As I landed in Nairobi a week ago, I proceeded with my typical routine of re-entering the local context: adjust the watch, buy some airtime, buy internet bundles, call Uber, get home, etc. At the stage of buying a bundle, I noticed that instead of taking me to the typical list of choices (daily, weekly, monthly…), USSD platform led me to a “pre-choice” choice-screen with 3 new options: (1) data bundle with no expiry, (2) calls and SMS with no expiry, and (3) normal data bundle with expiry. The new collection of choices forced me to slow-down my routine for a short while, and think whether I was ever troubled by the fact that my 20-shilling daily bundle expired every night. I was not, so I proceeded with buying a normal 20-shilling bundle with expiry.
Later in the week, I ran a few experiments and realized that my 20-shilling bundle with expiry never lasts longer than a day, so now I made an informed choice of sticking with the original option. However, the incident sparked anew my interest in the overall topic of choice and the fine line between choice as an enabler of and choice as a hindrance to behavior, self-expression, and essentially the freedom of being.
Several years ago, I wrote a post on the state of financial inclusion in Nigeria. In the post, I argued that too many choices of Mobile Money (at that point, there were 12 providers) – a product/service not yet familiar to Nigerians — were stifling people’s ability to choose an option and resulting in many choosing none. Have things change since then? Have better access to the internet and endless internet-store shelves, AI, AliBaba and other novelties made us more adapt to handling multiple choices with poise and determination?
I’ve done my desk research and dug through journals and websites, and finally ran across an article by Liz Baker and Crawford Hollingworth in ResearchLive New Frontiers: When is Choice a Paradox, which referenced a multitude of interesting research, but to my mind was still too long for a general consumption and also misses a couple of really critical insights. So, I decided to summarize and clarify it for myself and anyone interested in behavioral economics and the psychology of choice.
Baker and Hollingworth start with the same question as many of us in social and commercial marketing are eager to understand: When more (choices) is truly more? And when more (choices) is definitely less? As a starting point, they do debunk the findings of the industry’s favorite study published in 2000 by Cheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper about the choice paralysis of the jam shoppers in a California supermarket (the study that I referenced in my original post). The study suggested that people offered with 4 options of jam were more likely to buy one, while people offered 12 choices were more likely to try (than those offered only 4 choices) but they conversion to buyers was much lower than those presented with only 4 options. So, are the findings still true? Baker and Hollingworth say… It depends!
And does it depend on? Three key factors – buyers, product, and the context of the purchase. So, this is a behavioral love-triangle in which the number of choices serve as a type of a mediator defining whether the overall experience is positive (a game) or negative (a grind). Neutral experiences generally go unnoticed, so we would not include them at least for now.
Let’s start with people. The studies analyzed by Baker and Hollingworth agree that more choices are a benefit when a person,
1. Is already familiar with the product, service or concept;
2. Does not have strong preferences in favor of a particular type of product, service, concept;
3. Is motivated to acquire the product, service or concept;
4. Has medium-to-high risk tolerance.
All of the above makes a lot of sense. As per #1, a person unfamiliar with the product and faced with a multitude of variations of it is forced to perform several tasks – (a) learn about the new product, (b) compare it against the alternative s/he is already using or access it’s generic benefit if the product is new, (c) learn about the variations of the product, and (4) compare the variations against each other. This is a daunting task, which might be interesting to people with no established preferences but really motivated to acquire the product and open to trying its variations even at the risk of losing money and/or time while doing that. Such people are few and far between, while the majority of us prefer to play in the familiar territory and “consume” risky experiments a teaspoon at a time.
Now, on the product/service/ – the benefit of a broad choice range is appropriate when,
1. Different variations are very distinct and can be cleanly separated from each other;
2. The UAP and ROI of each choice are easy to “calculate” – i.e., even a layman can clearly see what each choice “buys” him/her.
These also make a lot of sense – if number 15 on my choice list starts blurring with number 3, I might feel confused, tired, frustrated, stupid – none of which are motivating emotions or emotions aligned with high risk tolerance.
Finally, my favorite part is the context of the choice. I am really glad that Baker and Hollingworth brought the context into a spotlight in their post because many studies neglect to acknowledge the importance of the context when it comes to choice. So, what is important when it comes to the context of choice?
