cup of coffee.

In taking cluster analysis and its classifications to the logical extreme, are we not building a superfinicky society? Five minutes in any Starbucks line will answer that one. We used to be one nation, undivided, under three networks, three car companies and two brands of toothpaste for all. Today we are the mass niche nation. This is a country in which 40 percent of the eligible population doesn't vote, but can be expected to maneuver its way through a sprawl of options every time it heads out for tooth twine. Increasingly the brick-and-mortar world resembles the virtual one: an infinite landscape of microscopic subcategories, in which one loses oneself, twice.

A friend in Seattle - I'll call him Mitch, because that is his name - reports a full-scale identity crisis in the toothpaste aisle. There he stood, two coupons in hand. Was he ready to become a rejuvenating-effects, tartar-protection kind of guy, or was he wed to the fight against tobacco stains? And to think it all used to boil down to squeezing from the bottom........


.....Is there a name for what I'm experiencing? Of course there is, replies John Quelch, the Harvard Business School consumer marketing guru, who began laughing as soon as he heard the words "toothpaste aisle." He was quick to diagnose "analysis paralysis at the point of sale." Paco Underhill, perhaps our most diligent student of the science of shopping, terms it the "confusion index." And yes, it's growing. As are the fractures among us.......

[Nay]

1. Link?

[Demit]

2. LOL! And further down the aisle, shampoo... Don't get me started!

[fencesitter]

3. If you build it, they will come..

Sooo true. I laughed when I read this article, I spend way too much time buying a bottle of aspirin. No, Tylenol, maybe Ibuprofin, but what if it's daytime?, nightime? Do I have a tension headache or a sinus headache? Maybe only women should take this one. 12 hours or 6 hour relief? Oooo, my headache just got worse.