雅思阅读机经：[3]2013年6月8日part3

Reading Passage 3 Title: Psychology of New Product Adoption(新产品接受研究) Question types: Multiple Choice Complete each sentence with the correct ending(句子配对) YES/NO/NOT GIVEN 文章内容回顾： 商业营销类话题 往期真题详细参考(20101120): 题型:四选一Multiple Choice (5); Matching; T / F / NG 文章内容: 关于经济学相对优势的问题。内容有讲到企业与创新,并分析了一些消费者心理,同有各路专家出来给出解释。印象比较深刻的观点是说消费者会拿商品和自己已有的物品比较进行主观判断,而且总体上购买欲是比较消极的。有俩实验: 一个是让两组人分别扮演买者和卖者,对一批咖啡杯进行估价,卖者永远比买者估价高出一倍左右。 另一个是三组小朋友,一组可以任意选择被告知价格差不多的咖啡杯和瑞士巧克力,第二组有咖啡杯但他们可以选择用自己的咖啡杯去换巧克力,第三组有巧克力但可以选择用自己的巧克力换咖啡杯。结果已经有咖啡杯或巧克力的人,只有10%左右愿意拿手头的东西换新的。于是各路专家继续解释。 原文拓展阅读:Understanding the Psychology of New-ProductAdoption More than a century ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson is reported to have said, “If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.” If only marketing innovations were that simple. In today’s hypercompetitive marketplace, companies that successfully introduce new products are more likely to flourish than those that don’t. Businesses spend billions of dollars making better “mousetraps” only to find consumers roundly rejecting them. Studies show that new products fail at the stunning rate of between 40% and 90%, depending on the category, and the odds haven’t changed much in the past 25 years. In the U.S. packaged goods industry, for instance, companies introduce 30,000 products every year, but 70% to 90% of them don’t stay on store shelves for more than 12 months. Most innovative products—those that create new product categories or revolutionize old ones—are also unsuccessful. According to one study, 47% of first movers have failed, meaning that approximately half the companies that pioneered new product categories later pulled out of those businesses. Consider three high-profile innovations whose performances have fallen far short of expectations: Webvan spent more than $1 billion to create an online grocery business, only to declare bankruptcy in July 2001 after failing to attract as many customers as it thought it would. In spite of gaining the support of Apple’s Steve Jobs, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and many high-profile investors, Segway sold a mere 6,000 scooters in the 18 months after its launch—a far cry from the 50,000 to 100,000 units projected. Although TiVo’s digital video recorder (DVR) has garnered rave reviews since the late 1990s from both industry experts and product adopters, the company had amassed $600 million in operating losses by 2005 because demand trailed expectations. After the fact, experts and novices alike tend to dismiss unsuccessful innovations as bad ideas that were destined to fail. But surely that’s too simple an explanation. If these innovations are so misguided, why isn’t it obvious before the fact? Webvan was backed by seasoned retailers, executives, and investment bankers, but it was nonetheless a spectacular failure. While the Segway and TiVo stories have yet to play out fully, both company executives and industry analysts were far more optimistic about those innovations than they should have been. Why do consumers fail to buy innovative products even when they offer distinct improvements over existing ones? Why do companies invariably have more faith in new products than is warranted? Few would question the objective advantages of many innovations over existing alternatives, but that’s often not enough for them to succeed. To understand why new products fail to live up to companies’ expectations, we must delve into the psychology of behavior change. This article presents a behavioral framework that explains why so many products fail and outlines some actions that companies can take to improve their chances of success. New products often require consumers to change their behavior. As companies know,those behavior changes entail costs. Consumers incur transaction costs, such as the activation fees they have to pay when they switch from one cellular service provider to another.They also bear learning costs, such as when they shift from manual to automatic automo-bile transmissions. People sustain obsolescence costs, too. For example, when they switch from VCRs to DVD players, their video-tape collections become useless. All of these are economic switching costs that most companies routinely anticipate. What businesses don’t take into account,however, are the psychological costs associated with behavior change. Many products fail be-cause of a universal, but largely ignored, psychological bias: People irrationally over value benefits they currently possess relative to those they don’t. The bias leads consumers to value the advantages of products they own more than the benefits of new ones. It also leads executives to value the benefits of innovations they’ve developed over the advantages of in-cumbent products. That leads to a clash in perspectives: Executives, who irrationally overvalue their innovations, must predict the buying behavior of consumers, who irrationally overvalue existing alternatives. The results are often disastrous:Consumers reject new products that would make them better off, while executives are at a loss to anticipate failure. This double-edged bias is the curse of innovation.