It's a beautiful sunny day and you find yourself at a market, a tourist trap or a pop-up shop and though there are a lot of great items, you cant choose. Why? Too much choice is actually worse for our decision-making.
You are expecting me to say it is choice overload and that is one of the reasons you cannot choose (I experienced this trying to choose a tartan scarf in a tourist trap in Scotland).
Choice overload, or "over choice", is a phenomenon stating our tendency to have difficulty choosing if presented with numerous options.
Business owners think we need to have options in order to make a purchase but it has been proven otherwise with a simple study on Jam. find it here
This is the Paradox of Choice. This concept from psychologist Barry Schwartz suggests that the more options we have, the less satisfied we feel with our decisions. This phenomenon occurs because having too many choices requires more mental decision-making effort, leading to decision fatigue and increased regret over our choices.
Less options are more likely to produce sales.
BUT, what do you eliminate?
If you have all of the fruit jams, that's a reasonable set of options, but once you get into combinations or twists, that's where it gets tricky.
It is easier for consumers to choose between raspberry or blueberry as flavours, strawberry or marmalade, but it is more difficult for us to choose between strawberry cinnamon flavour and strawberry chai flavour. Since these two flavours are closely related, and both equally intriguing, they are more likely to give us buyer's remorse.
Overchoice is the phenomenon of overchoice occurs when many equivalent choices are available. Making a decision becomes overwhelming due to the many potential outcomes and risks that may result from making the wrong choice. Having too many approximately equally good options is mentally draining because each option must be weighed against alternatives to select the best one.
Initially, more choices lead to more satisfaction, but as the number of choices increases it then peaks and people tend to feel more pressure, confusion, and potentially dissatisfaction with their choice. Although larger choice sets can be initially appealing, smaller choice sets lead to increased satisfaction and reduced regret. Another component of overchoice is the perception of time. Extensive choice sets can seem even more difficult with a limited time constraint. (Wikipedia)
If you have ever booked a flight, you have probably noticed the number of options that seem relatively close and it takes a little digging to see the differences. Or if you have ever gone to buy new runners, the options can seem overwhelming for items that seem relatively similar.
To make decisions easier, people prefer to make a choice where there are clear preferences, ie: raspberry jam vs blueberry jam. When you have an obvious preference, the number of options has little impact on your decision, and therefore it leads to less chance of post-purchase regret. More closely related options provide less post-purchase satisfaction and the change of regret.
So what is optimal? It depends on the scenario, in low decision-making effort areas (common, often low cost products) we tend to stick to what we know, our grocery list likely has the same products from week to week. When it comes to high effort decision-making items like cars or computers, some needs can be more specific and due to the higher cost, the buyers remorse could increase meaning people want to know they have made the right decision.
You can also help your clients by reducing the number of houses for them by understanding what their needs or preferences are.
There are even many more tools marketers and businesses use when helping or nudging customers into making choices, including decoy effect, pricing strategy, priming and urgency. Stay tuned, we will cover more to come!
Julie Boake
awedity creative
Comments