Think of your local grocery store and how long it would take to count all of the different products displayed. There's an unbelievable amount of choice, but at least it's constrained by the physical shelf space.
Now, think of the internet. No shelves or walls -- only an infinite amount of space to display products. Counting would be impossible.
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So, how do you stand out? Well, believe it or not, that local grocery store can offer a few very important lessons about the way product choices are presented and how people will react to them. Translated to the web, it can mean more viewers -- and more sales. So, grab your shopping cart, and let's get started.
Aisle 1: Spaghetti sauce
Psychophysicist Howard Moskowitz was hired by Campbell's Prego line in the 1980s to help them find the perfect spaghetti sauce. He cooked up 45 different recipes and held taste tests, rating them on a scale of zero to 100. His conclusion: There is no such thing as the perfect spaghetti sauce.
He explained that there is no sauce that everyone loves because people have different preferences. To make everyone happy, there must be many different spaghetti sauces. One person may love one flavor and hate the other, which is fine; just have one for each group of tastes. Prego took his advice and has cashed in ever since.
The same is true for your own product mix. If you try to make one product that everyone likes, you'll only create a product that no one loves. But, if you offer different products, people can find the one that works for them.
Aisle 2: Jams
Stanford University's Mark Lepper and Sheena Iyengar studied the effect of multiple jams. Yes, that's right. Multiple jams.
Lepper set up two displays in a supermarket, one with 30 different jams to choose from and one with only six. Just 3 percent of people bought jam from the 30-choice table while a whopping 30 percent bought from the six-choice table. Faced with more choices, people become overwhelmed and are less likely to buy.
Now, if you think of what the typical website product offering page looks like, you'll quickly realize how this is hurting online conversion. Choice overload!
But wait. Spaghetti guy just said that many choices are needed for many consumer tastes. What do we do now? Let's move to the cereal aisle to learn more.
Aisle 3: Cereal
So which lesson is correct, the sauces or the jams? Well, let's first take a look at Elliot, who's here in the cereal aisle.
In 1982, Elliot had a tumor removed but was found to have brain damage that left him completely emotionless. He now made decisions solely based on logic. You would think that, with emotions out of the way, he would make great decision based on the facts. But that wasn't the case. When emotions were taken out of the equation, it took Elliot forever to make a decision, even something as simple as picking a cereal.
During his study of Elliot, neurologist Antonio Damasio discovered that people don't use pure reason to make choices -- they use emotion. Emotions are what enable people to make decisions between different options.
So, what's a typical internet marketer's response to choice overload? Comparison chart! Yet, if emotions make us decide, a just-the-facts comparison isn't going to speed up the process. Here in the cereal aisle, that's the reason you'll see cartoons or pictures on the front of a box rather than the boring nutritional facts.
Brought online, the lesson is to find out how your consumers "feel" about products. Communicate with them and help them get emotional about your product. Ask questions that can help them make their decision.
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So what have the spaghetti sauce, jam, and cereal taught us? Which theory is right for your website?
They all are! But it's important to present your products in an appealing way.
We learned in the spaghetti aisle that you need many choices, but in the jam aisle, we saw that too many are overwhelming. So, what you need to do with your website is create situations that easily walk your customers through a selection process, much like a real life sales person would do.
The obvious web equivalent is the comparison chart, and that's where most people instantly gravitate toward, but we learned in the cereal aisle that product purchase is more than just features and specs. It's about the product that's right for me.
With your site, look to develop areas of interaction that can take basic user wants and turn them into genuine product recommendations. It's not necessarily an easy task, but giving the user power, and making the purchase fun and engaging, is going to convert much more often. From our experience, taking this approach has been shown to increase purchase behaviors anywhere from three to 50 times the normal result.
It honors what we learned in the spaghetti sauce aisle -- offering a bunch of products to choose from -- but also considers the jam aisle by not presenting the choices all at once. And since what we call interactive conversation talks to the person, not just comparing products, it creates the emotional response and decision we learned about in the cereal aisle.
Now, will that be paper or plastic?
Amanda Lannert is president of The Jellyvision Lab.
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