An Option Too Many…
Should I buy the micro-brewed Brouwerij Van Steenberge? Or the Primátor Maibock. I can’t take it! I guess I’ll just buy the Budweiser…
Options. Most people and most marketers mistakenly think more is better, but recent studies and some published books have shown that it can be a demotivator at a certain point, actually causing real sales to plummet.
Too Many Choices - In Jelly or Beer
Columbia professor Sheena Iyengar has been studying choice. For her research paper, “When Choice is Demotivating”:
They set up a free tasting booth in a grocery store, with six different jams. 40% of the customers stopped to taste. 30% of those bought some. A week later, they set up the same booth in the same store, but this time with twenty-four different jams. 60% of the customers stopped to taste. But only 3% bought some!
What does this mean for Success in our marketing efforts, in deciding between tasks we want to accomplish? In deciding in goals we want to achieve?
It means we can be paralyzed by choice. The human mind is capable, on average, to hold up to seven things at once. We can only truly focus on one thing, but we can keep track of about seven max (for the best of us). Probably between 4 and 6 is more realistic for most of us. What this means is that when we are face with choices that are very much greater than this, we face a dilemma where we are not sure what the best choice is because we cannot analyze all of the choice data, so we get internally frustrated and ultimately make no choice.
This is statistically significant – in fact if we know exactly what we want, or have a pretty good idea, we can eliminate most of the multitude of choices and focus down to the few we really need to look at. This accounts for the three percent who actually bought jelly in the example. So what occurs when we have even a partial focus is we are able to “recreate” the situation with fewer choices. But when we are completely unfocused on what choice we want, and when we are faced with too many options, we don’t make a choice. This is a general principle that needs to be applied to our marketing efforts.
How many times have you seen a website where there were a dizzying array of possible options, links, videos, audios, banners, pictures,etc. and you simply did not know what to do. Perhaps you felt like you wanted to click something, but you had that frustration that whatever you clicked on would take you away from a possible better choice that led somewhere else…
How many times do you think sales have been lost at websites like that because of the issue of over-complexity and too many options? Probably more than most think, because most people assume that more options is better.
The solution to this dilemma is to find ways of presenting large quantities of choices in a simplified fashion. Splitting the choices using hierarchical trees, breaking data into related chunks, pulling together links into blocks that hide the details so that focus is regained. This is an essential tool in designing a website with many choices.
An excellent example of this is Google – a plain white field with a single logo in the center, a box to enter search terms, and two buttons. That is all. How is that for simplicity? And this engine can bring you the complexity of the entire web. This is the kind of forethought that needs to go into any sales page or product display, etc. It’s nice to have many options, but if you don’t present those options in a way that is digestible to human brains, you could lose most of your sales.
This principle holds in most things, not just selling jelly (or beer) – but in the presentation of data in a slide show for your office, or in presenting a scientific paper – anything that presents objects to be considered in some way.
One option too many can make life just as colorless as one too few. In business, this is an important principle to understand.
-DTM
