How Many Choices?
When it comes to customer service for your business, extremely helpful and courteous behavior – extremely polite, extremely generous works. But when it comes to product choices, it is possible to overdo. Harvard professor, John Gourville explains how more people often choose at one extreme or another… say the most basic cell phone or the most tricked out model… finding the middle choices too foggy. It’s important to think through your product and service extremes.
Gourville focuses on the compromise effect as the process consumers go through when they are presented with too many choices. It’s known as extremeness avoidance, and it depends largely on the nature of the choices – whether the options cover for each other, as in leather seats vs. cloth seats in a car model, vs. the option to visit New York or San Francisco. With the car seats, no matter which covering you choose, you still have seats. But with the travel choice, you simply do not get the Statue of Liberty in San Francisco. Granted, you get the Golden Gate bridge, but the bridge is no lady!
