Give Me a New Product That's Like The Old Products I've Been Buying

Here’s a statistic to keep in mind next time you hear a tirade about how marketers colonize the brains of consumers: In a measure of unaided recall, 50 percent of respondents to an InsightExpress poll couldn’t name a single new product that had been launched in 2003. The product with the highest aided-recall score was the new $20 bill—in other words, not a product at all in the conventional sense. Marketers no doubt are doing their best to colonize consumers’ brains, but people have deep reserves of obliviousness with which to combat such efforts.

It’s not that consumers regard themselves as being averse to new products.