Grundger

On the Web a new type of customer is rising. One more and more immune to marketing happy talk. One that wants facts before emotion.

In his seminal book, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins explores the idea of the sustainable ecosystem. In one game of life there were three players: suckers, cheats and grudgers.

Each player needs to find another to scratch its back. Suckers scratch the back of whoever asks them. Cheats ask to get their backs scratched but never return the favor. Grudgers scratch a back if asked, but if you don't return the favor they will never scratch your back again.

Too much marketing and advertising treats the customer like a sucker. By cleverly manipulating our core emotions, advertising gets us to buy products that are never quite what they seem. (Have you ever seen a car advertisement shot in rush hour traffic?)

Of course, marketing is not entirely to blame here. The consumer is nearly always a sucker to complexity in the store, while cursing its lack of simplicity once they take it home. Our reason and logic has long suffered from our relentless tsunami of emotions.

The game of scratching begins and the cheats race into the lead, driving the suckers and grudgers close to extinction. However, as there are less and less suckers to exploit, the grudgers slowly begin to advance. Over time, the grudgers rise and rise, with the cheats declining and the suckers never recovering. It seems that a sustainable ecosystem is dominated by grudgers.

Last week I rented a car with Hertz. It started off at US$ 85 for two days, but by the time I left the office, the price was US$ 266. The Hertz rep was very smooth, very friendly, convincing me to buy a full tank of gas, because he estimated I'd use most of it. (I used half of it.)

A large multinational found that every time it added a “hero shot”-that perfect, smiling face-to a Web page, the number of customers who left the page immediately after arriving shot up. Once the hero shot was...