Over the past two decades, a wide range of experiments have shed light on how an excess of information and choice impairs decision making. One of the most common consumer responses to the excess is to forgo a purchase altogether. In a classic
experiment, Sheena Iyengar, then a doctoral student and now a professor at Columbia Business School, set out pots of jam on supermarket tables in groups of either six or 24. About 30 percent of those who were given six choices bought some jam; only 3 percent of those confronted with 24 choices did. As the psychologist Barry Schwartz demonstrates in The Paradox of Choice, an excess of input leads to angst, indecision, regret, and ultimately lowered satisfaction with both the purchase process and the products themselves. Dozens of related lines of research confirm what now seems like common sense: Too much choice or too much information can be paralyzing. Consumers themselves say they’re overwhelmed. A 2004 survey conducted by the market research firm Yankelovich found that two-thirds of respondents felt “constantly bombarded with too much marketing and advertising.” (And it’s safe to say that eight years later, the bombardment has only increased.) The implication for marketers is clear: Aggressive engagement that overloads consumers’ already-saturated brains may backfire. But the hundreds of marketing executives we interviewed told us that their engagement strategies were designed expressly to achieve more-frequent interaction and deepened relationships.
Compounding the overload problem is the human penchant for overthinking trivial decisions and second-guessing. The explosion of messages and product data feeds this tendency, one consequence of which is a “spiral of discontent.” Research by the University of Florida’s Aner Sela and Wharton’s Jonah Berger shows that the more challenging a decision is to make, the more important people imagine it to be. Think about consumers trying to choose among an array of poorly differentiated products, such as digital cameras: The difficulty of wading through the choice increases the perceived importance of the decision. This in turn causes people to spend even more time and effort on the decision, which further increases its apparent importance. A trivial purchase decision can thus spiral into a disproportionately complicated and time-consuming one â(euro) ‘’ and the process creates consumers who are less happy, not more. Indeed, 41 percent of those we surveyed expressed anxiety about the purchases they’d made, and 20 percent conducted research after the purchase, still looking to validate their decisions. Sidebar 3: About the research Over a three-month period, Corporate Executive Board conducted pre- and postpurchase surveys of more than 7,000 consumers in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, covering a wide range of ages, income levels, and ethnicities. Respondents were asked dozens of questions about their attitudes and purchase experiences across a variety of price points and channels in categories including apparel, cars, luxury goods, onetime items (such as airline tickets), and ongoing services (such as cell phone service). Questions explored shopping duration, effort required, purchase-related research, the consumer’s state of mind, his relationship with the brand, the frequency of his interactions with the brand, and the likelihood of repurchasing and recommending. In addition, we interviewed 200 CMOs, brand managers, and other marketing executives representing 125 consumer brands in 12 industries globally, asking about their strategies and beliefs concerning drivers of stickiness.
