Paul J. Richards/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesComputer shoppers at a Best Buy store in Fairfax, Va, last month.Are people suffering from gadget overload? Are they exhausted by the consumer equivalent of the brain fatigue — information overload — that is caused by a constant updates of devices and online media?
Underwriters Laboratories, the venerable nonprofit product testing and certification organization, issued a study last week that found about half of consumers, 48 percent, “feel high-tech manufacturers bring new products to market faster than people need them.”
It helps to dig a bit further into the clues included in the 42-page report.
The report was based on interviews with 1,200 consumers in four countries, the United States, Germany, India and China. And 1,200 manufacturers were interviewed in the four countries. High technology was one of four industries examined in depth; the other three were building materials, food and household chemicals.
The consumers’ sense that high-tech companies bring out products faster than needed suggests two possible explanations. The first, obvious one is that the pace of innovation is too fast for consumers.
The second, less obvious explanation is that, in fact, innovation is too slow. That is, the new offerings companies are pushing out the door every six months or so are me-too products or ones with a just couple of new features or design tweaks. Marketing schedules, not product innovation, are driving the corporate train.
Manufacturers in America valued “speed to market” more than in other countries, the report found.
In an interview on Friday, Sara Greenstein, U.L.’s chief strategy officer, offered her interpretation of the survey results. “Innovation is too fast only if corners are cut,” she said.
For the high-tech sector, there are a few other intriguing findings in the report. Consumers, understandably, are less concerned about safety in high-tech products than categories like fresh and processed food. But their top safety concerns are emissions and wireless radio waves. Many people, it seems, are uneasy living in a thickening cloud of radio waves from cellphone towers, Wi-Fi hot spots and the gadgets they communicate with.
A finding that was a bit surprising is that to consumers, the innards of high-tech devices do apparently matter. Some 55 percent of consumers, according to the report, said that they are “more concerned about where high-tech parts/components come from than where the product was assembled.”
The report doesn’t really say how that information — “traceability,” U.L. calls it — would actually affect consumer buying decisions. It could be complicated. Manufacturing companies on average, the report says, rely on more than 35 contract suppliers around the world to create a single product. That number would be higher for a smartphone or laptop.
But maybe some sort of supply-chain labeling, like a tiny color-coded map of the world, showing where parts come from in a product? “We’re working on it,” Ms. Greenstein said.