Which power is most directly associated with reducing customer inertia by high switching costs?

• A. Cornered resource
• B. Switching costs
• C. Scale economies
• D. Branding

Answer: (B)

Switching costs are the mechanism that directly reduces customer inertia. When a company raises the cost, effort, or time required to move to a competitor—such as data migration, retraining, reconfiguring workflows, or losing integrated features—the temptation to switch decreases. The higher those costs, the more customers stay with their current provider, even if alternatives exist. That makes switching costs the most direct way to dampen inertia. By contrast, cornered resource is about control over scarce inputs, scale economies about cost advantages from size, and branding about perception and loyalty—none of which implement the concrete, frictionful barrier to switching that switching costs do.