There comes a point at which ever-increasing consumer choice does more to confuse than to liberate

 The problem of too much choice

Do you like your orange juice organic or regular, with or without calcium, or with minimal or maximal pulp? How about your washing-powder? Is it bio or non-bio, branded or non-branded, liquitabs or tablets, with or without added conditioner? By the way, what’s your favourite scent?

Or maybe the thought of having to select any of those options is keeping you out of the commodity jungle entirely - you’d rather scrape by on what’s still in the house.Although an explosion of consumer choices may mean we sometimes get exactly what we want, too many choices can also overwhelm us to the point where we do not choose anything at all. Do you need proof? Let’s just take a look around Sainsbury’s online: there are currently 41 different varieties of fresh soup, 13 different categories of cheeses, each containing 20–40 different products – from the range of cheeses available, one could think the French have taken over the UK! ‘Too much’ exists in pretty much every single FMGC product category.   Confusion is likely to be an ever increasing problem; our society has become a society all about choice and innovation. While personal computers and the Internet have speeded up and revolutionised the way we shop, they have also spawned a tsunami of information for us to wade through, and choose how to deal with. As a result, having to choose is taking more and more of our time when we have no time to spare! Innovations create consumer confusion.

Confusing confusion

I paid particular attention to my buying behaviour for a couple of weeks and came up with three different types of confusion:

1. Misleading confusion: While British food manufacturers are currently arguing over whether food products should use the traffic light or the GDA labelling system, I was a victim of what I call ‘misleading confusion’. I purchased a supermarket’s own brand ‘light’ yoghurt, only to find out its content was not that light in comparison to similar products on the market, and should not have been classified as a ‘light’ product.  

In this particular case, the misleading took the form of a slight exaggeration of the language. The same applies to the feminine care sector, where the use of words such as ‘magic’, ‘mini’ and ‘ultra’ to describe the thickness or thinness of a product confuses consumers.[1] 

2. ‘Too much’ confusion Simonson[2] claims that the value of trademarks depends on the ability to protect them from confusion. Have a short wander in the aisle of any supermarket and you’ll witness similarities in packaging between the store’s own brand and the premium brands.

3. Bewildering Confusion: The last type of confusion I came up with is bewildering confusion. The possibility of bewilderment arises when consumers have to face a purchase decision. Let’s take a look at the decision-making process:  

The buyer decision-making process	Example
1. Need Recognition	I need a new phone
2. Information search	Friends’ recommendations (WOM), retailers, www, catalogues etc.= INFORMATION OVERLOAD!
3. Alternative Selection	Why? There’s already too much choice on the market!
4. Decision-making on buying the product	Sounds like a good deal! J
5. Post-purchase behaviour	Maybe it wasn’t such a good deal, after all L

 I needed a new phone and started doing some research on the Internet, paid a visit to a few retailers and asked my friends to give me some information about their mobile phone supplier. Whilst this information gave me confidence in my ability to judge and evaluate various mobile phone suppliers, I however disregarded some important information on hidden extra call charges; my extensive information search in fact led to information overload.  This means that in effect, consumers cannot cope with all the facts and are forced to disregard important information leading to poorer decisions.

Motivating the consumer

If too much choice is a problem for the consumers, it is a catastrophe for marketers! Consumers have adopted a very simple, yet clever coping strategy for the dictatorship of ‘too much’: to ignore the marketing messages that they see. When overloaded with choice, they buy brands they know and trust, but even these may not be entirely meeting their needs. Marketers need to get their marketing right in order to ‘shout louder’ than their competitors. Some pioneers are already getting out in front of the issue and gaining acceptance by consumers. Dove is one of these pioneers:

•  Less is more - Dove’s simplicity lies in its consistent fragrance across the range. For instance, the fragrance of a soap bar is identical to the smell of a deodorant.  Dove’s key differentiator is the fragrance of their products.  
•  Keep it simple – Dove’s packaging is simple yet memorable; Dove stands for navy blue. The use of the bird conveys the products attributes, naturalness and softness (1/4 moisturising cream)·        
• Offline marketing – Dove’s recent Campaign for Real Beauty was a true success. The campaign for real beauty’s[3] mission is to make women feel more beautiful every day by challenging today’s stereotypical view of beauty and inspiring women to take great care of themselves. The brand’s commitment to the mission starts with using real women, not professional models, of various ages, shapes and sizes to provoke discussion and debate about today’s typecast beauty images.
• Web 2.0: Web 2.0 marketing activities can make or break a brand; never underestimate the power of the blogosphere! Dove is one of the few companies who managed successfully to empower their community. Their video ‘The Evolution of Beauty’ was a viral success but Dove also managed effectively to communicate with their audience with their ‘share your views’ blog. Using a combination of online and offline marketing activity, Dove have probably managed to reach every single segment of their target market.Less is more may sound simplistic, but in an era of increasing information overload, companies need to adapt and listen to their consumers. Web 2.0 is the way forward. Those businesses that ignore Web 2.0 won’t die; they’ll just become increasingly ignored in an era of too much everything.

