Too much choice, too little control

Serendipity 3, an exclusive New York restaurant, is well-known for its outrageously priced $69 “haute dogs” and $1,000 ice cream sundaes. However, when this haute dog was launched, the sales of its $17.95 hot dog1 went through the roof. That’s anchoring and decoy effect in action – the expensive hot dog played the role of a decoy for the cheaper one and drove up its sales.

 

The scarcity effect creates the sense of exclusivity which luxury brands covet. Burberry is known to have burned unsold items to “protect its brand”. Starbucks’ Unicorn Frappuccino claimed to be available only for a few days on its website: it garnered 160,000 hits on Instagram and was sold out on pre-orders.

 

In our era of short economic cycles and even shorter attention spans, consumers have an unprecedented amount of choice. From rent your home, share a bike, find a parking spot, share a workspace, to online medical consultation, wearable bio-medical devices and fitness apps that reward users in ‘sweatcoins’ the current generation is in the midst of a massive shift in engagement with products, experiences and brands. The speed of new idea launches has led to indiscriminate choice and vastly new experiences. It’s vital for brands to creatively engage attention to survive.

 

The landscape of brand experience is morphing before our eyes. Brand and service experiences are today parallelly experienced through the palm of our hand and at the store. Traditional brand development models have to keep up with this disruption with consumers expect seamless experience across all touch points. In turn, brands expect consumers to absorb and respond to the myriad messages that are directed at them. This hyper-engaged audience faces an attention deficiency that is both manna and curse at the same time.

 

In this climate of choice, consumers either selectively use information to confirm existing beliefs (also known as the “availability heuristic2”) or are hit by decision paralysis that leads to default, known and safe choices. Mental shortcuts for decision-making alleviate the need for the cognitive heavy lifting of making more deliberate (and time-consuming) choices.

 

Defaults appeal to human tendency to take the path of least resistance. It economizes the cognitive energy which can be used for other more compelling tasks. An opt-out or presumed consent system as a default dramatically improved organ donation in many countries. While challenges receiving full consent from the family remain, the power of defaults3 to drive behaviour change is compelling.

 

Brands must balance this default psychology with strategies to grab attention. The 1920s Bouba-Kiki4 experiment was repeated in 2001, with participants from across the world. It revealed a seemingly arbitrary mapping between speech sounds and visual shapes. 95% of those surveyed associate “bouba” with softer, rounder shapes (like brie and cushions), and “kiki” with angular, pointy shapes (like spiky stars).

 

This sound-symbol association offers tremendous opportunity for multi-sensorial brand experiences. Words can be used with the added meaning of symbolic association in marketing: naming a sharper tasting coffee with a rounder sounding brand name could change perceptions and even acceptance.

 

Consumer contexts are rapidly changing and, as a result, relationships with brands have never been as complicated and multi-sensory. The marriage of rapid advances in technology and discoveries of neural underpinnings of behaviour leads to newer, more exciting experiences for consumers. Brands could well benefit by reflecting these at every touchpoint.

 

Notes:

1https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/priceless/201008/super-sizing-the-price?amp

2https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4140/e7481c2599604b14fcd04625274022583631.pdf

 

3https://www.behavioraleconomics.com/resources/mini-encyclopedia-of-be/default-optionsetting/

4https://worldoffoodanddrink.worldtravelguide.net/food/gastrophysics-trips-sauce-fantastic/