When we give consumers more choice and, hence, control, are we really giving them what they want?
Conversations regarding the plethora of choice that people have today in terms of their media consumption is now a mainstay of marketing conferences and a given when planning advertising. So much so, it’s practically cliché to say that the modern consumer lives in a world rich with options, from what kinds of products to chose, to where they get their news and when they watch programming.
This unmooring of media from time and place is the next biggest thing happening to the consumption, impact and practice of media since the dawning of the commercial internet itself.
For the first online users with phone-cradle modems, or plodding through Prodigy’s walled garden on a 2,400 baud-rate modem, it might be hard to imagine how this is going to influence what I like to call the “always on” generation, but it should be among the primary concerns of marketers, advertisers, agencies and media companies alike when considering the architecture of media’s future.
PDAs, mobile phones, DVRs, laptops and PSPs are just the beginning. Think about a time when people will have inexpensive, high-resolution digital paper, to which can be downloaded regular updates of the day’s news by walking past (or through) a wireless network, with users setting up an auto-pay for a per-usage charge. Or have portable, expandable compact viewing screens on which to view programming on a whim.
The sociological implications are uncertain and tend towards both the utopian and the dystopian. For example, there may be democratized content and Thomas Friedman’s “flat world” of collaboration on the one hand and the replacement of practiced knowledge with information-by-reflex and actions borne without deliberation and a sense of consequence on the other.
What is certain now is that all of this lends itself towards more and more personalization of the products and media we consume.
Me, Inc.
Media can be personalized to the degree that it becomes an extension of the self. Bluetooth headsets and white headphone wires grow out of our heads, cell phones and PDAs cling to our hips, video game controllers and keyboards stretch out from the ends of our fingertips. The only thing left is <I>what<I> we are communicating. There is communicative action but its means of facilitation blends into the background.
At the recent iMedia Agency Summit, Carisa Bianchi of TBWA/Chiat Day mentioned the idea of “Me, Inc.,” a label she used for the concept that people now pursue total experiences with their media and the brands those media display, which they then make completely their own. At the Spring 2004 iMedia Agency Summit, Esther Dyson raised the idea of the “Daily Me,” where the only media content an individual is exposed to is content that caters to that individual’s tastes and biases. But when it comes to content, the more that is left in the hands of the consumer the more that consumer will likely be satisfied.
With increasing regularity people are attempting to create and control their own content. And with increasing facility, the media environment is accommodating them.
But it would be a mistake to think that control to the level of solipsism is what people really want. The unspoken responsibilities taken on by desire for choice and the options that desire inspires leads to a great deal of unconscious anxiety.
The Paradox of Choice
In last year’s book, "The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less," author Barry Schwartz, a professor of social theory and social action at Swarthmore College, points out that people really end up more unhappy with the decisions they make when those decisions are arrived at from a wider variety of choices, or they end up not making any choice at all.
One study Schwartz calls out was set in a gourmet food store in an upscale community. Researchers set up a display that laid out a line of exotic, high-end jams where passing customers could sample them and receive a coupon for a dollar off of the purchase price. In one instance of the study, only six varieties were available for sample. In another instance, there were 24 from which to choose. In both cases, the full product line of 24 jams was made available for purchase. Though the larger display of jams attracted a much greater number of people, 30 percent of those people exposed to the smaller selection of jams made a purchase whereas only three percent of those exposed to the full line of 24 made a purchase.
Another study was done evaluating gourmet chocolates. Students, under the auspices of a marketing survey, were asked, based on appearance and description, which chocolate they would chose for themselves. They were then asked to rate the chocolate. In one condition, only six kinds of chocolate were there to choose from; in another, there were 30. In both conditions, chocolate was offered as payment for participation in lieu of cash. It was found that the students with the smaller selection to choose from were more satisfied with the chocolates they chose than those with the larger selection. They were also four times as likely to opt for chocolate as payment for participation than cash.
So befuddled are consumers by today's range of choices -- from TV sets to media vehicles to personal care products to, well, jelly -- that what people really want is to have decisions made for them. It stands against reason to say this in the face of ever increasing consumer demand for more choice, but there are numerous examples, for instance, on television.
"Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" is really about a poor slob who can’t make decisions that will change his life, so five gay men are sent in to do it for him. "Extreme Makeover" and "Trading Spaces" are of a kind; only instead of the wayward candidate’s hair being fixed it is his or her bedroom.
The same is true of what media companies pass off as choice and consumers take to be so. Recommendation engines and personalized home pages that rely on category-content pre-selection are actually ways of managing the tyranny of options and our inability to choose in the face of them.
What does this mean for media?
It means that media companies have to walk the razor’s edge of providing audiences access to more choice than they can stomach while at the same time provide them with the means to reduce all of those options to something simple to manage. Basically to take us half-way through the Zen koan, reducing the all to the one.
Simplifying the decision-making process in our daily lives, prompts such as recognizable labels, colors, shapes and even sounds are used. We regularly make use of these reductive cues to manage the everydayness of our lives outside of media (and there is less and less of that life); publishers need to work very diligently at identifying what those are and providing them to their audiences so that those audiences can have the experience of choice and feel satisfied by the choices they have made.
Of course this leaves open opportunities for the hyper-niche media outlets to become pantheons of simplicity, with audiences making decisions and deriving greater satisfaction from them by virtue of the singular focus of those media outlets.
Giving audiences in every instance what they think they want may be more detrimental to their long-term satisfaction with a brand -- be it media or product -- than we thought they think it does. By helping audiences simplify their frantic world of choices and decisions, giving them what you know is good for them rather than what they think they want, you may just build a kind of loyalty that is seldom found in the modern choice-rich world in which we live.
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