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by Don Moyer

Don Moyer can be reached at

[e-mail]

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Harvard Business Review Online | Opt Artists

Your customers love choices, but too many can paralyze them. Thirty-plus PDAs. Eighty SUVs. Four thousand

mutual funds. Overwhelmed by abundance, they may leave the marketplace empty-handed. It’s easier to

postpone a buying decision than to wade through all those options.

But no one is hankering for the any-color-as-long-as-it’s-black Model T. What they want is advice. An informed

opinion. Direction from an intermediary who relishes the quest to find the best and is generous with insights

about superior goods and services.

Consumer Reports has played that role for 68 years; today shopping advice Web sites proliferate while Malcolm

Gladwell’s mavens adjudicate on the best cappuccino in Manhattan. In fact, how many buyers of Gladwell’s best-

seller The Tipping Point were influenced by praise from such canny critics as George Stephanopoulos and Michael

Lewis?

If a product’s quality speaks for itself but no one can hear it, does it make a sound? In a noisy marketplace,

target the mouths that matter.

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