Twenty Five Kinds of Super Glue

I kid you not.

In a recent Wall Street Journal report detailing changes on supermarket and pharmacy shelves, it announced that Walgreens would be reducing the number of superglue varieties it carries -- from 11 to 25. Doesn't 11 still seem excessive? Isn't the whole point of super glue that you can use it for a whole range of surfaces? Can you even imagine eleven different situations in which you might need a special type or even a certain brand of super strength glue? I'm pretty creative, but I stopped after about seven.

In the past, I've talked about brand extension as a mixed approach to retail, especially when it comes to food. We've about exhausted the rationale for new kinds of Oreo cookies when we hit 12, didn't we? (For goodness sake, if you're going all out for a holiday, why not just get some heart shaped cookies on Valentine's Day? If you need Oreos, get Oreos! They don't have to have red cream).

But the economy has retail manufacturers discovering what consumers have known all along: there are just too many tiny variations on the same thing to make choices. According to the WSJ report, Target Chief Executive Gregg Steinhafel says even he is baffled by Target's array of shampoo choices:

"I have found myself standing in front of the Pantene display, trying to figure out if I need the product for dry hair with frizz or dry hair with split ends," said Mr. Steinhafel, a thick-haired 54-year-old. A typical Target store has 88 kinds of Pantene shampoo, conditioner and styling products. A Target spokeswoman said the chain has "slightly reduced" its hair-care offerings this year.

Even eight or nine years ago, consumer research was showing that people are overwhelmed by the choices. As Sheena Iyengar reported:

The more-is-better approach can backfire, warns Mark Lepper, the chairman of Stanford University's psychology department, who studies how variety affects the odds that people actually buy. Mr. Lepper set up a table with 30 jars of jam and gave shoppers who stopped for a sample a discount coupon for their next jam purchase. He also had a table with six jams. He counted the coupons to see which group was more likely to buy. Of the shoppers who faced 30 choices, only 3% actually bought jam; of the shoppers who had six choices, 30% purchased jam.

The study, like many others, concludes that too much choice was not a good thing. People also feel bad when choosing from a broad selection because they second-guess their pick and worry they have made a poor selection, his follow-up studies revealed.

I'm still stuck on the eighty eight kinds of Pantene shampoo. Seriously, I normally try to curb my consumer rant voice when I'm exploring the rationale behind retail, but that's just mind-bogglingly ridiculous. There simply aren't eighty eight different kinds of hair problems that warrant their own product. Indeed, P&G has pulled back, repackaged, and cut some of the varieties in order to address less-than-desired sales.

But let's review simple science: the more you add, the more the original gets diluted. The more it's diluted, the less it resembles the original item.

Here's the social scientific conclusion: The less it resembles the original, the less people will feel any loyalty to the product as a unique and significant item in their must-have pile. And let's face it, what brands are competing for right now is a slot in the shrinking must-have pile in the grocery cart.

What's missing from the brand retraction (can we call it that?) that's going on due to economic retrenchment is a consumer-based logic. Sure, maybe there's a core group of consumers who use one or two of those varieties of Pantene on a regular basis -- and they'll be at a loss when they show up at Target looking for the usual stuff. What retailers and manufacturers are loath to do -- and in fact, have never been particularly good at -- is giving consumers the head's up about the loss of a product. At the very least, offer them something new (coupons for one of the surviving comparable types of shampoo, let's say...) that isn't yet another "special for frizzy hair, will glue plexiglass. and has a cartoon character stamped on the outside cookie" invention.

image credits: Germes and Dominic Bracco II (WSJ online).