Paradox of choice: no longer means better
Imagine that you came to the online store to buy a water heater. The catalog displays a set of two hundred options. You are not an expert in this type of technology and do not know how they differ and which characteristics are important. Moreover, most of them are very similar in parameters. How easy will it be to make a choice?
People get lost when they are immediately offered too many options. Often they go where the choice is smaller and easier to decide. A wide range makes us not only passive, but also prevents us from getting satisfaction from a good deal - said American psychologist Barry Schwartz in his book Paradox of Choice. Why “more” means “less” .
The main reason for the negative experience with a wide choice is ignorance. It’s one thing to choose toothpaste among dozens of analogues on the shelf, another thing, for example, to choose insurance. In the second case, the person is faced with a mass of information, which he does not understand at all. He gets annoyed because he is offered to pay a large amount for something he does not fully understand. At the same time, insurance agents also unconsciously do not inspire confidence - they know what you do not know, and for immersion in the question you have neither time nor desire.
It turns out that the lack of cognitive resources makes the process painful. Potential buyers become lethargic and go to where everything is clear and familiar to them even to the detriment of their wallet. How to avoid it? The answer is simple, although a bit cruel: you need to limit the choice (opportunity, not the range) and force the consumer to make an informed choice.
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However, not all so simple. Some researchers believe that if the product is presented in the store in a single copy, then the buyer is most likely to refuse it and look for a replacement. That is, even a temporary restriction of choice can lead to a drop in demand for this type of goods - says Daniel Moshon of Tulane University. The fact is that the lack of choice spurs the desire of consumers to seek an alternative.
From here we conclude that the task of the marketer or business owner is to facilitate the process of active choice as much as possible and to strike a balance between reasonable restriction and the breadth of the range offered.
How to do it? One way is to work with product information. It should contain everything that is important for the consumer to make an informed choice, for example, pricing principles, advantages over analogues, etc.
Another way is active communications, i.e. information needs to be correctly dosed, and it is desirable to avoid comparisons with competitors, and even more so their diminution, because this leads to confusion for customers and again puts them before the problem of choice.
The third way - changes in the interface. First of all, try to limit the number of variations of one position. For example, if you sell hats, then do not offer one style in 50 different colors. If you sell sneakers, then do not put another 30 pairs in one row, differing only in the color of the laces.
Group products, break into classes and do a search by parameters using filters. To check how everything works, ask your mom or someone who is not familiar with your store to buy a certain product and note how long it will take him / her to do so. A typical user spends about the same amount, cursing everything in the world, for a bunch of almost identical products.
Remember about the magic number 7 ± 2 : offer a maximum of nine groups of goods, and optimally five. Look at the categories in Amazon - they also adhere to this rule. They have reduced the full list of categories to 10 points and give a link to the full catalog, because they know that most of the clients will search in these 10 categories, so why divert their attention to something else then?
The fourth way is to anticipate the desires of the buyer. Use recommender systems for this - they are simple enough to implement. Smart algorithms in the background take into account the behavior of users and advise each of them exactly what they are likely to buy. This greatly facilitates the role of an ordinary customer who has gone shopping and is not a shopaholic who enjoys the process.
Recommender systems work in conjunction with personalization. That is, their main goal is to select a particular user from the masses and help him with a choice. For this purpose, such types of recommendations serve as: “They also buy with this product”, “Popular products”, “You have recently watched ...” or “The choice of an expert”.
At the end of my small post, I want to remind the story about Buridan's donkey , who could not choose which haystack from two he had, and so, poor thing, and died of starvation. Please do not force your customers to be donkeys. Do not throw out all that is on them, advise, direct them. People will appreciate if you give the opportunity to spend money and get pleasure from it.
People get lost when they are immediately offered too many options. Often they go where the choice is smaller and easier to decide. A wide range makes us not only passive, but also prevents us from getting satisfaction from a good deal - said American psychologist Barry Schwartz in his book Paradox of Choice. Why “more” means “less” .
The main reason for the negative experience with a wide choice is ignorance. It’s one thing to choose toothpaste among dozens of analogues on the shelf, another thing, for example, to choose insurance. In the second case, the person is faced with a mass of information, which he does not understand at all. He gets annoyed because he is offered to pay a large amount for something he does not fully understand. At the same time, insurance agents also unconsciously do not inspire confidence - they know what you do not know, and for immersion in the question you have neither time nor desire.
It turns out that the lack of cognitive resources makes the process painful. Potential buyers become lethargic and go to where everything is clear and familiar to them even to the detriment of their wallet. How to avoid it? The answer is simple, although a bit cruel: you need to limit the choice (opportunity, not the range) and force the consumer to make an informed choice.
')
However, not all so simple. Some researchers believe that if the product is presented in the store in a single copy, then the buyer is most likely to refuse it and look for a replacement. That is, even a temporary restriction of choice can lead to a drop in demand for this type of goods - says Daniel Moshon of Tulane University. The fact is that the lack of choice spurs the desire of consumers to seek an alternative.
From here we conclude that the task of the marketer or business owner is to facilitate the process of active choice as much as possible and to strike a balance between reasonable restriction and the breadth of the range offered.
How to do it? One way is to work with product information. It should contain everything that is important for the consumer to make an informed choice, for example, pricing principles, advantages over analogues, etc.
Another way is active communications, i.e. information needs to be correctly dosed, and it is desirable to avoid comparisons with competitors, and even more so their diminution, because this leads to confusion for customers and again puts them before the problem of choice.
The third way - changes in the interface. First of all, try to limit the number of variations of one position. For example, if you sell hats, then do not offer one style in 50 different colors. If you sell sneakers, then do not put another 30 pairs in one row, differing only in the color of the laces.
Group products, break into classes and do a search by parameters using filters. To check how everything works, ask your mom or someone who is not familiar with your store to buy a certain product and note how long it will take him / her to do so. A typical user spends about the same amount, cursing everything in the world, for a bunch of almost identical products.
Remember about the magic number 7 ± 2 : offer a maximum of nine groups of goods, and optimally five. Look at the categories in Amazon - they also adhere to this rule. They have reduced the full list of categories to 10 points and give a link to the full catalog, because they know that most of the clients will search in these 10 categories, so why divert their attention to something else then?
The fourth way is to anticipate the desires of the buyer. Use recommender systems for this - they are simple enough to implement. Smart algorithms in the background take into account the behavior of users and advise each of them exactly what they are likely to buy. This greatly facilitates the role of an ordinary customer who has gone shopping and is not a shopaholic who enjoys the process.
Recommender systems work in conjunction with personalization. That is, their main goal is to select a particular user from the masses and help him with a choice. For this purpose, such types of recommendations serve as: “They also buy with this product”, “Popular products”, “You have recently watched ...” or “The choice of an expert”.
At the end of my small post, I want to remind the story about Buridan's donkey , who could not choose which haystack from two he had, and so, poor thing, and died of starvation. Please do not force your customers to be donkeys. Do not throw out all that is on them, advise, direct them. People will appreciate if you give the opportunity to spend money and get pleasure from it.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/210878/
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