Jealousy and Betrayal, Meals We Don't Eat, Etc.

Let's say you're a loyal user of Brand Z phone service, cheerfully paying full price for it. How would you feel if you discovered the company was offering new customers a better deal than yours? A study by the University of Michigan Business School says you'd suffer feelings of "betrayal" and "jealousy." These emotions might prompt you to switch to a rival company, even if it didn't offer a better price than what you now pay. The problem doesn't arise if the old customers are unaware of the deal being dangled to newcomers, but concealment is hard to sustain in the Internet age. The report suggests companies would be "better off in the long run if they gave special deals to their loyal customers instead." Sure, coffee from a fancy café is pricier than the convenience-store variety. But think how much cheaper it is than a Prada skirt! That's the imaginative point made in an ad for Cafe Ink by Cultivator Advertising and Design of Boulder, Colo. On the other hand, if you've already splurged on something from Italy, another ad in the campaign says, "Now you actually have somewhere to take that $4,000 Italian scooter."This week's Best Use of a Library Motif for a Really Odd Product is found in a campaign for Wild Wings, a line of custom-made bird- houses that incorporate old books. Since the recycled books are often library discards, agency Blattner Brunner of Pittsburgh used the return-date card as a visual device. Here's a reason to be skeptical when someone says, "Let's do lunch." An NPDFoodworld poll finds lunch is the meal Americans are most likely to skip. Last year, the typical adult skipped 59 lunches, 46 breakfasts and 16 dinners. (And Americans still managed to become obese in record numbers. Go figure.) Restaurant lunches continued to increase (from 44 per capita in 1991 to 50 apiece last year), while the home-made variety dwindled. Nonetheless, a majority of lunches (56 percent) were prepared and eaten at home last year. Twelve percent were carried from home, and the remaining 32 percent were bought from a restaurant or other outside source.If you don't like the way kids are raised these days, don't blame the authors of parenting manuals. Blame the parents' parents. A poll by Parenting asked people who now have little kids to cite the main factors shaping their behavior as parents. Eighty percent mentioned "the way I was brought up," and 53 percent pointed to "my parents' advice." Other key factors: "my children's age/personality" (73 percent), "my lifesituation—income, work schedule, etc." (62 percent), "religious beliefs" (61 percent) and "my temperament" (60 percent).As the bloom of youth fades from a woman's cheeks, does she come to resent the young lovelies who adorn ads for beauty products? Not enough so that advertisers should use plain faces instead. A survey by DiMassimo Brand Advertising found 67 percent of women over 40 saying they'd be less likely to buy a beauty product if it featured plain-looking people in its advertising. Having grown up amid politically correct hostility to the "beauty myth," just 21 percent of the survey's younger women confessed they'd be put off by plain-faced ads. Low self-esteem causes all sorts of problems in society. Unfortunately, so does high self-esteem. Fresh evidence of this emerges in an Indiana University study recently cited in Time. Among girls who'd displayed low self-esteem in seventh grade, 40 percent were sexually active by the time they hit the ninth grade, vs. 18 percent of girls who showed more self-confidence. Among boys, though, half of those with high self-esteem were sexually active, vs. 29 percent of those with low self-esteem. Consumers like to deal with self-respecting companies, but they also like to be on the receiving end of some groveling now and then. With its vignette of a customer being carried around a showroom on his recliner, a spot for the Tonkin car dealerships in Portland, Ore., manages to combine these elements. We witness Tonkin's (literally) slavish devotion to its customers; at the same time, we appreciate that the company is joking about the extremes to which this concept is sometimes taken. JohnsonSheen of Portland created the spot.When it comes to insurance claims, time beats money. In an Accenture poll of consumers who have filed a property-and-casualty claim, 94 percent of respondents said quick resolution of it is "highly important" to their satisfaction with the process. Fewer of them (74 percent) assigned such importance to the amount of money the insurer offers in settlement. Among those with a settled claim, 42 percent said they were dissatisfied with the amount of time it took. To err is corporate, to forgive is human. Such seems to be the attitude of the 6 percent of recent Gallup poll respondents who said they have a "favorable opinion" of Enron.

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Jealousy and Betrayal, Meals We Don't Eat, Etc.

Mark Dolliver

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Mark Dolliver