Focus the Choices You’re Offering

Buyers of almost anything you can think of — from televisions to desk lamps, face a plethora of products to choose from. It gets even more difficult for purchasers trying to make the right choice when there are several items on the shopping list. Imagine yourself setting up a home office from scratch and the buyer’s dilemma becomes clear.

For years the mantra “choice is good” has been heard around the world, and the response has been a bewildering array of similar products in every category. The time has come to ask the question: Is this actually meeting consumer needs or is it really just complicating and extending the buying process?

Choice Can Be Confusing

Graham Vidler, Head of Policy for consumer advocacy magazine “Which?”, says: “We know that choice can be bewildering for many people. That while lack of choice undermines consumers’ ability to get the goods and services they want and need, so too can an excess of choice.

“In practice, many people try to scale down the choices open to them where they can. For most of us, a trip to the supermarket offers weekly exposure to a choice of thousands of products. But 75% of us say that we simply try to get through the process as quickly as possible, relying on brand familiarity, habit and responses to store layout to reduce the number of choices we actually have to make.”

Vidler’s statement has the ring of truth about it. A trip to the supermarket to make just one purchase — laundry detergent, can become an intellectual challenge. Here are some of the decisions that need to be made:

— General-purpose or cold water only?
— Liquid, powder or tablet?
— Name brand or house brand?
— With phosphates or phosphate-free?
— Scented or unscented?
— With or without fabric softener?
— With or without bleaching action?

Most detergent is chosen after a period of trial and error. Eventually a brand is found that is believed to provide “better” results than others and it becomes the product regularly purchased for the household. Brand loyalty is created, often to avoid the necessity to perform further or additional trials of detergents.

Interestingly, the laundry detergent itself doesn’t clean the clothes. It’s there to break down the surface tension in the water so that water soluble dirt dissolves more easily. The cleaning is achieved by the actions of the agitator and by the clothes rubbing together. Using large amounts of detergent can actually cause clothes to wear out and fade faster.

Is There Value in Choice?

What is the actual value to consumers of having all this choice for just one type of product — laundry detergents? And how does the consumer benefit from having to make similar choices for another twenty or thirty items during each trip to the supermarket? In the final analysis a lot of time is taken up for very little if any consequential value.

In his book “The Paradox of Choice”, Professor Barry Schwartz of Pennsylvania’s Swarthmore College talks about the negative consequences of having too many choices before us: “The benefits of so much choice are obvious, as we find goods and preferences tailored to suit our every need. However, the growth of options and opportunities for choice have several negative effects:

— Decisions require more effort,
— Mistakes are more likely to be made,
— Psychological consequences of mistakes are more severe.

Professor Schwartz points out that as choices increase, so does the perceived need to make the best choice. “…this tendency increases the incidence of anxiety, depression and stress. There comes a point at which opportunities become so numerous that we feel overwhelmed.”

Given that this situation is replicated in office product retailers, fast-food restaurants, sporting goods stores, lighting retailers — virtually every product category is overpopulated and overcomplicated with an excess of offerings; it’s costing everybody money as well as causing stress, and retailers themselves are impacted by the expenses of warehousing and stocking inflated product selections.

Time for a Fresh Look

It’s time to review the choices we offer our customers and take a fresh perspective when deciding what to put on the shelves and in catalogues. It’s time to make these decisions on the basis of relevance to customers rather than trying to have “something of everything”.

Chris Lawer of the OMC Group, a UK strategic developer, sees the solution to the problem as the responsibility of businesses. “One of the core value propositions at the heart of the buyer-centric movement is precisely to help people overcome the burden of choice, by helping them make smarter decisions and to cut through the clutter.

“Just as business has for decades focused on reducing its own transaction costs through an emphasis on efficiency, optimization, engineering and incremental improvement, – buyer-centric organizations do precisely the same, but for individual people.”

We need to acquire a depth of knowledge about our customers that enables us to save them time and give them the best choices rather than the most extensive range to choose from. It requires a much more proactive relationship with customers and a serious effort to gain actionable feedback.

It means we have to change our attitudes toward choice by understanding that some restrictions on what we offer will actually benefit our customers — that reducing the options available will help them make their selection quicker and, because we’ve been more thoughtful about what is being offered to them, give them a better end result.

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Copyright 2005, RAN ONE Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from www.ranone.com.