Not in the telecoms arena in this country though. Consumers don’t have much choice at all and it shows. Landline wise, eircom dominate it all. What do we have? The hioghest line rental rate in the whole of the EU. €8 per month more than the EU average and €6 more than the next most expensive country.

And for the mobile market, 3 telecom companies, and yet Ireland has the highest ARPU in the EU and one of the highest in the world. Telecoms spend in this country is massive, do we really have choice?

There’s really 2 reasons behind a single company offering so many choices. Firstly, rather than it being a consumer choice between Magnum and say 9 other competing brands, it’s a choice between 5 Magnum offerings and 5 other products - so they increase their market share by introducing products that seem to compete with themselves.

Secondly, the new age of consumerism is ‘massclusivity’ - where people want exclusive, custom versions of mass produced products. Okay, Magnum or HB are never going to fill this with different brands of ice cream, since you can’t actually customise them in any way (unless they let you buy on-line, but surely they’d have melted before you’d get it !!!) but having only slightly different products allows individual taste selection.

I take your point about confusion though … consumers don’t want ‘massclusive’ versions of simple, commodity products like sweets and ice cream.