The Paradox of Choice: Fewer is Better
August 20th 2007 08:08 pm
Many people want to keep their options open. They feel restricted when they don’t have enough choice. But there is a dark side to choice. Malcom Gladwell, in his book Blink, illustrates that the more options people are presented with, the less likely they are to choose one. Gladwell explains this futher with the story of an experiment conducted by Sheena Iyengar:
She once conducted another experiment in which she set up a tasting booth with a variety of exotic gourmet jams at the upscale grocery store Draeger’s in Menlo Park, California. Sometimes the booth had six different jams, and sometimes Iyengar had twenty-four different jams on display. She wanted to see whether the number of jam choices made any difference in the number of jams sold. Conventional economic wisdom, of course, says that the more choices consumers have, the more likely they are to buy, because it is easier for consumers to find the jam that perfectly fits their needs. But Iyengar found the opposite to be true. Thirty percent of those who stopped by the six-choice booth ended up buying some jam, while only 3 percent of those who stopped by the bigger booth bought anything. Why is that? Because buying jam is a snap decision. You say to yourself, instinctively, I want that one. And if you are given too many choices, if you are forced to consider much more than your unconscious is comfortable with, you get paralyzed. Snap judgments can be made in a snap because they are frugal, and if we want to protect our snap judgments, we have to take steps to protect that frugality.
I found the above quote from blog.vortexdna.com. I’ve been wanting to write on this for a while (not to solicit brownie points, but I did read the book), and got inspired all over again when I saw this post. The post there deals primarily with user interface design. A pet peeve of mine is when Web sites present too much choice. A well designed interface, be it a Web site, a cell phone, or a household appliance, should not present the user with too many options at once. If you are on a Web site and they ask you to download their free sample, and sign up for their newsletter, and check out their CEO’s blog, or the company wiki, what are you likely to do? Personally, when I’m looking for something specific, and I can’t find it, I go back to Google, and continue my search. I am definitely not going to wade through someone else’s disorder.
Business, too, can learn from this study. As an overarching strategy, customer service, customer evangelism, has become the latest holy grail. Simply providing a superior product is not enough. You must provide a superior experience. And, even if your product is inferior to the competitions, with a superior experience, your company can become very successful.
Yet there’s more. One way to reduce the amount of choice your clients and prospects have to make is to build solid relationships with them. If your customers already have had a superior experience with your company, they likely will trust you with more responsibility. The more other people can trust you and your company, the fewer decisions they have to make. And if they have fewer choices to make, your customer service scores will soar.
Of course, the key to this is not to take choice away from someone not willing to part with it. That’s the part where the relationship building comes into play. Companies that build their business plans and mission statements around their customers (and not around their own internal structure) are the ones that will have a sincerity that will support a positive relationship building process.
Don’t focus on creating shareholder value, but on doing the right thing for the customer. That’s not to say that shareholder value isn’t worth anything, but if you don’t have customer’s, you don’t have a business. By doing what’s right for the customer, you will be rewarded with profit.
Stumble it!
