Does Consumer Choice Matter?

I was prompted to write this article because of a pattern I noticed in our customers’ buying tendencies. We would generally display between 20 and 100 pairs of sunglasses in a rack on the assumption that people wanted as much choice as possible. What we noticed, however, is that although our racks attracted lots of attention, not many people would actually buy a pair of sunglasses. It turns out that there are psychological reasons for this behavior as supported by Gerg Gigerenzer, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development whose breakthrough research was a major source of Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink.

Modernist architect Mies Van der Rohe famously asserted that “Less is More”. His post-modern predecessor Robert Venturi quipped back “Less is a Bore”. What insight can designers and marketers working in the retail and ecommerce sphere gleam from these seemingly contradictory approaches to design?

Context and Objectives

We instinctively understand that there is some truth to both of these propositions. But you may already have asked yourself ‘Less of what? More of what? What are these post-mortem/modern designer dudes referring to?’ And rightly so. The claim “Less is More” is what might be called a heuristic or rule of thumb. In his book Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, Gerd Gigerenzer explains that intuition is derived by applying rules of thumb to our reading of external situations. The example Gigerenzer uses is a fly ball in a baseball game wherein the outfielder must judge the speed at which he needs to run to catch the ball at exactly the right time. In this case the rule of thumb applied is a gaze heuristic which says “Fix your eye on the ball, start running, and adjust your speed so that your angle of gaze remains constant.” Without having to calculate the exact landing point of the ball, the player knows how to get there and is able to predict more accurately than through analysis. These imprecise, yet powerful, heuristics are derived from a combination of contextual understanding, i.e. what is my situation and what is my goal, and evolved capacities in our brain, i.e. skills that biology has selected through reproduction as a means for survival.

Consumer Psychology

With the knowledge of how intuition works, let’s examine what effect this might have in the setting of a retail store, for example. Here is the experiment that Gigerenzer gives in his book on the unconscious:

Consider Draeger’s Supermarket in Menlo Park, California, an upscale grocery shop known for its wide varieties of olive oil, two hundred and fifty varieties of mustard, and over three hundred varieties of jam. Psychologists set up a tasting booth inside the grocery store. On the table were either six or twenty-four different jars of exotic jams. When did more customers stop? Sixty percent of the customers stopped for the wider selection, compared to 40 percent when fewer alternatives were offered. But when did more customers actually purchase any of the jams on offer? With twenty-four choices, only 3 percent of all shoppers bough one or more jars. However, when there were only six alternatives, 30 percent bought something.

Remarkably, ten times as many customers bought when their choices were limited even though a larger choice drew more of a crowd. How might rule of thumb explain the buyers’ decisions in this experiment? Let’s imagine for a minute that you aren't in a grocery store looking for jam, but rather you are in the wild foraging for berries. On your right you see a large bush bursting with bright red berries, while on the left you see a bush that is equally exposed and only has a few berries hanging on the underbrush. Which bush is more likely to draw your attention? Which are you more likely to eat from? Certainly the bright red bunches of berries are an immediate eye catcher. Yet, without prior knowledge of how to identify poisonous berries from nonpoisonous berries, you would have to rely on rule of thumb to know which is best. In this case your unconscious, split-second assessment of the situation may tell you that the bush with fewer berries, which may have been picked over by birds or other foragers, is more likely to bare sweet delicious fruit and less likely to cause you digestive harm.

Less Is (Sometimes) More

We’ve established that in some circumstances, such as direct sales, limiting the choices granted to the customer can lead to improved conversion. Of course, it’s important to keep the objective in mind. If the goal is simply to raise awareness around a particular issue then Venturi’s decorated shed principle may be the most effective method of solving that particular design problem. In fact, your company’s inbound marketing, social media, and advertising are areas where the more contact you can have with the customer, the more likely they will be to visit your store or click through to your website. Don’t trust me on this, trust your instincts.