Have you ever found yourself perusing a long menu in a restaurant, with a plethora of fabulous choices and found yourself incapable of making a choice for your meal? In fact, after looking at all these fabulous choices you’re not even hungry anymore. It’s not you, it’s them!
The body of research on persuasion talks a lot about the need to carefully balance the number of choices or options you offer your prospect or stakeholder. One choice seems like a demand with no freedom to make an actual decision, two choices still feels pushy, and too many choices puts us into overload and renders us incapable of making a choice at all for the fear of getting it wrong.
What is the impact of too many choices or options?
There’s some famous research from Sheena Iyengar in 2004 who researched company-sponsored retirement programmes for nearly 800,000 workers. They looked at the impact of choice or options on participation rates and yes, they found that the more choices that were offered, the less likely people were to enrol in the programme. When only two funds were offered, the rate of participation was around 75% and interestingly, when 59 funds were offered the rate dropped to around 60%. 15% is significant when you’re dealing with 800,000 people!
The same researchers did a similar experiment with jam flavours. When they displayed 6 flavours at a tasting stall in a fancy supermarket, 30% of passers-by tasted the jam. When they displayed all 24 flavours only 3% of passers-by tasted the jam.
The point is that when there are too many choices available the decision-making process involves the dimension of a higher risk, too many chances to get it ‘wrong’. When we go into overwhelm our mind shuts down and we simply can’t make any decision.
Sometimes lots of options works!
If you’re going to make the choice to offer lots of options either because you want the publicity that comes with offering wild and crazy options, or perhaps you want to offer every possibility so that everyone can always find something they want with you and they never have to visit your competitor, you need to give out lots of free samples or offer a rigorous try-before-you-buy scheme in order to reduce the inherent risk in getting the choice wrong.
This was proven by the ice-cream wonderland known as La Casa Gelato in Vancouver,
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MICHELLE BOWDEN IS THE PERSUASIONIST!
Based on thousands of hours of global research, Michelle can show you there is a GAP in the way your people persuade your customers, prospects and decision makers.
Once you fill that gap, it will increase how often they hear the word ‘yes’!
Remember an idea is just an idea until you persuade someone to support it, fund it or endorse it.
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©2024 MICHELLE BOWDEN is an authority on persuasive presenting in business. She’s run her Persuasive Presentation Skills Masterclass over 1000 times for more than 13,000 people over the past 25 years and her name is a synonym for ‘presentation skills’ in Australia.
Michelle is a multi-million-dollar pitch coach to her client list that reads like a who’s who of international business: banking and finance, IT, pharmaceutical, retail, telecommunications plus many more. Michelle is the creator of the Persuasion Smart Profile®, a world-first psychological assessment tool that reports on your persuasive strengths and weaknesses at work, the best-selling internationally published author of How to Present: the ultimate guide to presenting live and online (Wiley) and How to Persuade: the skills you need to get what you want (Wiley).
