Pi-Consulting

The Cheerios brand is one of America’s iconic breakfast cereal products, selling 95 million boxes last year and putting $288 million in the coffers of General Mills, its manufacturers. What’s the reason for such public devotion to a food product that has been around for sixty years? (The name was changed from “CheeriOats” in 1945). David Altschul, president of the Character consultancy, thinks that Cheerios has “deeper emotional resonance”. If the brand were a character, he asks, “What would it want? I think the brand actually wants to enable family connection”. General Mills agrees that the Cheerios brand “enjoys loyalty beyond reason” and continues to beat off competitive attacks from cheaper clone brands. Altschul points to letters written to the firm by consumers — letters which have been used to guide Cheerios advertising — who talk about the “amazing emotional experience they have had” while using the O-shaped cereal. It’s what consumers apparently believe. “We’re not making this stuff up”, says a bemused Altschul. (Source: New York Times)

A massive shift has been recorded in Europe in the way audiences pay for television services. Hitherto the model almost everywhere has been dominated by advertising revenues, with audiences getting the commercial TV channels “free”, (free, at least, if you ignore the cost of advertising which is built into the price paid for products in the shops). However, a new report by advertising agency group Zenith Optimedia records the momentous fact that, in 2005, Western European commercial TV stations received more revenue from viewer subscriptions than from advertising sales. This is the first time the lines have crossed over. ZO account for the switch partly by TV subscription increases (average $29 per month for pay-TV in 2004, up from $25 in 2000 and $12 in 1991). Another contributing factor is TV’s waning share of advertising revenues, with the internet “taking over as the up-and-coming advertising medium”. (Source: Zenith Optimedia “Television in Western Europe to 2014”, quoted by World Advertising Research Center)

You know what an oxymoron is: it’s one of those definitions that internally contradicts itself, like “Military Intelligence” (thank you, Groucho Marx) and “Compassionate Conservatism”, (the drowned remains of which went to a watery grave under the New Orleans levees last year).

Here’s an oxymoron for our times: “Customer Service Line”.

Everyone who has had occasion to phone one recently will know what we are talking about. All you wanted was politely and good-naturedly to report your problem to a fellow human being, and hear what they were proposing to do about it.

Instead, you listened to a recording so meaninglessly and ingratiatingly upbeat that the lady who made it HAD to be on happy pills, you listened to six series of four options which failed to include the one you wanted, and you wound up in a loop of endlessly repeating but totally irrelevant instructions to “contact your so-and-so supplier”. If you were lucky, you were then treated to a music loop-tape that sounded like Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik played on half-empty pickle jars. If not, you were simply dumped into that eerily silent corner of electronic space-time from whose bourne no traveler returns. That’s when you threw the telephone handset at the wall, and shouted to anyone who happened to be listening that you would sooner die than do business with (supply company name here) ever again.

Customer service? More like a foolproof mechanism for avoiding human contact with your customers, let alone having to satisfy them about anything.

It doesn’t take the massed talents of the Harvard Business School to figure out that hiding behind the voice-recorded equivalent of a barbed-wire fence is probably bad for business. How can this imbecility be so widely practiced by companies whose mission statements formally commit them to “listening to the voice of the consumer”? And how did those companies plan to do so without ever actually answering the #!^%* phone?

We’re guessing, but we suspect that the honest answer in most cases would be “We’re on a cost-cutting drive, and dealing with all those callers in real time would be prohibitively expensive”.

One recipient of 21st-century corporations’ maddening refusal to talk to people decided to fight back, as reported recently in the New York Times. Entrepreneur Paul M. English lost his rag in the Summer of 2005, did some research, and posted an item on his long-standing blog. It was in effect a leaked “magic code-book” giving out keypad sequences that would get his fellow-sufferers past various companies’ wall of blather and “options”, and instead put them through instantaneously to an “RHB” (or Real Human Being).

The result was electrifying. Visitors to English’s blog applauded, added more codes to the ones English had unearthed, and started spreading the word to others. The result was first a slew of articles in the mainstream press, then a decision to start GetHuman.com, a dedicated website for those who wanted not just to get mad, but to get even ….or perhaps just to get through. The site identifies itself as the spearhead for a fight-back movement to “change the face” (or more properly the voice) “of customer service”. A large electronics retailer’ secret code is apparently 111##, followed by ignoring three dummy prompts demanding your home phone number. Reaching an “RHB” at a well-known bank is as simple as dialing 0#0#0#0#0#0#. And so on. The secret call-through pathways of four hundred companies have already been revealed to their frustrated customers.

English describes his site as a crusade against corporate arrogance. “Why do the executives running these call centers think they can decide when I deserve to speak to a human being and when I don’t?”, he reasonably asks.

Curiously, there is an upside to all this for the companies concerned, did they but know it. First, the pressure to respond can prompt them to simplify and streamline such procedures as online ordering of goods and the tracking of internet orders. If those things happen more smoothly, many irate phone calls would never be made in the first place. And when the aggrieved and frustrated consumer does get through, says Richard Shapiro of the Center for Client Retention, “Companies will find that customers who interact with human beings are more likely to volunteer useful information, try a new product, or develop a loyalty to the company concerned. Excessive voice automation eliminates all that”.

