Do not miss Tom Asacker’s blog post today. Tom quotes extensively from a new book by Phil Fragasso called Marketing for Rainmakers: 52 Rules of Engagement to Attract and Retain Customers for Life 
.
Here are a couple of key points …
As counterintuitive as it sounds, the surest way to lose customers is to give them too many choices. People are inundated with decision-making responsibilities. Think about your own life. Every single day you’re faced with literally hundreds of personal and professional decisions. Take a walk through your local grocery store and if your choice of cereals, shampoos, sodas, detergents, and breads don’t approach a thousand different options then you’re living in the wrong neighborhood.
And …
We’ve created an environment in which the experience of buyer’s remorse – questioning whether you made the right purchase decision after the purchase has been made – is being replaced with buyer’s aversion, a pre-purchase feeling of angst that leads directly to a paralysis-by-analysis mindset. If we make it too hard to choose, we make it very simple for the consumer to walk away. (Or even worse, we force the consumer into making a quick decision based on the one differentiating factor he actually understands: price. And that’s a lose-lose proposition for anyone who doesn’t happen to work for Wal-Mart.)
You’ll also find some suggestions about how to deal with this paradox that too much choice paralyzes decisions.
From personal experience you are right. When faced with too many choices myself, I retreat and usually make no decision at all. When shopping with my daughters I found the same reasoning happen to them. If they find a tee shirt they like and there are two many colors, they usually end up putting it down, but will buy one that doesn’t have as many choices. Wonder why, could it be too over-whelming?
Yes, that’s it exactly. Our brains shut down when we have too many choices.
Be well,
Bob
I got an email from a producer today looking to book a tried and true top market female announcer voice for one of the Emmy shows. I gave him one name and one name only. He contacted her, asked her for “some reads” on a script. After trying the script in the stylings of how the gals who’d been cast in prior years might have read it, she decided to “Just Be Herself” … gave it one take in her core brand voice. He loved it. Hired her in an instant.
One name was recommended.
One take on one script.
That one person was hired.
Quick, simple, and confident all the way down the line made it a quick, simple easy casting choice for everyone.
Point proven.
Nancy,
Thank you for providing such a vivid example. Very cool.
Be well,
Bob