.the Thorn In Jaguar's Side
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday September 5, 1986
SEPTEMBER'S will be a very '80s issue of Choice. The cover story, which will have America's Cup suppliers rushing to the stands on Wednesday to vilify or defend the choice of Moet et Chandon as the official Cup tipple, will be on champagne.
There'll be another instalment on microwave ovens, a story on computer printers, how to make the most of your savings and a look at cosmetic surgery
It's a far cry from Choice's first humble publication on March 1, 1960, which reprinted stories on shampoo and slimming from the British magazine Which? and launched Australian content with analyses of aspirin tablets and "an informative article on frozen foods".
And the readership, which was then a modest 5,000, will be about 800,000 -207,000 subscribers, supplemented by avid consumers.
But more voracious readers still will be the manufacturers, for whom a good word from Choice and the Australian Consumers' Association - the only"completely independent, non-profit, non-political organisation" in the Australian marketplace - can literally mean boom or bust.
In 27 years, Choice's supporters say it has become a social force with "the potential to equal the trade union movement". The genesis of the Department of Consumer Affairs, it has been largely responsible recently for changes to the Commonwealth Health Department, a review of the electronic funds transfer system and recent amendments to the Trade Practices Act.
And there have been, naturally enough, industry casualties.
The most recent is the luxury Jaguar, which the magazine said last month was"well below average" and the least reliable car on Australian roads.
Jaguar's Australian distributor, JRA Ltd, was upset. According to JRA's corporate affairs manager, John Crawford, Choice's "sampling methods, compilation and presentation of results are highly suspect".
Only 24 of a possible 12,000 vehicles were sampled, he said, - a bad comparison with "most respectable market research studies, which would consider a survey of 100 cars borderline, 50 definitely suspect and anything below that number simply inadmissible."
And, he complained, the average age of those was seven years - a particularly bad time for Jags, which were then "suffering from enormous quality problems"
Choice did point out that "they don't build them like they used to," but John Crawford argues that its reference to those problems "read like a disclaimer. It was grandstanding . . . cheap tricks".
Despite predictions in 1984 by the then ACA chairman, Judge Paul Stein, that"if we continue to be effective, and corporations feel they are being hurt by it, then they are bound to counter attack" and that "we are seeing the first seeds of that now," Choice is proud of the fact that "we've never had to settle an action . . . people have just given up or stopped in mid-flight".
It's because "everything we write has to be strictly correct and we have to be ready to attest to that in a court of law," says the manager of ACA's public affairs department, Philippa Smith.
It's also because court action can rebound against the claimant, as it did last year when Macro Vitamins claimed damages under the Trade Practices Act for a Choice ad.
ACA lodged a cross-claim that Macro Vitamin's failure to disclose the presence of the artificial colours amaranth and tartrazine in its list of contents on Macro B was misleading. The Federal Court decision prevented Choice from using the ad, but it also required the manufacturer either to remove the colours from Macro B or disclose their presence.
Whatever the reason, the integrity of Choice is rarely challenged, and few manufacturers who have fared badly by it are as outspoken as JRA.
Choice's tests, which cost about $10,000 an article (less if there's no laboratory work), are invariably the issue in any strained relations. It has been criticised for adopting an American rather than European standard of testing and for basing its results on one test alone, rather than on a battery of cross-tests.
And, as Norm Krieke, of Toshiba, points out, "over the years there was some animosity among manufacturers in all fields over the fact that Choice tested products and published the results without notifying them".
While the products it tests are still bought anonymously off the supermarket or department store shelves, Choice has markedly improved industry relations since 1981 by sending the manufacturer involved a schedule of test results.
The firm then has the option to rectify faults or defects or take the product off the market before the results go to press.
Manufacturers respond to Choice tests in what Philippa Smith calls "a very positive liaison". Executives from National, for example, were so worried about Choice's findings on a dishwasher a few years ago they flew from Japan to discuss improvements. An air-conditioner manufacturer redesigned its product after a Choice schedule last year, and a washing machine with a fake approval number was withdrawn from the market before Choice spilt the beans earlier this year.
© 1986 Sydney Morning Herald