How to manage your choices?

Yes or no? - This is the hardest question that people confront with. It becomes even harder with the increasing number of alternatives. We make many choices every day, every week and over our life thus altering the direction of the latter. We eat, study, shop for new dresses, we work, take a nap, we return a phone call, we meet people and on and on. Some people enjoy decision-making/choice-making process and think that they are good at choosing; hence they do not take the situation seriously. Usually do-and-see attitude towards important decisions result in irrevocable consequences. On the contrary some people get confused when they are faced with decisive situations. As many alternatives you have as harder it is to make comparisons, cost and benefit analysis, to do tests, judgments, etc. Nowadays market is filled with different types of innovative products with different options, the majority of which are not uniquely differentiated though. It becomes harder and harder to choose even a simple product or service.

I usually become nervous when there are dozens of non-differentiated alternatives, because it is harder to manage those choices. I liked Sheena Iyengar’s podcast “How to make choosing better”; she speaks about choice overload, the negative consequences of that and proposes techniques to businessman for attracting customers and making it easier for them to choose and more importantly buy the products.  Sheena Iyengar is S.T. Lee Professor of Business in the Management Division of the Columbia Business School; she is the author of “The art of Choosing” book, which is one of the Amazon.com’s Top 10 Books in Business & Investing.

I liked her clear English and her way of communicating with the audience. Interestingly all the facts she mentioned were based on studies conducted by her. In the result of one of her experiments she has found out that people are more inclined to stop near the shelf with more types of the same product to sample one, but on the contrary they are more likely to buy when they encounter less choices. She has made studies since her graduate years and compiled them in her book. According to Iyengar (2012), people are more likely to delay choosing or make worse choices due to choice overload: it is impossible to compare all the hundreds of alternatives. Iyengar brings the example of Walmart andAldi: Walmart today offers 100,000 products, but the nineth largest retailer in the world today is Aldi, and it offers only 1,400 products – only one kind od canned tomato sauce.

In the end Iyengar suggests businessmen the following simple techniques to mitigate the choices overload problem and thus attract more buyers:

·         cut - get rid of the inessential choices

·         concretize the choices so the customer understands the difference between them

·         categorize - have more categories but less choices

·         condition for complexity – gradually increase
the complexity  

For more details about Sheena Iyengar you can visit www.sheenaiyengar.com