Overload in Packaging

A New York Times story, titled "Product Packages Now Shout to Get Your Attention" written by Louise Story, is most revealing about the direction of information overload in society:

"In the last 100 years, Pepsi had changed the look of its can, and before that its bottles, only 10 times. This year alone, the soft-drink maker will switch designs every few weeks. Kleenex boxes used to be square or rectangular, but no more. Kleenex, after 40 years of sticking with square and rectangular boxes, has started selling tissues in oval packages."

"Coors Light bottles now have labels that turn blue when the beer is chilled to the right temperature. And Huggies' Henry the Hippo hand soap bottles have a light that flashes for 20 seconds to show children how long they should wash their hands."

"Consumer goods companies, which once saw packages largely as containers for shipping their products, are now using them more as 3-D ads to grab shoppers' attention. The shift is mostly because of the rise of the Internet and hundreds of television channels, which mean marketers can no longer count on people seeing their commercials. ...So they are using their bottles, cans, boxes and plastic packs to improve sales by attracting the eyes of consumers, who often make most of their shopping decisions at the last minute while standing in front of store shelves. "

Does this mean ever-accelerating product packaging changes and accompanying bombardment? It appears so.

Simplify Your Bargain Hunting

Here are three sites that help you cut through the clutter of too many shopping choices:

www.Mpire.com offer a graph which depicts the average price of an item over time, on retail as well as auction sites. Hence if you're bidding for the item, you have much more price information at your finger tips.

www.Mytriggers.com enable you set your own price. You simply enter your product and how much you're willing to pay, and this site will provide you with vendor list. Then click on "Trigger It!" and the site will send you an email when the price of your item drops.

www.Frucall.com provides a service when you're comparison shopping." Type in an item's 12-digit bar code if you have it and the site will indicate if there's a lower price online.

Search Engines Aid in Purchases

Where do web surfers get information on potential purchases? According to Hitwise.com, an online competitive intelligence service, Google is by far the top U.S. search engine in terms of driving visitors to shopping sites, accounting for 14.9% of visits. Yahoo! Search was found to be the second most popular search engine, accounting for 4.7% of shopper visits, followed by MSN Search and a rapidly-gaining MySpace.

Too Many Choices!

If making product purchases was as simple as choosing supermarket items, we could all cope. But the tyranny of choice extends to large products, as well as services like insurance, retirement options, investments, and frequent flyer programs.

By the time we absorb all the rules and regulations, we heap on more stress to our already stretched-thin composure. I recommend that you judge the merits of any product or service on two criteria:

(1) the intended benefit, and

(2) the ease with which we can understand and enjoy those benefits.