The Art of Choice Pt. 2

In a prior blog we discussed some of the down sides of presenting your customer with too many choices. Now let's take a look at the converse side: having too few choices. Malcolm Gladwell is known as a pioneer in researching the way humans make decisions. Gladwell discusses the benefits of offering your customers a vast array of choices to target each different market segment. He expands on the efforts of a phychophysicist Howard Moskowitz who is famous for reinventing spaghetti sauce.

Gladwell points out that in working with various brands such as Pepsi, Vlasic and Prego, that no company will ever discover one right item that will capture the entire market. For years and years, Pepsi researched the ingredients for the perfect Pepsi, when in fact Moskowitz insisted that there is no 'perfect Pepsi' only 'perfect Pepsis'.

When working with Prego, Moskowitz found after conducting extensive research that Americans craved 'extra-chunky' spaghetti sauce as opposed to traditional plain sauce. Ten years (and 36 more flavors of spaghetti sauce) later, Prego has made 600 million dollars in revenue thanks to their line of extra chunky sauces.

While having a wide array of choice may be either beneficial or detrimental, on thing can be understood from the lessons of both Malcolm Gladwell and Sheena Iyengar: If you don't listen to your market, you may miss your biggest opportunity for growth.

The Art of Choice Pt. 1

We all think we are great at making choices. Whether it's going into the grocery store and choosing a tub of ice cream to eat after dinner, or going to the mall to pick out a new pair of dress pants, we all like to think we are somewhat educated in why and how we make decisions.

Sheena Iyenger, a psycho analyst with an PhD in psychology from Stanford, has done a large number of studies on the art of choice, and how and why we make the decisions we do. Iyenger fostered an experiment in a grocery store involving jam. The focus of her study was to determine whether a different amount of choices (a lot of choices or a few) had an effect on the types of choices people made (or if they made a choice at all). Iyenger set up a sample-tasting station in a grocery store. First, she set up a station with 6 different flavors of jam, and then a station with 24 different flavors of jam. Iyenger found that with a station of 24 jams, 60% of people stopped to try the jam as compared to 40% of people with the 6 jars of jam. Conversely, of the people who stopped at the 24-jar station, only 3% of customers actually purchased a jar, whereas 30% of customers purchased a jar of name at the station of 6 jars.

In addition to her study, Iyenger argues that when providing people a vast array of choices, they tend to act in the following ways: Delaying choice, making worse choices, choosing something that makes them less satisfied, or not choosing anything at all! Iyenger argues that less truly is more when it comes to marketing different options to your customers! Whether or not this is true for your product and industry is for you to decide.