People’s brains tend to instruct their owners to stay right where they are. That’s why people tend to stick with what they have. Because when they stay where they are, they get to avoid the tyranny of choice.
In their best-selling book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, authors Chip and Dan Heath tell us why it’s so difficult to get people to buy something new.
“The status quo feels comfortable and steady because much of the choice has been squeezed out.”
It seems that choice is exhausting; not physically exhausting, but mentally and emotionally exhausting. The more choices you offer customers, the more exhausted they become, the less likely they are to purchase something they’ve never purchased before. The Heaths call this decision paralysis:
“More options, even good ones, can freeze us and make us retreat to the default plan.”
Ok, you know how to fix that, you’ll simply offer fewer choices. But that’s just the beginning, especially if you have a retail store. Think of your customer as they walk into your store for the very first time. They see rows and aisles of products they have never seen before. That unfamiliarity immediately hits customers with their first choice: “Where do I begin?” Think about that. As soon as people walk through your door, you are already pushing them toward exhaustion.
The same goes for your website. If you bombard visitors with an array of choices on the home page, they have no idea where to go, and they get tired just trying to choose their first click.
A Good Place to Start
How do you get around this? The business trend is to offer more choice. You can blame it on Chris Anderson, who wrote The Long Tail, in which he proclaimed that “the future of business is selling less of more.” Meaning more choices. Chris is an engineer, and likes analyzing data. What he didn’t take into account was how more choices would exhaust customers. In his book, he offered up the examples of Amazon & Netflix. I’m glad he did because Netflix provides a model for overcoming the tyranny of choice.
When you first join Netflix, it’s easy. You type in a couple of movies that you missed at the theater and they arrive in your mailbox a day later. What happens next? You get to choose more movies, as many as you want. Oh the tyranny! But it doesn’t seem like you are choosing from their long-tail selection of 100,000 different movies, because Netflix narrows the choices for you by giving you a place to start.
Netflix customers get to browse the Netflix Top 100 and choose from that list. That’s a good place to start. Then, Netflix begins suggesting movies to you, based on your previous choices and ratings. Another good place to start. They further narrow your choices by genre, so you can start with comedies if they are your favorite.
Give customers brains a rest and make it easier for them to make the new choice of purchasing from you. Give them fewer choices, not more. Then suggest a good place to start.
Ask yourself: Are you exhausting your customers with the tyranny of choice?
Related read: Three Predictably Irrational Pricing Strategies That Get the Sale
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