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[2] Simonson, (1994) ‘Trademark infringement from the buyer perspective: conceptual analysis and measurement implications.’ Journal of Public Policy and Marketing , 13, issue 2, P 181-189

Supermarkets in labels war

If you care about what kind of food you buy, there is suddenly a lot more to digest.

The big supermarkets have put new labelling systems with more nutritional information on the front of packs - but what you get depends on where you shop. More consumer confusion ahead…

Sainsbury’s, Asda and Waitrose have all opted for a traffic-light label, where green is good, orange is not so good for you, and red is a warning not to consume too much. This is the system the Food Standards Agency would like the whole industry to adopt.

But Tesco and many of the big food manufacturers have gone for the rival Guideline Daily Amounts (GDA) system, where the label tells you what percentage of your guideline daily amounts of sugar, salt, fat and calories each serving contains.

I have been working on a number of packaging projects recently, and I always advise my clients to go for the GDA labelling system rather than the preferred traffic light system. Why? Because I am a consumer and here I am simply using my common sense!

While the colour-coding is easy enough to understand, the grams are meaningless. Taking a look at the above pictures, the Sainsbury’s packaging indicates that this product contains 15g of sugar – fair enough but so what?

While consumers may be aware of calories intake or salt content, they may not necessarily understand some of the percentages on the pack. This labelling system is supposed to help consumers, not confuse them!

Taking a look at the GDA labelling system, the above label shows that each pack contains 8.1g of sugar which equals to 14% of your guideline daily amount. Now that makes sense.

Who wins? You decide!

Too much NOISE!

Katia Adams and C.B Whittemore recently teamed up to write a terrific post on ‘Transcultural Perspective on the Retail Experience’. As it turns out, I recently wrote a paper for my company on consumerism (which I should hopefully be able to post on my blog shortly), and I felt their post was ideal to expand on the issue of ‘too much choice’.

Katia is a Brazilian national living in the USA who blogs about transcultural marketing, and shares her experiences of living in a foreign country. Katia’s ability to discuss cultural differences struck me, as I never really experienced a cultural shock when I moved to the UK 7 years ago… Well, the Brits do drive on the wrong side of the road, still use the imperial metric system, and the Queen is an A-List celebrity!  

Aged 14, I remember being terribly excited when spotting Amora (Amora relève le plat!) mustard or Bonne Maman jam (Confiture Bonne Maman, c’est toi qu’on aime tant!) at the supermarket; in fact, I was always trying to spot French products on the shelves. Interestingly, British supermarkets are usually much smaller than French supermarkets, but because of the wide variety of products available, consumer confusion is something companies still have to face and tackle.   

Katia says: ‘I had visited the US a couple of times before I came to live here, and one of the things that struck me most was the enormous variety of products available on store shelves compared to Latin America. The impact of “wide variety” alone has its effects on building size, and so one sees enormous super markets and drug stores in the US compared to relatively small to moderate sized stores in Latin America.’ 

Although an explosion of consumer choices may mean we sometimes get exactly what we want, too many choices can also overwhelm us to the point where we do not choose anything at all – this is what I call too much noise (cf. buying decision-making process) or information overload. And while this is a nightmare for consumers, it is a catastrophe for marketers! 

‘In Brazil, Colgate is the dominant toothpaste brand and, being a good conservatively minded consumer, I was a regular user of the “original” white Colgate. When I migrated to the US, I still used Colgate, but I “migrated” to some of the other varieties of my regular brand, like Colgate with fluoride or the whitening agent, the pump or some other attribute. Then, I began to engage in brand trial with one of the other competitive premium brands. What happened then is that I experienced “choice pressure” – perceiving that I “had to” choose from a wide variety of options rather than sticking conservatively to one brand. At that point, I would say, marketing had molded in me the mindset of a classic mass market consumer.’ 

‘Should louder’ than the competition!

I recently worked on a project for a major feminine care manufacturer (unglamorous, I know!!) on consumer confusion, however although due to confidentiality reasons, I cannot discuss the findings of this research into too much detail. 

The research helped us realise that product innovations such as scented liners and Always Freshelle created even more confusion across the category.  When we asked women to group different products in the feminine care category, we quickly realised that the perceived category landscape didn’t make any sense at all as consumers didn’t differentiate between liners and towels. We analysed consumers’ perceived product benefits and emotional needs to create a Decision Tree. The Decision Tree highlighted level by level the product and emotional needs that are important when making a purchase. Manufacturers can use this tool to decide whether they should launch a product or not.

Decision Trees are excellent tools aimed at helping marketers and consumers alike to choose between several courses of action. They provide a highly effective structure within which you can lay out options and investigate the possible outcomes of choosing those options. They also help you to form a balanced picture of the risks and rewards associated with each possible course of action. It’s definitely something businesses need to look into…  

To be continued…