Viennese Counter-offensive
CONSUMING INTEREST
By PETER GOLDMAN
These magazines, however, are handicapped in one important respect. Unlike the other sources of consumer information mentioned, they lack what someone has called 'the impact of immediacy.' The copywriter's jargon will be on your TV screen, your friends and relations on the phone, and the persuasive counter-jumper on his job, the very afternoon that you spend your good money. But comparative test magazines are in most countries published monthly: and though some use market intelligence for timing product reports, it will still be a matter of chance whether their reports and your needs coincide at any par- ticular moment of time.
The difficulties can be exaggerated—for most readers are happy enough to file away their copies against the itch to spend—but they do exist. Produce a report on power lawn-mowers in March, and you will soon hear from gardeners who already bought theirs in February. Test dish- washers during the winter, and by early spring housewives will want you to pronounce on some new and heavily-advertised marvel. Declare the Dalmatian brand kennel a Best Buy, and Fido's mistress will find herself in the pet shop minus the relevant report, buying a Damnation brand kennel instead. Such mischances are enough to make anyone bark.
How to bring full, comparative, test-based information to the shopper at the actual moment a purchase is to be made—that is the big question. One day, perhaps, computers could provide the answer. This is certainly what I was told last year by an American professor of an extremely switched-on subject. He left me (after several rounds of bourbon and branch water) with the vision of gigantic telephone kiosks in every High Street where eager shoppers, by inserting coins and dialling appropriate numbers, could get the latest processed data on twin-tub washing machines, oral contraceptives, medium-sized refrigerators and other appurtenances of the sweet life.
Meanwhile, the nearest approach to this shoppers' Utopia exists in Vienna. There the herein fur Konsumenteninformation relies not on raimputer but on a corps of highly trained personal advisers. The advisers are drawn from this consumer organisation's own testing and research staff and from independent experts in the physical and domestic sciences, economics and law. They take it in turns to be available for consultation in the afternoon and evening of most weekdays and every Saturday. Announcements are made by leaflet and advertisement and on the radio, indicating what demonstrations and Leslie Adrian is on holiday. Peter Goldman is the director of the Consumers' Association. buying advice will be given on specific days.
This advisory centre gives the Austrians the edge on consumer organisations that simply pro- duce a magazine. Their programme of compara- tive testing may be less impressive than the American or the British or the German. But such guidance as they give is available at the time and in the place where most of the relevant shopping decisions are taken. Their advisory centre is, in fact, superbly located. It is plumb in the middle of Mariahilferstrasse, the Oxford Street of Vienna, where the large department stores are found and where all but the more moneyed Viennese appear to make their major purchases.
The accessibility of the advisory centre, how- ever. would be of small account were it not for the acceptability of the advice given. Such verbal advice can often be more up-to-date than that in publications. It can be hand-tailored to the cir- cumstances and requirements of individual shoppers. It can get things clear by argument and counter-argument. Above all, it can be demon- strated: for the advisory centre's showrooms can house exhibitions of the competing brands of major consumer durable. In this way would-be purchasers are able to examine the available pro- ducts (with their test ratings) in conditions free from. sales pressure.
They come in droves. The advisory centre now has close on 250,000 inquirers yearly—a remark- able figure for a city whose population is well under two millions. Moreover, good verbal advice has not proved competitive with good published advice. The Austrian experience is that the advisory centre provides the best possible means of recruiting new readers for their test magazine. But Konsument is no exception to the rule that test magazines, being semi-technical, require efforts of critical concentration which large num- bers of people are unable or unwilling to give. It is to such people—with their pre-shopping questions and their post-shopping complaints— that the advisory centre especially caters.
Can the Austrian example be followed in this country? It would be pleasant to think so, and proper to try. Four long years have passed since the Molony Committee consigned comparative test information to the safe keeping of the educa- tionally privileged. They honestly believed that `dangers' would attend its dissemination to 'con- sumers of lesser wisdom,' and viewed 'with a certain amount of trepidation' the beginnings of the BBC's television programme Choice. It seems not to have occurred to them that there was a question of social justice involved here: that it is precisely the educationally under-privileged who are most vulnerable to misinformation, least able to afford expensive mistakes, and therefore most in need of independent assessments and guidance.
Fortunately the climate has changed. So muchf so that the Reith Report on advertising, published this summer, expressed certain anxieties about the 'pin-prick' circulation and one-class support of Which?. The report's facts were not accurate. Which? reaches some three million people in all —quite apart from the mass audience for Choice —and draws about one-third of its membership from the lower middle and skilled working classes. All the same, the report's anxieties were not without some substance. It is certainly time to take a modest leaf or two out of the Viennese book.
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