How to effectively paralyze your customers and lose sales

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Some of my own testing on options and on providing too many of them is supported by the useful research in the following article...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/27/yo...shortcuts.html

Specifically:

In a California gourmet market, Professor Iyengar and her research assistants set up a booth of samples of Wilkin & Sons jams. Every few hours, they switched from offering a selection of 24 jams to a group of six jams. On average, customers tasted two jams, regardless of the size of the assortment, and each one received a coupon good for $1 off one Wilkin & Sons jam.

Here's the interesting part. Sixty percent of customers were drawn to the large assortment, while only 40 percent stopped by the small one. But 30 percent of the people who had sampled from the small assortment decided to buy jam, while only 3 percent of those confronted with the two dozen jams purchased a jar.

Good information for those of us who market for a living.
#customers #effectively #lose #paralyze #sales
  • Profile picture of the author dmadnani
    I remember reading somewhere (for the MMO industry) that offering less choices almost always leads to higher conversions, which is pretty much the case here too.

    Wonder what the exact psychology behind it is though, I'm guessing somewhere along the lines of more choices = confusion?
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    • Profile picture of the author Steven Carl Kelly
      Originally Posted by dmadnani View Post

      Wonder what the exact psychology behind it is though, I'm guessing somewhere along the lines of more choices = confusion?
      Ever stand behind someone in line at the local fast food joint who took way too long to order because they kept looking at the menu board and just couldn't decide?

      Back before Ray Kroc bought McDonald's from Dick and Mac McDonald, their restaurant had a menu that included 25 items. In order to reduce confusion and speed customers through the process, Ray reduced their menu to just SEVEN choices: hamburger, cheeseburger, french fries, soda (2 sizes), coffee, and milk shakes.

      That's it. And "fast food" was born.
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