Less is More: How small retail companies leverage choice overload to grow

Understanding brand success through behavioral economics

Glossier: A Case Study in Reduction

Glossier is absolutely the coolest company right now and also perfectly illustrates how success can be achieved by limiting choices. I own the entirety of their line, save for one or two odd items that honestly, I’m probably going to buy later. Fans eager to buy every single item you put out is pure business fantasy, but Glossier has managed to do just that. Growing such dedicated customers isn’t as simple as picking the top sellers and culling the herd though. Framing the right rationale for limiting choice is extremely important because of the very rational question that customers will have:

Why would you pay for a smaller selection when you can have a larger one at the same price?

In Glossier’s specific case, the question is why you would want a single face cleanser when we have the choice between all those other cleansers that tout themselves as perfectly crafted for our individual concerns (aging, oily, dry, etc)?

Screenshot of Glossier’s Website

The success of their pared-down approach is thanks to the combined forces of choice overload, framing, and beautiful advertisements.

Before launching into problems with framing for small selections, let’s first look at the business difficulties with keeping a small product selection:

1. Risk. With a smaller amount of individual products, the risk inherent to each existing product is more significant. Example: 1/10 products fail vs 2/20 products. Even if the expected values for failure are the same, risk of failing more is higher with less products due to its smaller sample size. Click for a visual explanation of how sample size impacts distribution.
2. Narrower audience (theoretically). It’s akin to catching fish by casting multiple smaller nets vs. casting one wide net. This strategy is super common in advertising, as evidenced by the industry’s obsession with segmentation. The hope is that if you’re more strongly targeting a smaller audience, you can tailor your message to strike more accurately. If you have only one product, the assumption is that it will be sort of relevant to everyone, but extremely relevant to few.
3. Downtime. Longer durations between product releases. Easy to see why that’s a terrifying thing. Attention spans are shortening and you don’t want to get on the wrong side of that battle. You can guess who won out between The Atlantic vs. Buzzfeed.
4. No Discounting. Sales can’t be used as a strategy nearly as often, because of the likelihood of devaluing the brand as a whole. Ex. Discounting 3 items in 10, means 30% of of your products on sale, while discounting 3 items in 20, means only 15% of your products are on sale.

These are all questions most industries grapple with daily. Large companies struggle to limit items or features because large companies are designed to be risk-averse. A larger company is working with much larger sums and the fear of losing larger sums apply.

Now that we’ve talked enough about why it’s scary to curate (especially big businesses), let’s talk about why it can be fantastic to cull:

1. Scale. It is infinitely easier to scale up production of your product . Assuming you built your product with some semblance of efficiency, it should always be cheaper to manufacture more of one product than a few items of several products.
2. Consistency. It’s so much easier to assure every customer gets the same great experience, from the product to the buying experience. Imagine having 10 different stores. This is also why newer online companies are trending toward small product releases (Glossier, Everlane, Casper), rather than seasonal collections. It makes sense because small releases simultaneously fix the problem of downtime and also encourages undivided attention on each product. Research has shown experiences are more valuable than material, which is why increasingly, companies that provide great experiences are edging out those who are competing for the lowest bottom like.
3. Organization. It’s far easier to craft a cohesive and understandable vision of your company with less products. The time that would have been spent coming up with new copy for each product and demographic can be put toward refining the fewer messages you need. Just imagine trying to evalute 5 different strategies each for 10 different age groups. That’s 50 different strategies to test and evaluate already! Can you imagine how expensive it would be to test all those hypotheses? Complexity definitely increases exponentially.
4. Longevity. Items have a longer shelf life. This strategy assumes you’re trading off a larger product selection for a smaller proportion of quality products. Less items also lowers customer burnout by giving them a chance to recuperate their losses and buy your next item without guilt. More are likely to want that last item to finish their collection rather than one more item in the mass of releases.

The Glossier Experience

Glossier vs Choice Overload

Glossier has an extremely edited selection of products. They have exactly 1 cleanser, 1 moisturizer, 1 face mist, 1 skin tint, etc. Their color products are also similarly edited. 1 lipstick, 4 colors only.

This might seem obvious to some, but if you compare to other beauty brands at launch, this small of a collection unheard of! Glossier might have color products now, but they started out offering just four skincare products. Even now, there are only 7 skincare products! That might sound like a lot, but let’s see what a comparable brand has:

Glossier Vs Framing

Reducing your selection is risky, especially when the norm in the industry is to cover all the bases. The reigning theme amongst skincare marketing is all forms of “X product is going to be the best at correcting all Y problems,” like this:

For color products, it’s “M product has so many shades that you’re definitely going to find a color to suit you,” example here:

Screenshot from Maybelline’s US website

Everyone’s competing to put forth the same message, so when you’re contradicting this dogma, your product will naturally garner way more attention than trying to compete for the same objectives of “most effective etc etc”.

Let’s see two ways the contradicting message can be framed:

1. “Do you suit product A?”
2. “Who doesn’t suit product A?”

The two statements technically ask the same thing, but they start with different premises, or frames. Statement 1 is the question that gets asked with most product marketing, Statement 2 is what Glossier does.

Glossier’s message is genius because it shifts the burden of being unique onto you, rather than the product itself.

The message simultaneously flatters you by reminding you that you’re unique, as well as establishing themselves as unique for doing so. Glossier draws your attention not by reminding you of problems you have, but by putting forth an image of a person you aspire to be. Their beautiful advertisements and packaging establish credibility themselves and their message, which is necessary when you’re doing something so revolutionary. No one trusts a company with a bad website ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

In a behavioral laboratory, isolated effects are the goal. Applying them to real life means the interplay between different effects is becomes a subject of study too.

A brand can reduce its selection, change marketing, and make better advertisements, but the application has to be seamless and make sense, for the principals to work in the best capacity. You don’t want unintended consequences.

Companies always talk of being customer focused, but that often stops being the case when marketing. Product design is customer focused but marketing always ends up being product focused. The transitive property doesn’t work, and that’s how the customer focused mindset dies out.

Especially in a world where your senses are constantly being assaulted by notifications and calls to answer, customer loyalty is more important than ever. A cult following could be the difference between fading into irrelevance or being given a second chance.

Retail is a competitive market, but the saturated market is precisely the reason why having less stands out more.

Also because you deserve 20% off their products for reading so far: http://bff.glossier.com/db2lo (Look how cute their referral links are!)

I’m not associated with them in any way, just a fan of their products who wanted to talk about their business.

Not convinced yet?
Shoot me over some counterexamples and let’s discuss.