Before Purchasing Stress: A Consumer hell
Most people struggle with making choice. They can’t even decide what drink to have in the pub, what to eat, where to take a walk. They’d rather like someone to make the decision for them; to tell them what to do. They will feel relieved.
The end of the scarcity age in developed countries comes with consumers being overwhelmed by the huge number and variety of goods and services.
“Am I buying the right digital camera? Am I getting the best treatment for my chronic ulcer? Am I signing up for the right serve?” is the inner voice each consumer is hearing when he face this hell of choice.
There are indeed amounts of information to respond to these questions and there are several channels to access more and more information, “But who has the leisure and the proficiency needed to sort through and evaluate all these products and services? [And] The burgeoning complexity of offerings, as well as the associate risks and reward, confounds and frustrates most time starved consumers. Product variety has not necessary resulted in better consumer experiences” C.K. Prahalad
Consumers are lost. Information comes to them as noise.
THE NOISE BELT SYSTEM

Every consumer today surrounded by a “Noise Belt”. The noise belt is getting thicker and thicker and putting a lot of strain on consumers.
To find relevant, trustful information, consumer needs to filter all the noise noise himself. For doing this, consumers need to filter amounts of information, “Most of it isn’t very good. When you need answers, you may end up sifting through contradicting advice, opinionated content and a lot of pretty crappy material. You’ll waste plenty of time” – James Chartrand, from http://menwithpens.ca
No one takes the noise fatigue as his problem, but everyone comes to add his own noise.
The unheard voice of the consumer behind the amount of data sounds like this:
“I need less data, not more data. I need to know what is important, and I don’t have time to sift through thousands of Tweets and Friendfeed messages and blog posts and emails and IMs a day to find the five things that I really need to know. People like Mike and Robert can do that, but they are weird, and even they have their limits.
So where is the startup that is going to be my information filter? I am aware of a few companies working on this problem, but I have yet to see one that has solved it in a compelling way. Can someone please do this for me? Please? I need help.» Erick Schonfeld, Editor at Techcrunch.com
We are now in the attention economy, in which the new scarcest resource isn’t ideas, capital or talent, but attention itself. Today’s businesses are headed for disaster-unless they learn to manage this critical yet finite resource, or fail!- Thomas H. Davenport, John C. Beck
Businesses which will succeed in this attention economy are the one that take customers attention as a loan or manage it as an investment” NOT something they “paid for“. Companies that fully understand and appreciate those distinctions will be the winners in the future. – Michael Schrage
