On your visit to the grocery store you might have often come upon the sight of confused shoppers holding multiple accessories in their hands and unable to decide the best fit. You may have often heard them yelling curses, just because of so many varieties.
At first glance, this might feel crazy, after all, don't more choices make you better off? That might be a general notion. Clearly no one would want to live eating just one flavor of ice cream, but at the same time, there are disadvantages to having 100 different flavors of ice cream as well ie it becomes difficult to choose from.
All of us might have experienced this at some point or another. Imagine yourself standing in front of 100 different types of comics and having money to purchase just 1, you'll probably end up wasting a lot of time and may still not decide the best pick. This is the paradox of choice.
Although the different choices were supposed to make you better off, they ended up causing you greater mental stress and thus making you worse off.
This is not just the case with consumers but also the sellers who are trying to sell a particular product or service. Here, time is involved in trying to persuade or convince your customers.
Quantitative Backing:
Let's look at a brief study that was conducted to demonstrate this. A vendor is trying to promote different types of ketchup through 2 experiments, one in which he offers 24 samples and in the other, he offers only 6 samples. So what were the results?
It was observed that although a large number of samples attracted more people, in both cases, people tasted the same number of jams on average. However, the major conflict came at the purchasing time.
There was a HUGE difference… Only 3% of the people who were offered 24 ketchups to sample from went on to buy the ketchup. However, 30% of the people who were offered only 6 ketchups to sample from went on to buy the ketchup.
Too Many Choices?
The funda behind "Daily Specials"!
A common application to this is at restaurants, where multiple varieties of dishes just make it impossible to pick the best one, thus you end up being paralyzed. The managers then cleverly announce that day’s specialty and you end up going with that even if it's a little pricey, simply because you can easily decide within those few choices of special dishes rather than the whole menu. This is exactly how the restaurant owners end up making high margins for an otherwise cheap dish.
Mobiles and consumer electronics are another great example of this.
There are frankly so many brands and devices with different features, that you’ll go haywire in decking your right fit. Ultimately 2 choices are left, one either asking the store managers to help you decide the best fit as per your requirements or go through the reviews posted by top review sites.
Reaching the Sweet Spot:
Either way, it’s the top brands who reap the profit again by giving a greater commission to the stores and these websites to craft in a greater share of customers. Here too you ended up being paralyzed due to vast choices available.
So does the whole idea of a paradox mean that the best thing to do would be to give no choice at all?- The concept of Sweet Spot
No, Barry Schwartz concluded a so-called sweet spot in the paradox of choice. The point is where the number of choices is most effective on our subjective well being. To give an idea, here’s a visual display of the paradox of choice and the sweet spot.
This aspect of consumer choice is really important as a larger variety in appliances, food, and services such as insurance schemes can actually result in lesser motivation to actually buy the product/service. The trick is to find that sweet spot: where you offer not too little, but also not too much.
Many top brands are therefore focussing on reducing the number of choices for the following three positive outcomes for the customer:
Improving the quality of decision making
Making the process of buying a product less stressful
More satisfaction with the decision after the purchase
With the advent of Machine Learning, the selection procedure has become even more consumer-friendly with the choices being displayed are already fine-tuned to his previous likeness or those preferred by similar consumers.
With excess content present online, OTTs are focussing a lot of our efforts on Recommendations- through streaming platforms are vying to woo users by offering more content, is this the way to go? Well, that's definitely something to think about.
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