Notes

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So now we're at the next
stage.
The consumer has searched for information,
they have a consideration set.
And now, they're going to evaluate the
different products and ultimately,
hopefully, make a purchase.
At this stage in today's world, with all
the
possibilities, and all the different
things you can consider.
Online, offline, in the store.
Many times, consumers are overwhelmed.
We have choice overload.
And sometimes when that happens
consumers choose not to choose.
There's a famous study that was done by a
Columbia professor.
Sheena Iyengar, where she set up two,
tables of jams in a supermarket in
California.
On one table she had six jams, and on the
other table she had 24 jams.
And the idea here was it was a tasting
table and it's a, they waited
to see how many people came up to the
table to taste these jams.
They counted the number of people who came
up on the days
when they only had six and on the days
when they had 24.
They also then had a coupon that consumers
could use to purchase the jam.
And so they also counted how many coupons
were used to purchase the jams.
It was very interesting, the results.
What they found was when there 24
different
jams on the table, more people came up to
the
table than when there were only six jams
on the table.
However when they counted how many coupons
were
used to purchase jams, in the end more
people
purchased jam from the tables that only
had
six jams than the tables that had 24 jams.
They concluded from the study that whereas
a lot of variety was attractive and
invited people to come up to the table,
too much variety,
too much choice was overloading and people
chose not to choose.
This was a very interesting study and
caused a lot
of consternation among marketers; maybe we
have too much choice.
However, I ran another study myself.
Coincidentally, I had a tray with six
flavors
of jellybeans and 24 flavors of
jellybeans, and
on separate occasions I put the tray with
six out and asked students,
kids, to choose as many jellybeans as they
wanted, and on other occasions
I put the tray out with 24 jellybeans and
asked students, 24 different
flavors of jellybeans, and asked students
to pick as many as they wanted.
Unlike the jam study, what I found is that
the students picked
more jelly beans from the 24 tray then
from the six tray.
Now, there are a lot of things that are
different between these two studies.
they could choose as many jelly beans as
they want.
The jelly beans were free, etc.
So there are a lot of reasons why the
results are not the same, but to me what's
interesting
is clearly just 24 different flavors of
jelly beans or
24 different flavors of anything is not
necessarily too much.
Why did they choose more in my 24
condition versus my six condition when the
opposite was found with jams?
The purpose of my experiment though,
interestingly was not to show
choice overload, which is what the purpose
of the jam study was.
But what I was going for to show perceived
variety versus actual variety.
So I didn't just have just two different
conditions, a six and a 24.
I actually had four conditions.
I had two different trays with six
flavors.
In one tray, they were organized.
And in the other, all the jelly beans were
all scrambled together.
Similarly, with the 24 flavors of jelly
beans, in one tray they
were organized, and in the other tray,
they were all scrambled together.
And again, I had four different conditions
where the kids
could come in and choose as many
jellybeans as they wanted.
And what I found is that
when there were only six jelly, flavors of
jelly beans, the consumers or
the students chose more jellybeans when
they
were scrambled than when they were
organized.
But in the 24 condition, they chose more
jelly
beans when they were organized than when
they were scrambled.
Why is that?
In the six colors, when they were
organized,
there didn't seem like many very jelly
beans.
It wasn't fun to pick.
And so people
weren't attracted to the assortment as
much,
and they didn't choose as many jelly
beans.
But when the six flavors were scrambled,
it seemed
like more variety and they were incented
to choose more.
In the 24 colors, it was exactly the
opposite.
24 flavors of jellybeans, that's a lot of
jellybeans,
and it was fun and people chose a lot.
But when they were all scrambled up, it
seemed like too much.
It was, again,
choice overload and it was in this
condition
that I replicated what happened with the
jams.
There was too much choice.
People couldn't make sense of it, and they
chose fewer.
So the bottom line here is that at, to
remember
once again That the consumer's decision
making process is staged.
At the assortment stage, when they choose
variety,
variety is good.
People are attracted to lots of different
choices, it's fun, they like it.
When they move on to the choice stage, and
they're trying to
decide which one they like, then too much
variety can become complex.
And so the issue, then, to reduce the
choice overload for the marketer, is to
figure out ways to take a lot of variety,
because variety is not necessarily bad.
People like a lot of choice.
But to make that choice manageable.
One way, in a market like this, where they
have lots and lots of different kinds of
cheeses.
And if you go to those cheese display, you
might be
overwhelmed by all the different flavors
of cheese that they have.
But in this store in order to make that
easier to parse or easier to understand,
they have knowledgeable cheese experts
standing there who
are trained in cheeses and attributes of
cheeses and
can help you figure out which cheese you
want.
Another way to do it if you don't have
people in
the store to help it is to line up the
products
in such a way that the attributes are
alignable in such
a way that you can figure out what's
better than something else.
So for example, you can align the
attribute of calories.
You can align it on a shelf so the things
that
have highest calories are at one place,
and you could easily
see what has high calories, what has low
calories.
Or you can align it by price.
Or you can align it by different types of
colors or different types of attributes.
The more alignable you make the
attributes, the easier
it is for the consumer to parse through
the complexity.
Another way to help consumers deal with
complexity is to help them learn their
preferences.
That's a really big advantage of this
omni-channel world.
You can have tablets or you can have apps
on consumer's phones
that help them learn the different
attributes of complex products or product
lines and help them figure out what the
like and what they
don't like, and that helps the consumer
deal with the complex product categories.
Finally, the way you organize it on a
shelf makes a big difference.
If you organize it on a shelf in a way
that lines up with the way that consumers
think about the category, it's much easier
for
the consumer to find exactly what they
want.
So for example, if you buy wine by the
type of grape it is.
And if the shelf is organized by grape,
then you're
going to easily find where the chardonnays
are, or the burgundies are.
On the other hand, if you think about it
by grape, but the
store is lined up by region, or country or
shape of the bottle,
whatever it is, it doesn't line up with
the
way you think about it, then it's going to
be much
more complex for you to go through that,
choice a
very large product set and the choice can
be overwhelming.
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