When is choice a valuable offer?

It seems like more choice would always be a good thing, but customers don’t see it that way.

Being faced with too many choices can lead to two negative consequences: 

• Paralysis before making the choice, because it’s too hard to weigh the options

• Remorse after making the choice, doubting whether the decision was correct

These consequences can impede sales and erode loyalty, so it is important to carefully consider when to offer choices, how to offer them, and what choices to offer.

Choices are only valuable if they have significantly different impacts on the customer.

Companies need to offer the right choices at the right time in the customer journey. If the options make no difference to the customer, the promise of choice becomes false, which can be very frustrating. Because the impacts of choices are both rational and emotional, you need to understand the customer’s context on both of these levels to predict impact. To accomplish this, you will need to understand not just how your customer segments differ, but how the situations they face differ as well. Ethnographic research is a great way to get these answers.