choices

spider got this last wednesday.

We were at the creative shop at plaza sing. And we were pretty amazed at the kind of things sold there. They seem to have better, cheaper things than apple, with more colours/choices and more functions to boot.

“Then how come people still prefer to buy the ipods than the zens ah?” - spider asked.

“Donno. Maybe they give people too many choices. Ipod got few colours only. But with zen, got so many colours you just give up ah trying to decide which one to get” – offered me.

That was just my way of trying to explain away something I don’t understand. But yesterday, I came across something from the book I’m currently reading that seems to hit the nail on the head.

According to the book, “if you are given too many choices, if you are forced to consider much more than your unconscious mind is comfortable with, you get paralyzed.”

There was an experiment done in which a tasting booth with a variety pf exotic gourmet jams was set up at an upscale grocery store in California. Sometimes the booth had 6 different jams, and sometimes there were 24 different jams on display. They wanted to see whether the number of jam choices made any difference in the number of jams sold. of course common economic sense would tell us that the more choices we the consumers have, the more likely we are to buy, because it’s easier for us to find the jam that perfectly fits our needs.

But they found the opposite to be true. “30 percent of those who stopped by the 6-choice booth ended up buying some jam, while only 3 percent of those who stopped by the bigger booth bought anything. Why is that? Because buying jam is a snap decision. You say to yourself, instinctively, I want that one. And if you are given too many choices, you get paralyzed. Snap judgments can be made in a snap because they are frugal, and if we want to protect our snap judgments, we have to take steps to protect that frugality.”

Amazing.

Lesson to be learnt (for when I finally get down to starting that lil biz of mine):
Don’t offer too many choices, but instead, be very focused on yr product offerings.