The Paradox Of Choice: A Crippling Trend In Consumer Behavior

In the course of deciding whether to keep reading this article, you will likely change your mind several times. 

Similarly to choosing a movie or show you may contemplate how long it would take, whether you would enjoy it, or how else you can be spending your time.

In a world of virtually endless media, entertainment, and information, each piece of content pleading its case, even the most trivial decisions can be crippling. But this concept extends well beyond the consumption of media. This article is about a trend in consumer behavior - what’s driving our decisions, and more importantly, why.

Many neuroscience studies of decision making have generally involved estimating the average activity of populations of brain cells across hundreds of trials.

However, Stanford University researchers have found that this process often overlooks the intricacies of a single decision and the fact that every instance of decision making is slightly different: the myriad factors influencing whether you choose to spend time reading this article today or watch that movie or show will differ from those that would affect you if you were to make the same decisions tomorrow.

Of course, the only other investment consumers may value more than time out of their day is money out of their pocket.

The new customer journey

In the changing world of consumer behavior, influencing a customer’s decision on where and how they spend their money depends on the information you’re putting in front of them that day, and more importantly, how they’re receiving it.

Your local grocery store may have 48 varieties of yogurt, 134 types of red wine, 64 different cleaning products, and 30,000 items. If you’re like most modern consumers, you’ve probably experimented with purchasing such everyday items online over the past year. And maybe you still are.

Initially, the surge in online shopping over last year and a half was attributed to the number one consumer demand during 2020, health and safety.

“How can I get toilet paper without going into the store and getting coronavirus” was a common concern for many. Now e-commerce and m-commerce revolves around reducing customer effort, convincing consumers that a given service is easy and worth their immediate investment. According to our research, conducted in a CCW Digital Market Study on consumer preferences, resolution, and speed and efficiency are currently the top consumer demands in customer experience.  

For example, we may not want to drive to the supermarket and look at 134 bottles of red wine. Instead, we might search online, swipe through an alcohol delivery app, and filter certain brands out.

As consumers across all demographics have become more comfortable shopping online, today’s retailers are continuously brainstorming ways to help consumers decide what they want, make those difficult decisions less difficult, and ensure them that their time and money is well spent. 

But is it really working? Is online shopping making the customer journey easier, or is the information overload on the web making purchasing decisions even more difficult for the modern consumer?

The messy middle

Once upon a time, Amazon.com Inc. only sold books, Apple Inc. sold computers, and Google was just a search engine. Those days are long gone, and each of those companies—as well as Microsoft Corp. and Facebook Inc. — have become the most prominent tech behemoths that influence our everyday lives.

Science Focus estimates that Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook collectively store at least 1,200 petabytes. What does that mean and why does it matter?

Putting this in perspective, a three-minute song uses about three megabytes of storage, which means that at 1,200 petabytes, those four companies alone hold about enough data for 400 trillion songs or 1.2 quadrillion minutes of music. That’s more than 2.2 billion years of audio. If the first single-celled organisms on Earth pressed play, we’d still have a few thousand years of Elvis, the Rolling Stones, Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber left. Today’s IoT, or internet of things can be a complicated web of information, that often times trickles down into the customer journey.

For this reason online commerce is becoming increasingly competitive, and consumers are becoming increasingly indecisive with the endless information available on the web, creating a  greater need for effortless experiences. 

Behind the numbers

As retailers attempt to make purchasing decisions easier online, consumers have grown more indecisive with which products and brands to invest their time and money in. In fact, studies have shown that nearly 40% of consumers have left a website because they were overwhelmed by too many options. Of course, the same cannot be said for the number of customers who walk into a physical store and leave without purchasing anything.

However, marketing research and insights commissioned by Google and Ipsos shows:

73% of consumers have become more interested in a product or brand after seeing an ad that is related to what they have been shopping for.

85% will take immediate action within discovering a product, including reading reviews or comparing prices.

For many businesses, interest generated from marketing campaigns is there. End-to-end execution is not. The question then becomes, what’s happening in that messy middle between marketing a service and securing a transaction? In other words, why do today’s consumers so frequently express interest, only to be lost somewhere in the customer journey?

What makes Amazon, Netflix, and Uber so appealing?

In a data-driven world full of information and options, the purchasing journey is actually more complex. The more information available, the more consumers are seeking information from their favorite sources before they purchase, creating a decision paralysis across many target markets. Similarly to the way picking a red wine for a date out of 134 options can be daunting (or 2.2 billion years of music), so too can any product that comes with an abundance of online marketing copy, product information or reviews, alternative options, or customizable features. When a customer fears making the wrong choice, they often don’t make one at all.

