Variety is the spice of life (or is it?)

So week 1 into my Havas Lofts experience in NY and my first blog post… I’m going to kick off with a slightly random topic — chilled drinks cabinets in average NY stores…

It’s incredible, at least 20 different flavours of Gatorade and sports drinks, at least 20 varieties of ice tea and then all the usual soda/soft drink brands you’d expect, coke, pepsi, snapple etc (albeit with a few more variations of these as well!)

I love it, I end up buying one pretty much every time I walk past a shop! Now the weather is hot here and as a result it is important to stay hydrated but I would probably never buy these type of drinks back home. So this got me wondering about the nature of choice and how this impacts on consumer decision making. Clearly in this case it has worked, the choice and variety put on offer has made me make a purchase when I otherwise probably wouldn’t. And whilst I am a marketers dream, willing to try anything with fancy packaging, despite my knowledge of marketeers tricks, it seems the opportunity to try something different is clearly a powerful factor for most people in purchase decision.

However, lots of choice on offer hasn’t always had a positive impact on my purchase decisions here… On my first night in NY, after a long flight, I wanted to go and grab something to eat, something local and easy… Upon exploring the local area near my apartment I was surrounded by options, pretty much every cuisine you could imagine! I was walking around thinking I would love to try this and that… until I got exhausted from all the choice! So unable to make a decision I ended up going home and ordered takeout Chinese instead… So clearly variety is important but choice can be both a positive and negative and therefore a dilemma to marketers — what is the right balance?

Fortunately, there are many people more intelligent and more educated in these matters than myself that have written extensively on this subject, and are able to offer some insight into the consumer choice process, as well as some strategies to tackle the dilemma. It’s a little long, but if you’re interested in reading more, then I found this research paper online that covers the subject in detail: http://www.chernev.com/research/articles/ProductAssortmentReview_Chernev_2012.pdf

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