Okay, caller, I’ll just put you on hold while you think about that. Here’s a little music…..

Huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ have always been at the core of leisure life in the USA. The US Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that 80 million adult Americans, i.e. almost 40% of the population, “enjoyed recreational activities relating to fish and wildlife”. 13 million Americans go shooting, and spend around $20 billion in the process. You can even buy a Bible in camouflage colors to refresh the spirit before opening fire. Nonetheless, the sport is beginning to shrink, with the number of hunters falling by 7% over a ten year period, mainly among the middle- and lower-income groups; hunters in $100,000+ income households were up by over 20% by the year 2000, implying that hunting is becoming significantly more elitist. Over the Atlantic in England, it always was. The recent ban on fox-hunting passed by Britain’s Labor government has produced a storm of protest among the huntin’/shootin’/fishin’ classes, many of whom are mounting campaigns of civil disobedience and flouting the new law. (Sources: The Economist, Pi Market Research).

NOTE: Don’t forget Father’s Day is June 18th. Hunt down something for your Da.

It has been suggested that one American in three now weighs as much as the other two combined. This kind of statistic is intrinsically impossible to verify. True or not, the idea is not likely to be contradicted very widely. America has been putting on weight, and fingers have been pointed at the food and beverage industries as the principal culprits.

But wait. Another striking statistic was recently cited (in a report in the Washington Post, no less) as a possible contributory factor. Could the expanding size of ourselves be related to the expanding size of our kitchens?

In the mid-20th century, the typical American kitchen was about 80 square feet in size, while the average American male weighed 166 pounds. Today, average kitchen size has almost tripled, to 225 square feet. American adult males now weigh in at 191 pounds on average.

Mere coincidence?

Aric Chen, as the Post reports, is a specialist writer on architecture and design, and he is convinced that, in this case at least, architecture has had a knock-on effect on human attitudes, and in turn on human behavior.

Chen’s inspired guess dated from his recent co-curatorship of a New York NY exhibition entitled “Value Meal: Design and (Over-)Eating”. He was moved to take on the exhibition project when he saw a news item about a well-known US furniture manufacturer marketing a chair for people whose body weight ranged up to 500 pounds. This firm was responding to a growing problem basically by accommodating it. Wrong answer, Chen said to himself.

He turned his questing mind to the subject of kitchens, rather than chairs. He noticed that kitchen rooms were not just getting bigger, they were also mutating in function, and that society’s attitudes to kitchens were mutating accordingly. This was encouraging people who should not spend more time around food to do just exactly that, he conjectured.

Unlike the smaller kitchens of yesterday, on which the door was closed once a meal had been eaten and the washing-up put away, today’s triple-sized kitchen has been re-cast as a combined living room, entertainment-center, communication post, children’s playroom, dining room, bar-room, meeting point and home office, (quite apart from its primary function as a place where food is stored and prepared). Many now have couches in them. Probably the most requested feature in new-build kitchens is the central island unit, where we park our increasingly capacious behinds on stools, nnd engage in activities that range from yakking about the day’s events to paying the bills online. Oh, and, of course, we eat.

It may be eating as an accompaniment to all those other kitchen-based activities that causes the trouble, muses Chen. He acknowledges that there is something romantic and nice about family and friends choosing the kitchen as the place to foregather, and he traces this back to “a nostalgic era of hearth and home”. But back then, as Chen so eloquently puts it, “You didn’t have big bags of Fritos lying around”.

After the multi-purpose eating island, the next most requested feature in new-build kitchens is “more pantry space”, implying that American feel a pressing need for more room in which to store food. The presence of more food, argue dieticians, particularly processed foods and non-perishable snacks, in itself contributes to systematic over-eating, and eating for reasons other than hunger. A spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association gives the cautious nod to enlarging kitchens and people spending more time in them, on the basis that this will promote home-cooking and discourage visits to take-outs and restaurants, where portions are bigger and calorie-counts are usually higher. However, the ADA expresses concern about kitchens becoming the nerve-center of a household for nearly all activities. Their beef is that “Americans become somehow mindless when they are watching TV, paying the bills, answering the phone or doing e-mails. …Put all those tasks in the middle of the kitchen with food around, and it’s a recipe for mindless munching”

The ADA alternative recipe? “We suggest people stop the “family-style buffet”, where they put food out on the island and tell people to help themselves. We want people to put one serving on a plate, take it out of the kitchen and go eat it in the dining room”.

The underlying aim is to restore a “sense of self-consciousness” about eating. When a kitchen was just a kitchen, it was embarrassing to be caught in front of an open fridge, snacking late at night. The “kitchen-as-kitchen” persuasion wants you to feel that way about impromptu snacking in general.

Seems the old adage about “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen” is getting updated to a new variant: “If you can’t handle temptation…”