Keep Your Women’s Market Sane: Avoid Overchoice
In the latest Working Knowledge newsletter, Harvard Business School professor John Gourville’s is interviewed about his new research paper, “Overchoice and Assortment Type: When and Why Variety Backfires.” Co-written by professor Dilip Soman of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, the paper demonstrates how confusing and decision-stopping too much choice can be for shoppers.
In the interview, Gourville discusses the difference between “alignable” and “non-alignable” assortments. For example, Levi’s 501 jeans in the many size/color/fit combinations are an alignable assortment, or trade-offs within a single dimension, that allow you to find the best match for your very individual criteria. On the other hand, buying a laptop involves non-alignable, tradeoffs across dimensions, where choosing one element usually means foregoing another.
If I understand the concept correctly - apparel brands have started to help us a bit with the “alignable assortment” options. Just take a look at Banana Republic’s different pant “fits” whereby a shopper can walk in the store and filter out a bunch of choices by knowing that the “Martin” fit is where she is going to start. How about a consumer electronics store that separates computers by categories, such as “Occasional Email/Internet & Very Occasional Word Processor” or “Fanatical Wireless Internet & Music Downloader” (but hopefully the store can come up with clever names to fit the profile). A note: “profiling” is not the answer in every case, certainly, but perhaps when it comes to alignable assortments, as Gourville describes them, it could be a way to ease the decision-making process?
This sort of categorizing or profiling might translate to non-alignable assortments, as well. Then again, is there really a way to filter out all those random, non-linear, options anyway? What do you think?
Clearly, I’d love to learn more about this research, which seems to be a helpful addition to the “less is more” debate chronicled in Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice (which I mentioned in a post a few months ago). If nothing else, by reading it, students of marketing to women could gather a few ideas about how to deliver choice, or refine choices, without losing customer satisfaction. And, to that, women will respond.
September 11th, 2005 at 12:51 am
Great post. Haven’t read the Harvard article, but I will. Sounds like a great build on Schwartz’s ideas.