photo credit Mannobhai / Manoj Jacob
It is easy to think that more choice has to be a good thing. After all, if you are free to choose whatever you want that must be better than being forced to use something you don’t particularly want. But there is a growing body of evidence to show that people are confronted with too many choices in matters big and small, from salad dressings to pension investment choices, and this is actually inhibiting them.
In cases where we are experts or connoisseurs, we may have very specific preferences or can simply identify what we prefer from a wide selection of choices. But in many other areas the options we have to choose from are unfamiliar to us. There will be a cost, usually in terms of time, to investigate all of these options. People have busy lives, and when confronted by the mountain of extra work, their reaction is simply to “switch off” and they frequently don’t choose anything.
An experiment was conducted by a behavioural psychologist, Sheena Iyenger, in which people at a supermarket were invited to try different flavours of jam from a particular manufacturer. When people were offered six different flavours 30 percent of the people bought a jar of the flavour they preferred. When there were 24 flavours offered only 3 percent of people went on to buy a jar.
Other studies have shown that when people are given a selection of different company pension funds to invest in, the more funds that they have to choose from the less they end up investing. For every 10 funds, the investment level dropped by 2 percent.
In a TED Talk Professor Barry Schwartz explains four aspects of this paradox of more choice making us less happy and stopping us choosing at all:
- It is easy to imagine that there is a better choice and we regret that we did not pick it,
- Even if we are happy with what we chose we still feel we may be missing out on other choices,
- With so much choice we expect there to be a perfect choice and if our choice is not perfect we feel let down,
- Because we were free to choose, we must be to blame if we made the wrong choice.
There are lessons here for life, but this is also something that anyone selling a product or service should bear in mind. If you offer something where people know exactly what they want, then choice can be a good thing.
But where customers might not come with the necessary experience or knowledge of the full range of possibilities, you might actually improve your offering by giving them a smaller selection of options which are likely to satisfy the normal range of wants. This could have other business advantages such as better stock turnover and reducing slow moving items.
Another approach is to keep the full range of options but use your knowledge and expertise to identify a smaller selection of choices which cover the normal range. By clearly promoting this smaller range for the bulk of customers it will not be too daunting for the less experienced customers. And this does not prevent you from offering more choices to those customers who have more experience or a greater understanding of your type of products or services.
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