The big, fat middle is decaying

"When I began my career as a retail marketer in the early 1990s, pricing just about any product or service was a cinch as long as you followed one simple formula. The "good, better, best" pricing convention that most retail marketers had used for the last 6o years was a surefire model for pricing just about anything from TVs to tennis rackets. Anywhere you shopped, you would have likely seen this simple three-tier pricing model in action. It was ironclad! "Good" was the entry-level line in a category. It was engineered, as one might guess, to be just good enough so as to be passable from a quality standpoint, but not so good as to deliver outstanding performance.
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There are a few reasons why this model worked so well. First of all, three choices are manageable from an analytical perspective—a choice of three doesn't confuse our brains the way more choices would. Second, the system allays two of the shopper's greatest fears: spending too little and getting crap, or spending too much and getting ripped off. But there's another overarching reason why good, better, best worked. Most customers felt that they belonged to the middle. They felt that their lifestyles, their economic states and therefore their product needs were no better or worse than average. The average choice was the most popular choice because most people ate, played, stayed, wore, drove, and wanted to be in the middle. The middle was what they aspired to. The middle was where they lived! (Moi ici: O Normalistão era o oposto de Mongo, ou seja o Estranhistão)
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The hard truth is that the big, fat middle is decaying - and has been for more than 30 years. More people are leaving the middle class each year than are joining it. A small percentage of the wealthy are accounting for greater and greater proportions of consumer outlays, and the rest of us are barely matching that small, elite percentage's spending power. In this landscape, being "good" just won't cut it anymore. My parents were satisfied to settle for average - today's consumer will not. So if you're still shooting for the middle, I'm afraid you'll miss every time, because the middle, as we knew it, is gone for good."

Em sintonia com os relatos sobre a polarização dos mercados.

Trechos retirados de "The Retail Revival: Reimagining Business for the New Age of Consumerism" de Doug Stephens.