Paradox Of Choices In Marketing

The Fear Of Making The Wrong Choice And Why Less Is More.

What Is Paradox Of Choice And How You Can Use It In Marketing?

The concept ‘Paradox of choice’ was popularized by Barry Shwartz in his 2004 book ‘The Paradox of Choice – Why more is less’.

In his book, Barry Schwartz shares speaks about how people love exercising their freedom of choice to consume what they like according to their personal interests and preferences.

When the number of choices increases for the consumers to choose from, the more stressed and confused they become at making a decision.

As a result, they may end up not making any or have a douhgt whether the decision they made was the best for them.

Offering too much options may result in 3 negative side effects as discussed below. 

Analysis Paralysis: When there are too many options, customers will become paralysed and instead purchase nothing.

Buyer's Remorse: After browsing for hours and then finally settling on a product, many customers will experience a sudden pang of guilt. They will develop a douhgt whether they made the best choice.

Descion Fatigue: People have that mentality of making a finite number of decisions each day. Once they've reached that limit, their ability to make smart decisions is severely depleted.

Here's What You Should Do.

In order to boost or increase your convertion rates, there's a long list of things you should consider as a smart marketer, we've shared the best things that will work out.

First of all, Spare your buyers from unnecessary decisions and they will have a mental energy to make an impulse purchase on the most important decision.

Test and get an idea about the right product choices, in terms of variety and numbers, that should be offered to buyers so that they make favourable purchasing decisions from a marketer’s perspective. 

You should communicate with buyers as soon as they make a purchase to reinforce their choice.

Reducing the number of choices you offer for your buyers will improve the quality of decision making, the process of buying a product less stressful and more satisfaction with the decision after the purchase.

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