Imagine you are in a supermarket where a wide variety of different types of jam
are for sale.
You see strawberry, blackberry, grape, raspberry, apple, peach, gooseberry, red currant, black
currant, cranberry, kiwi, and many more.
You name it, and they have it.
All in all, there are 24 different flavors.
Now let's change the scenery.
In this new scenario, the supermarket sells only the 6 most popular flavors.
What do you think?
Would you rather buy a jar of jam where 26 flavors are offered or where you can choose
from only 6?
When asked this question, many consumers had no difficulty answering.
Their gut feeling tells them, Choice is good for you!
They prefer to have a choice of many flavors of jam instead of just a few.
After all, isn't choice a fundamental value in modern societies?
Over time, the number of products consumers can choose from has increased dramatically.
Today, a well-stocked supermarket may carry over 40,000 items.
Okay.
Choice may be good in general, but when faced with a huge variety of products in a store,
the situation can become somewhat different.
The two scenarios I described were part of an in-store experiment conducted by two researchers,
Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper.
In an upscale supermarket in California, shoppers encountered a tasting booth with either 24
or 6 different flavors of jam.
Here is what happened: Considerably more shoppers were attracted to the booth offering an extensive
selection of flavors as opposed to the booth with the limited selection.
The results were drastically different, however, when sales were measured.
Of all shoppers who had tasted a jam from the limited selection, 30% made a purchase.
But only a meager 3% who had experienced the large selection bought a jar of jam.
In light of these findings, it seems that having many choices doesn't necessarily benefit
consumers or their choices.
They experience what's called choice overload.
Several studies have already examined this phenomenon, also called "the tyranny of choice".
They reveal the clearly negative consequences of too much choice.
Shoppers making a choice from too many options regret their purchase decision afterward much
more than do shoppers choosing from a limited choice set.
Additionally, shoppers who are overwhelmed often decide not to make any choice at all.
As a result, they leave the store without purchasing any of the alternatives.
Either because they have decided to postpone the decision to a later point in time or in
the worst case because they gave up on making any purchase at all.
If you optimize the visual merchandising strategy of a store you can avoid these undesirable
consequences.
There are two solutions: Solution # 1: Reduce the number of items carried
in the store.
Many stores have successfully reduced the number of stock keeping units.
A stock keeping unit is a specific product for sale.
One of these retailers is Trader Joe's supermarkets.
This is a highly successful grocery chain, concentrated primarily in California but now
expanding all over the United States.
Trader Joe's carries only 4,000 items: less than one-tenth the number carried by a typical
supermarket.
But each of the products it sells is carefully selected to make sure that it is of the highest
quality.
Solution # 2: Visually structure the assortment of products.
Offering only a limited selection of merchandise may be helpful to ease the burden shoppers
have in deciding which products to choose.
But the jam experiment also showed that shoppers are more attracted to a large selection than
to a small one.
To have the best of both worlds, here's what I've found to work for many retailers: Arrange
your products clearly and selectively.
This effect can be achieved by emphasizing only a few alternatives but also by having
the other alternatives available if requested.
For example, movie stores often feature the top ten movies of the month.
Similarly, I rearranged the assortment of a wine store.
Instead of giving equal emphasis to all the wines, I preselected several wines in each
section of the store.
With this new arrangement, wine lovers were still impressed by the vast assortment of
wines my client's store is famous for.
At the same time, shoppers also saw recommended wines in each of the sections: five recommended
champagnes, five recommended dessert wines, and so on.
The preselected wines were visually emphasized in a straight and simple way by putting them
on little pedestals on each shelf and adding a sign that stated, "Recommended- our customers'
favorite wines."
The true wine experts continued to make their own, very personal selections, but the vast
majority of shoppers now had a much easier way of choosing, which ultimately was reflected
in higher sales.
To sum it all up in one sentence: In visual merchandising, very often, less is more.