Choices - Are We Drowning?

Choices: they seem to be multiplying exponentially in every aspect of life for Americans, from the most mundane (choosing a supplier for your electricity) to the most life-changing (choosing a surgeon). And everything in between requires making choices, as people custom order, or build, their own computers, decide how many free minutes they need on their cell phone service plan, and visit sleep-away camps to decide which is the best for their ten-year-old child. Even decisions as to what to eat in order to stay healthy are increasingly complicated, given the continually changing information that is put forth in the media. It is likely that we will one day be faced with choosing what gene therapies to use for ourselves, our children, and even our babies in utero—and we will have to decide if these therapies are truly therapeutic or largely for enhancement. Americans have been living with the blessing and curse of myriad choices for a long time.

The Consumer Style Inventory, which was first created in 1986, elucidates eight mental characteristics of consumers—one of which is “confused by overchoice.” This Inventory was recently conducted in China, where the consumer market is expanding rapidly, and it was found that one in three consumers was “confused by overchoice”. It will be interesting to watch, over time if, as Chinese consumers become more used to an array of choices in products and services, they become more comfortable when presented with myriad choices. It is possible that the expansion of the middle class in many countries and the concurrent expansion of the numbers and types of products and services available to consumers will create many more “confused” shoppers. On the other hand, once variety and choice become accepted and expected in the marketplace, then their lack can create a sense of deprivation.

Consumer behavior is most certainly affected by the presence of numerous choices in the marketplace. The ways in which individuals react to choice has the potential to be useful in profiling customers. But the way a person reacts to having choices in one area, such as health care, may be different from the way that same person reacts to having choices in cleaning products. Do people necessarily avail themselves of options when presented with them?

In some arenas, the availability of choice has the potential to cause harm. Concern has been voiced that employee health care plans that make workers responsible for considering costs in choosing health services may lead to people scrimping on medical care that is necessary. There has been much written of late, also, about the potential dangers of privatizing social security and allowing people to make their own investment decisions. In yet another area, the abundance of knowledge that is now available to everyone—from which people must choose what to absorb and use—and the concurrent belief that anyone can now become a success because of that, has led to a pervasive fear of failure in knowledge societies.

It is not only people that must make choices in our increasingly complex world. Machines, too, are beginning to be faced with choices. There is now so much information on PCs that the desktop metaphor is becoming obsolete. These computers need a new way to manage and file all
the choices that are available for inclusion in memory and hard drive. “Parasitic computing” enables one computer to co-opt another to perform computations, unbeknownst to that computer’s owner, and potentially slowing down the host computer. IBM is working to develop autonomic computing, which will enable systems to solve their own problems—without human intervention. Presence awareness, a new concept in software development, lets devices automatically detect other devices on a network.

Implications:

In new world markets, created in countries where the middle class is emerging, marketers must be very conscious of how many and in what manner arrays of choices are presented to consumers. Too much choice could serve to alienate novices in the marketplace, yet too little choice could be seen as patronizing in a world where mass communication and mass media make people around the world aware of what a middle-class lifestyle can offer.

In existing markets, it will be worthwhile to consider ways in which to alleviate consumer stress by making it easier to make choices, yet without necessarily removing options from the marketplace. Market research needs to do a better job of helping businesses understand the subtle and highly complex issue of choice. This subject is often over-simplified rather than explored in depth.

Products that will require consumers to make fewer choices when using that product will be well-received. Companies such as Whirlpool and 3M Health Care are working with design firms to make user interface simpler without compromising the sophistication of the product.

As more and more items become embedded with computers that communicate directly with one another, with no human intermediary, it will become more critical that computers are able to make the right choices—the choices that their users want them to make, that is.

Issues Analysis provided by: Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc.
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