Choice is essential to long-term satisfaction because lack of choice makes humans unhappy. But excess choice makes us unhappy as well. If you have 100 products to choose from, all of which do the same thing for the same price people will get frustrated and stressed about how to choose the right one. It’s irrational, but welcome to humanity; this is who we are. Choice must be limited and framed to offer customers both the empowerment of choice and the satisfaction of easy choice.
4 Comments
1 Andrew wrote:
Absolutely, the Economist once referred to this as “the tyranny of choice” and I think that was well put.
Too many options leads to analysis paralysis and indecision, and ultimately, sales suffer.
Figure out your core offering and overdeliver on it. Everything else is a distraction.
2 EF wrote:
ha, i like that. u ever read anything on behavioral economics? its awesome stuff — really good balance to the traditional economics/marketing/business rationality that limits so manybusiness minds.
great stuff.
3 Andrew wrote:
Not formally, but I’d definitely take a recommendation for a good first book in the genre.
4 Richard wrote:
At our e-commerce website, we’re trying to keep our products to less than 10 categories and just a few options in each. We do bath products, we also removed distracting stuff like Facebook and twitter feeds an replaced them with an icon and limited blog posts visible on the front page to 3.