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市场营销新招数：眼花缭乱，无数选择=没选择。美国的电话套餐，十分复杂，即使是受良好教育的人士也搞不清各种套餐的关系，和如何比较，因此，最终干脆不选择，不更换套餐。 这一招，中国什么行业可以借用呢？
来源：economist.com There are some products — a Big Mac, an Apple MacBook — where the price is exactly what it says on the sticker, and you won’t find much variation by shopping around or looking for an online discount. Then there are others, like flights or hotel rooms, where the price is a murky moving target, but online comparison systems let you choose between the best offers. And then there are wireless plans, which seem to contain the worst of both worlds. Between the big four cellular operators, there are hundreds of possible plans and price points, and it’s virtually impossible to get a clear, simple comparison of all of them. Erin Riordan, a mother of five in Naperville, Ill., who pays a total of $495 a month at AT&T for her family’s mobile plans, summed the process up nicely in a WSJ story this week: “I consider myself to be pretty educated, but it makes me want to stick a fork in my eye.” If we can avert just one incident of cutlery plunging into eyeballs, consider our journalistic mission accomplished. The WSJ has spent the last few months putting together a tool that lets customers compare plans from the big four carriers, based on four simple steps: How many lines you need, how many voice calls and text messages per month, and how much mobile internet data you’re likely to consume. The result: The WSJ’s Wireless Savings Calculator, which does exactly what you hope it would. Once you’ve had a play with it, see below — Corporate Intelligence spoke with Scott Austin, the WSJ editor who led the effort in putting it together. This took a long time to put together — why was that? We started working on the project about three months ago. It took much longer than we expected because of the number of permutations on all the plans. We were startled to find about 700 combinations of smartphone plans from the four top carriers, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon. Then we had take all those combinations and compare them all, writing the logic so that our calculator would only show the cheapest plans from each carrier based on your preferences. During process, Sprint added a whole new set of plans, many of which are now cheaper than its previous options. That set us back some more. Originally we tried to include feature phone plans and prepaid plans, but that would have taken us many more months, and the majority of people now use smartphones. If you want to make it simple to understand, you have to stop somewhere. So we stopped at only the big national plans — we have left out deals from regional operators. And we left out the prepaid plans, and the offers that come with feature phones, because those are dying out. We stuck to smartphones. Why do you think there are so many different plans, and it’s so hard to compare them? It’s confusing by design. If everything was so transparent, people would more easily switch between carriers. When things are so complicated, people feel trapped. These carriers want to keep their customers for as long as possible, they don’t want them leaving. My Verizon phone contract expired a few months ago, and I went through my own personal hell trying to figure out what I would do next. None of the plans match across carriers, and in the end I stuck with Verizon partly because I didn’t want to spend the time to figure it out. And it works, right? Not a lot of people end up switching. Exactly. Even with all of the competition out there, only about 1% of customers leave AT&T and Verizon each month, and about 2% at Sprint and T-Mobile. While you see a lot of advertising, it’s a small pool of customers who are ready to actually change over. There’s an idea that too many choices lead to analysis paralysis. Choice is supposed to be good, it’s the root of a free market. But as [Columbia Business School Professor] Sheena Iyegar said in a TED Talk, when presented with too many choices, “We choose not to choose even if it goes against our self interest.” | 