1. Time a person has to make a choice;
2. The purpose of the acquisition – routine/necessity or pleasure/luxury/status;
3. Any time of pressure associated with the act of choice – social, political, economic, personal, etc.
The interesting part about the context of choice is that all three factors are interconnected. For example, when I chose toilet paper – a routine purchase of a utilitarian/necessity product – I want to spend as little time as a can on making a choice, and I will likely be guided by an established consideration, e.g., the lowest price or the closest location of the shelf to the cashier counter; the need to choose from a range of 5 options of TP is a nuisance that diverts my time from other, more important things. When I choose a luxury car to drive around the neighborhood, choice becomes part of the enjoyable process of self-validation (I now can afford that luxury car!), forecasting of the lasting/future positive experience (I will love driving that car and/or I will love seeing neighbors being green with envy), and pressure considerations (How would this car match up to my wealthy neighbor’s choice? or Would this car damage or improve my political career?).
What does all this mean? The decision on the number of choices for a particular product/service/concept should be driven by a three-layered inquiry akin the process of understanding art:
1. What’s on the surface – What are we choosing from?
2. What’s in the mind – Who is choosing and what drives them?
3. What influences both – What is the bigger context responsible for the biases of the choice?
What’s the best approach to carry out such an inquiry? Well, my answer will always be – do not underestimate the value of a good segmentation study. While we are all enamored by numbers and their power to convince us of anything, a well-designed qualitative study resulting in a collection of personas and actionable insights on the best way to handle each personal has proven to be a powerful tool for organizations, who want to succeed in the game of choices.
#marketing #segmentation #choiceoverload #optimalchoice #behavioraleconomics #behaviorchange #behaviorchangecommunication #SBCC #qualitativeresearch #actionableinsight #datadrivenstrategy #anaytics #research
Picking and Choosing: When choice turns a game into a grind

About 10 months ago I finally gave in to my internal passion of woodworking after about 5 years of suppressing it. I made the decision to wipe my savings and invest in quality carpentry power tools for the job. Since I couldn’t get any locally I need to import and my shopping destination was Amazon.UK.
And then I was the shopper you describe. I knew very little about tools and was relying on info from other wood workers most of which I could barely remember. One specific item that gave me a lot of trouble was a router table. There was more than 20 brands on amazon all of which mostly looked alike but one would have this feature that would be described as superior to others. But then the next would be described as more superior, and the next and the next…. it was too much. I shopped for all the other tools and…to cut a long story short, today, I do not have a router table. This is because despite there being more than 20 to choose from I never settled on one.
About 10 months ago I finally gave in to my woodworking hobby after about 5 years of resisting it. To set up my workshop I needed to shop for tools – power woodworking tools for that matter. Locally it is not easy to get decent woodworking tools and when you get them they are too expensive. So, I needed to look outside Kenya. I chose Europe because quite a good number of the best woodworking brands are European. A friend of mine has in the past shipped staff from the UK so he agreed to help me ship my tools to Kenya. I chose to shop on Amazon.
And that is exactly when my trouble started!!
First, it is worth mentioning at this point that I had never done any woodwork before so I did not have the slightest clue what I wanted. Secondly, I do not know many carpenters who use power tools so the only sources of information on what to buy were YouTube reviews mostly done by the brands themselves and other online platforms which I did not trust. Not much help there!
I almost gave up on the shopping because Amazon is Amazon – the variety is just too much. At this point I was worried about a number of things. I was worried about buying the wrong tool, I was worried about missing out on a deal and I was worried about not adding just a few more dollars to get way superior features. It took me 3 full months of filling and emptying my cart!! I was so tired of the whole process I almost dropped my woodworking ambition. At last I made the decision to just buy! I spent a total of about $3500
There was however one thing I did not buy – a router table. On this one I could not make the decision. There was like 20 brands each claiming to be better than everyone else. Some were cheaper and others expensive, some were more versatile than others but remember I had no clue what I was looking for – I knew what I wanted it to do for me but I could not pick from the variety. I had a budget of $350 for that item but I just could not make the decision!
Reading your article now makes me know that one of these brands lost a sale because of me having too much choice. And I agree, too much choice does not necessarily mean more – for me it meant less because I was not able to makeup my mind.
I have since reallocated that budget.
Thank you for the comment! If went through finally!