Whether a customer chooses to make the purchase or not, their experience in the entire consumer journey dictates whether they will choose to do it again, or not. According to our research on consumer preferences, 66% of consumers will switch to a competitor after just one to two bad interactions with a brand. This can include a number of factors, including the marketing copy buried in a search engine (or in a physical store), or the conversation they had with an employee.

Often overlooked, the decision paralysis that causes consumers to either not make a purchase, or worse, switch to a competitor can be the medium they’re using to interact with a business.

Have you ever stopped and thought about what makes online retailers such as Amazon or Shopify, streaming services such as Netflix, ride-sharing apps such as Uber, music services such as Spotify, or dating apps such as Tinder so appealing? In their own way, each company prioritizes personalization, eliminating friction (or decision paralysis) in the user experience. Amazon has individualized recommendations, one-click purchases and same-day shipping. Netflix organizes content for each user and even starts playing previews before you have click or make a decision. Tinder allows users to swipe left or right based off of a single image and some relevant information. The list goes on.  

Some early  innovators are already working on solving for information overload and are using a user-centric approach to put users back in control, in an intuitive way.

Ask Siri, or Sydney

For this reason, I recently sat down with Ross Engelhardt, the Global Director of Product Management & Digital Experience at a $10B enterprise building consumer facing technologies.  He is well known and respected in the Digital Transformation world having delivered a number of large scale transformations for the world's biggest brands, many of which we interact with daily. 

He and his wife recently founded AskSydney as a family business. 

AskSydney is an interactive and iterative approach to image driven browsing - a gamified visual search functionality that translates and collects real-time user preferences to provide a hyper-personalized search experience with enhanced results. When users indicate a preference, all images update to get closer to what they want.

What makes them unique is that they identified the opportunity to solve this problem by working backwards and listening to their users. 

Originally, they launched a food-recommendation app that let users swipe through photos of real food around them until a matched with a restaurant serving up that real-time craving. As they grew, organizations reached out to provide the same visual and mood-based search experience for things beyond food, like art, furniture, clothes, streaming, and more. They pivoted their efforts and now own a robust patent portfolio of 9 global patents (with others pending), that solves information overload. 

Their secret sauce is “why the next visual is presented” - such that despite the UI a designer may implement their technology (swiping, image grid, etc.), each time a user indicates a preference, or a non-preference, they are shown more of what they like and less of what they don't like.

Its beyond what their profile or previous history has stored. Perhaps usually you watch crime movies, but today, you're feeling inspired and want to watch a comedy. AskSydney allows users to be served recommendations for what they want, at that moment. 

The team is working with various global organizations and their IP has been cited by 11+ major tech companies that we all interact with daily, so we know now the behemoths  are catching on. 

AskSydney is also using this opportunity to put users in control of their data. Rather than companies trying to guess and creepily measure what we want, visual search allows users to share what they want and don't, directly. The guessing game is over. 

If organizations have a catalog of choices, AskSydney provides the human way to find what people want. By listening to their users, they are: 

Solving for information overload,

Unlocking real-time-mood-preferences,

Capturing explicit customer data,

Elevating and gamifying user experience,

Enhancing search results accuracy/activations,

Solving for "I don't know what I want" / "I can't describe it" / "I'll know when I see it"

Enabling fair trade data monetization

...all without ever needing a keyboard

Leaders are finally becoming aware 

The 11+ citations on the above IP portfolio represent a larger trend and call to action in the industry. While many competitors are hitting parity in their offering/capabilities and truly benign differentiated by their content/experiences, it’s now becoming a race to who will implement this at scale. 

Mitche Lowe Co-Founder of Netflix and Redbox was quoted just a few months ago in Dec 2020: "I think if anybody can figure out how to solve this problem [information overload] for big segments of the population, it’s a real big opportunity in the business, and no one’s doing it." He mentioned how some viewers are recommended watching Willy Wonka after watching the Shining.

Race is on

As users expect more from their digital lifestyle, it's time the content madness is eased. 

When you stream whatever you are binging  tonight, know that people are already at work trying to help you find what you want when you want.  When going through pages of furniture and shooing away generic recommendation engines that show you more of what you have, know that soon you'll interact in a new way that is simple yet effective at getting you closer to what you want and further from what you don't. 

AskSydney is out there to “kill filter and scroll,” and organizations that scale capabilities like these will not only win in the content wars, but reduce the consumer-to-content journey, the new differentiator and KPI for executives to measure.