Exercising Choice Control
If there’s one time of the year that I could do with a narrower view on purchasing then it is at Christmas. Every year it gets harder to know what to buy for others. Not that it’s any easier to make confident purchasing decisions for oneself as we really do have limitless choice these days. Even if you apply a set of variables and decision points then there’s usually too many. Back in the day, I studied the principles of horse-racing (well, more specifically the methods people use to make money out of it). I read that there are something like 32 variables governing a typical race so it’s an art, and practice, not a science. Like chess.
So when Rory mentioned Choice Architecture it got me thinking about some work from the Future Foundation called “Choice Control” (I recommend the excellent blog too). which is really a discussion on consumers desire for choice balanced with the actual decisions they’ll make. For instance, if you went to the supermarket to buy the following list: yoghurts, orange juice, milk, bread, cereal, tea, shampoo, washing powder and chicken pieces then you’d probably expect to buy pretty much the same thing each time. (For a discussion on how supermarkets think about this I recommend Joanna Blythman’s excellent book Shopped.) In fact in the FF fieldwork they found there were 7,426,655,852,990,400 (that’s right – seven thousand trillion) combinations of unique shopping basket for that little list. So in principle then consumers have an infinite choice with an impossible number of variables to comprehend. It’s hardly surprising then that actually – when questioned – a third of consumers between the ages of 16 and 25 they would rather other people made their decisions for them. FF go on to say that there is therefore an opportunity for trusted brands to edit consumers’ choices (in much the same way as your friends already edit yours for you). I’d go further than that. I think it’s an opportunity, sure, but actually it’s a responsibility to be an “editor of complexity” – a guide through the options, which one is free to exercise at any time, with the intent of filtering, ordering and prioritising the variables to best effect for the customer. Those choices may not be simple – it’s not a rate card - and it is only in the continuing conversation that preference for a choice will be established. In the world of infinite choice and disintermediated marketing messages, being a trusted advisor to a customer, joining hands with them, highlighting and expediting their choices (if they wish) is part of becoming a trusted brand in the first place. In doing so then the trap to avoid is making the choices about you and not them – it’s their choices and decision making process that matter, which may not neatly fit into a product-based world.
