There aren’t many places where people are faced with as many different product choices as they are at the supermarket. Now, most of us aren’t in charge of selling Funions or Hot Pockets, but a lot of us are in charge of helping people navigate product lines. Whether you’re an HR director trying to help your employees choose the right insurance plan or a marketing manager trying to move more televisions, understanding the way people react to product choices can make or break your next campaign. Over the course of this eBook, we’ll use our friendly neighborhood supermarket to explore three major pieces of scientific research that can help you better understand how the way product choices are presented impact people’s brains and behavior.
How to Present Product Choices Online Without Losing People Lessons from the Supermarket that Can Make Your Website Better
HOW TO PRESENT
PRODUCT CHOICES
OW ITHNOUT LLOSIINGN PEOEPLE
Lessons from the Supermarket That
Can Make Your Website BetterHow to Present Product Choices Online Without Losing People Lessons from the Supermarket that Can Make Your Website Better
Table of Contents
Intro Neighborhood Supermarket 3
Aisle 1 - Spaghetti Sauce More Products, Happier Customers 4
Aisle 2 - Jams But.More Choices, Fewer Sales 6
Aisle 3 - Cereal No Emotion, No Decisions 9
Clean Up on Aisle 4 Bringing Conflicting Ideas Together 12
Checking Out - Health Insurance How an Interactive Conversation Can Help 14
Lastly The Author and The Jellyvision Lab 16How to Present Product Choices Online Without Losing People 3Lessons from the Supermarket that Can Make Your Website Better
There aren't many places where people are faced with as many different product choices as they are at the supermarket. If you want to get the full impact of the sheer volume of items available, start at
Intro the first aisle of your grocery store and count off all of the different products there are. See how far you get before you lose consciousness (I think I blacked out somewhere in the frozen foods aisle). There's a crazy amount of choice, but at least it's constrained by the physical shelf space - there are only so many kinds of Lunchables you can fit into one building.
Now, let's take a look at the internet. There's an infinite amount of space, so there are no walls (or stock boys) limiting the amount of product choices that can be presented. Everything is up for grabs.
The internet is worse than the supermarket.
Most of us aren't in charge of selling Funions or Hot Pockets, but a lot of us are in charge of helping people navigate product lines on the web. Whether you're an HR director trying to help your employees choose the right insurance plan or a marketing manager trying to move more televisions, understanding the way people react to product choices can make or break your next online campaign.
Over the rest of this eBook, we'll use our friendly neighborhood supermarket to explore three major pieces of scientific research that can help you better understand how the way product choices are presented impact people's brains and behavior and what you can do with them to make your website work better.
So, let's get started! Oh, and try not to grab the shopping cart with the wobbly wheel.How to Present Product Choices Online Without Losing People 4Lessons from the Supermarket that Can Make Your Website Better
e owe a lot of what we find at today's supermarkets to a man SPAGHETTI SAUCE Wnamed Howard Moskowitz. Howard is a psychophysicist. This does not mean that he studies how gravity affects the mentally unstable. He studies the relationship between physical stimuli and sensation. A I S L E In Howard's case, the sensation he focuses on is taste.
In the 1980s, Campbell's Prego line hired Howard to help them find the perfect spaghetti sauce. So, Howard had the Prego test kitchen cook up 45 wildly different varieties of spaghetti sauces (regular, spicy, extra-chunky, etc.), had a bunch of people score the spaghetti sauces on a scale of zero to 100 and then analyzed the results. And 1 what did he end up telling Prego, the company that hired him to find the perfect spaghetti sauce? He told them that there's no such thing More Products, Happier Customers as a perfect spaghetti sauce.
That meeting had to be awkward.
Howard told Prego that there was no such thing as a perfect spaghetti sauce. There was no one spaghetti sauce that everyone loved, because people fell into different segments in terms of their preferences for spaghetti sauces. If you tried to design one spaghetti sauce to please everyone, the highest score you could possibly get on a scale from zero to 100 was 60. Now, if you create different spaghetti sauces for each of the different taste segments, you can make spaghetti sauces that score around 71. How big of a deal is a score of 71? In an article in the New Yorker written by author Malcolm Gladwell, Howard said, "a 71 is something you'll die for."
Prego took Howard's advice and made a killing with their diversified offeri... [download for more]
