Friday, June 17, 2005

Too much to choose

Which is more important: a wide variety of products so you can find exactly what you want, or a smaller number so you can easily choose? Sometimes overall sales actually increase when you lower the number of choices people have to make.

Dynamist Blog: Managing Choice explains that some product categories (e.g. cereal, shampoo) balance this well, but other categories offer too much choice (e.g. computers, cell phone plans). I bet cell phone sales would go up if there were fewer plans to choose from.


1 comment:

Anandi said...

Cell phone sales would also go up if the phones were not bound to a particular carrier. This is true all over Asia so everyone rushes out to get the newest model and replaces their phone a lot more often than we do here.