Another marketing catastrophe: the Medicare drug benefit

A front page article in the New York Times notes the profound confusion around the new Medicare drug benefit being marketed to senior citizens. We noted the issues of giving people too many choices and the analysis paralysis it would create nearly a year and a half ago in our article on the tyranny of too much. Ordinary consumers find themselves paralyzed by too much choice in toothpaste; imagine the stress created by being confronted with thirty or more plans with varying coverage of drugs (not all of which are publicized) upon which you are dependent.

Regardless of what you think of the policy, this is a marketing disaster. The only possible way to make it easy for consumers to deal with would be to publish a large comparison table of all the plans. But the insurers would never support this, and the table would be too big to comprehend anyway. And what is even worse is the fact that even if a consumer evaluates all the plans and makes the best choice for themselves, few will ever be confident that it actually was their best choice. It's the perfect lose-lose marketing plan, guaranteed to make even good customers dissatisfied with the results.

Technorati Tags: Marketing Measurement, Medicare, Tyranny of too much