Give your customers choice — don’t force them to make decisions
Imagine this, one day you walk into a shop and near the checkout is a stall, one of those ones that gives free samples of new produce. On this day the stall has six different flavours of jam. You can taste test each of them, and if there’s one that takes your fancy, you’ll get a discount voucher for it.
A little while later, you return to the store and there’s another stall promoting jam. The process is the same as before, you can test each of the flavours,and if you like one you’ll get a discount voucher. This time, rather than six, there are 24 flavours to pick from.
In some social psychology circles this experiment has something of a cult fandom, in others is a cliche. But, either way, it illustrates an important point — there’s a significant difference between choice and decision.
Over the years I’ve had many long conversations with clients about how to manage choice and options. Usually, clients draw a parallel between more choice and increased sales — the reasoning here usually falls into two camps,
- ‘In giving customers more options we’re giving them more control. If the customer feels in control they’ll select us over our competitors’
- ‘If we don’t show everything on here our customers will never find it’
Essentially, both of these arguments can be classified as FOMO — fear of missing out. Clients fear that if they don’t show EVERYTHING to the customer up-front then the customer will never buy it. But more choice = more sales logic doesn’t hold up. In giving customers more options we require customer to make more decisions.
Decisions, decisions…
A few years ago I was in the market for a new TV. My needs were relatively simple — it had to be HD, it needed a digital tuner, 40” would be great (42” even better). After an hour or so checking the prices between various stores I settled on a model. At €875 it was more expensive than I expected BUT it was on sale. Once I’d made my choice the sales assistant pointed to another model; the specs were similar, but this one had 4K — it cost €928.
€53 isn’t much, not in comparison to the cost of the two devices, but I couldn’t bring myself to spend over €900, it was a step too far. The psychological barrier of spending over €900 was far greater than the benefits of 4K.
We make a significant mistake when we assume that the decision-making process is a logical one. When brands think about their customers they often forget that circumstances and emotions often play a more important role in how they make decisions.
It’s called bounded rationality, in essence we can think about decisions as a formula; decisions = circumstance (knowledge + time) + emotion. Since brands cannot control their customers’ emotions they must focus on the other part of the equation, circumstance.
In general circumstance can be improved through branding, store ambiance (think Apple Stores), and anchoring (the ability to easily compare the product to others on the market). Specifically, customer knowledge can be improved through promotion, appropriate on-site copy, and staff training.
In giving customers too many options, brands dilute their customers’ ability to easily learn about the product, and they reduce customers’ time to explore the product, and they undermine the circumstances in which the decision to buy is being made.
In short, giving customers too many options burdens them with making more decisions. It pushes the responsibility for product or service education away from the brand and onto the customer.
Customers shouldn’t have to sell your product to themselves by wading through pages of competing services, or shelves of similar products. Your brand should be the one doing the selling, and that means making smart choices about what you show, when, and how you show it.
