How many choices should you offer to your clients?
My past post was about key learnings from the book The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar, this time I will share some specific tips from the book for business owners on how to influence choice. Are you wondering what is the magic number of choices? or How do I organize the choices Here is the answer!
– Use the 3×3 rule: The client chooses among three choices, which can lead to another set of three choices, culminating in no more than a third set of options.
– When people are given a moderate amount of choices (4 to 6) rather than a large number (20 to 30) they are more likely to make a choice.
– We tend to better remember the first and last options in a group, rather than focus on the merits of each alternative: Which options would you prefer them to choose? Show them first or last.
– We tend to have a better memory for things that excite our senses or appeal to our emotions than for straight facts and dry statistics: How you communicate things is important, a personalized message will always have better impact and visually attractive product arrangements (merchandising) will lift sales. This is also the reasoning behind emotional marketing (forming a bond with your client through your brand’s personality). These are great general rules; nevertheless the science of merchandising and consumer psychology is a complicated one: you cant just decide to randomly cut your assortment or the choices you are giving your clients for the sake of simplification. You have to consider things such as the consumer profile, sales ranking, sales growth, consumer loyalty and the nature of your category and product. I will be talking more about merchandising and how to choose assortment in my next post. In your business, how have you facilitated choice for your clients? Please share your story here.