Does the paradox of choice doom mass customization? A search on the above phrase shows that a lot of marketers believe mass customization is a doomed concept with the headlines: Mass Customization Maybe Offers Too Many Choices, Spoiled for Choice: Consumer Confusion in Internet Based Mass Customization, The Mass Customization Paradox, and When Less is More in Consumer Choice. I disagree.
The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz
is a worthwhile, albeit slightly depressing book. Schwartz does an excellent job of demonstrating that today we (especially Americans) have infinite choices before us. We can choose from a variety of career paths, we can live in different cities, we can eat various foods, we can buy different products, we can date different people… on and on, you get the idea. Schwartz also presents various statistics (suicide rates, diagnosed depressions, medications) suggesting that, we are (in general) less happy. He suggests causation with the following rationale:
- Making good choices is just plain hard (imperfect, constantly changing information).
- We spend so much time researching choices that we’re too busy for our families and things that matter.
- We are constantly stressed out about choices because we don’t want to miss opportunities (we want them all).
- After making a choice we fantasize about how much better life would have been if we had chosen the alternative (regret).
- After doing all the research to select the best option our expectations of the result become so high that reality can not deliver (disappointment).
- Once we’ve made our choice, we constantly compare our choices to others and try to analyze who made a better choice.
Throughout the book is the theme that there are two types of people: maximizers and satisfiers.
Maximizers always try to make the “best” decisions and satisficers try to make decisions that are “good enough”. The ironic result is that maximizers tend to be more successful and satisficers tend to be more happy.
Most of us are somewhere in the middle, or behave as one or the other depending on the choice being considered. I think the book is a worthwhile read for this point. You might find some personal insight into your own quality of life!
If more choice = less happiness and mass-customization = lots more choice, it follows logically that mass-customization = lots less happiness.
And there are plenty of failed mass-customization efforts to cite. Just see Proctor and Gamble’s “Reflect”, Cannondale, or Levi’s Personal Pair. However, a little research will show is that many of these “failures” or “discontinuations” weren’t because consumers didn’t like the choice. For example, Levi’s ended the Personal Pair effort because it caused sales channel conflicts – other efforts had trouble manufacturing custom products and staying competitive.
Points from PoC that support the case for mass-customization
We are naturally drawn to choice
The fact is, most of us want more choices – even if they make us less happy. As Schwartz says, “65% of people not diagnosed with cancer say they would want to choose the treatment if they were diagnosed”. We crave freedom and individuality whether it is good for us or not. Mass-customization offerings are thus a natural draw to potential customers and should be able to easily get customer attention.
Whether we like it or not, we are already faced with infinite choices
Suppose you are an ecommerce company selling coffee makers. According to Schwartz’s advice, offering fewer coffee makers on your website would increase your sales. This might have worked 10 years ago in department stores, but today, when customers are looking at your coffee maker website, you can bet they have multiple browser tabs open to your competitors websites as well. Putting less products on your digital store shelves only decreases the likelihood you will be offering what the customer is looking for (for more analysis on this point refer to Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail” discussion of Amazon.com).
PoC ideas to improve a mass-customization strategy
Provide salient information that help users make the right choices
The flip side of the above cancer treatment statistic is that “88% of people actually diagnosed with cancer did not want to choose their treatment”. The unhappiness of choice comes when the stakes are high and the correct choice isn’t clear. To help mitigate this, provide either a live person or a digital wizard to (1) provide an “experts” recommendation for the customers needs and (2) ease the customer’s mind that the stakes are not as high as they think (which is true for most buying choices). When personal attention is not feasible (most ecommerce), it is critical to integrate easy to navigate and relevant information. User interface designs such as Zafu that make recommendations after a customer answers several intuitive questions seem to work especially well. MyShape, HisCatalog and Yelp also offer user interfaces that work well for helping customers make buying decisions. These strategies should be applied to mass-customization offerings as well.
Focus on offerings that provide real utility – not just aesthetics
Frank Piller once mentioned that this is the key success driver in mass-customization companies. The paradox of choice psychology provides a good explanation why. If your mass customization provides a product with a superior fit (such as custom orthopedic shoes), the choice becomes easier to make because you just choose “perfect fit”. Real utility implies that there is a correct answer, not a subjective opinion. It might be complicated and it might require domain expertise or a better understanding of your personal situation, but with the right information it will be an easy choice. Conversely, aesthetic choices can be unclear. For example, choosing between 100 shades of pink could be a subjective choice – thus a very hard decision to make.
If you find the topic interesting (and don’t mind a $2000 conference price tag) come to the First Annual MIT Smart Customization Seminar November 10th and 11th, where I will be discussing my mass-customization start up Proper Cloth.
Tagged: , mass-customization, Paradox of Choice
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2 Comments
As Don Peppers, Martha Rogers, and I wrote as the opening lines of our March-April 1995 Harvard Business Review article, “Do You Want to Keep Keep Your Customers Forever?”: “Customers, whether consumers or businesses, do not want more choices. They want exactly what they want”.
I look forward to meeting you at the Smart Customization conference!
I strongly believe that mass customization only works when choices are managed. I’ve worked in this arena with industrial configure-to-order, build-to-order, and engineer-to-order manufacturers for a long time. An all-to-common mistake is that developing a customer-facing configurator that allows the customer to choose from all possible options will automatically generate skyrocketing sales. The problem is that too many choices only confuse the customer and produces dissatisfaction with the specification process and, by extension, the manufacturer. Customers, especially when faced with complex choices, expect the manufacturer to play the part of the expert and expect that part of what they are paying for is that expertise. The bottom-line is knowing who your customer is and in the execution of the process.
I also suggest “Nudge” by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein for excellent insights on “choice architecture.”