Marketing Overload: Solving The Paradox of Choice

Marketing overload is a real issue for consumers. Like lambs to the slaughter, they are bombarded with countless options of what to buy and who to buy it from. For marketers and business owners, the challenge becomes “how do I differentiate my brand from everyone else’s and how do I simplify the customer’s decision-making process?”.

With that being said, business owners still want to provide brand engagement and product flexibility for their audience in terms of how their customers engage with their brand and the number of touchpoints that engagement occurs on.

This is the paradox of choice. Marketers and business owners, want to differentiate their business and provide customer flexibility for brand engagement and purchase decisions, but can at times overwhelm the consumer with too many options.

Unsurprisingly, when that is the case consumers often become indecisive and anxious when making a purchase decision.

The question then becomes, how can marketers and business owners simplify that decision-making process and help consumers make better decisions?

Understanding The Paradox of Choice

Below you’ll notice a poster by Roz Chast titled “The Tragedy of Prosperity. Take a moment to make sense of it:

Roz’s poster perfectly captures what the Paradox of Choice looks like – the day-to-day life of the modern consumer whether they are online looking for something to buy, in the real world going about their business or simply trying to purchase a box of cereal in the supermarket. A decision that was supposed take 5 seconds now takes 5 minutes.

Back in 2004, psychologist Barry Schwartz popularised the term “paradox of choice” in his book, “The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less” The core idea? An abundance of options can actually hinder decision-making and satisfaction. This might seem counterintuitive but recall Roz’s poster above.

When the number of choices increases, so does the difficulty of knowing what is best. Instead of increasing our freedom to have what we want, the paradox of choice suggests that having too many choices actually limits our freedom.

This is the point where businesses and marketers often fall flat and start believing that more options for the customer is always a good thing. They see it as giving their customers control, which sounds ideal. But have you ever driven on a road and Google provides you with three options to get to your destination?

If you have like me, you start thinking, which path is shorter? Which one has the least traffic? Are there any road works? It’s in moments like these we realise making decisions is hard and making the right decision can even be harder.

Now I hate to be that guy, but clearly, when it comes to marketing, less can often be more. We’ve seen that to be the case with Hick’s Law and the concept of decision fatigue. Let’s compare and get some more meat off the bone on how they both connect to the idea that minimising customer options can maximise your desired outcomes.

Decision Fatigue & The Paradox of Choice

The average adult makes up to 35,000 decisions each day. That’s everything from when to get out of bed, what to wear, what coffee to drink, when to drink it, the route to work etc.. Each choice while small and at times seems significant stacks up throughout the and contributes to decision fatigue.

Now let’s add the approximately 10,000 ads the average person sees in the same 24-hour period (only a quarter of which is relevant). That’s a tonne of ads for your customers to either engage or not engage with and marketers along with business owners have to somehow be seen in the noise.

Essentially, what I’m saying is that you can’t separate decision fatigue from the paradox of choice regardless of how you slice the cake. The time your customer takes to evaluate their options (as dictated by Hicks Law) will always be a factor that makes its more difficult for your customers to make the right choice, feel they’ve made the right choice and avoid purchase regret later down the line.

Simply put, if you aren’t considering the paradox of choice when marketing your brand, you’re:

• Making it more difficult for your target audience to make a purchase decision.
• Increasing the likelihood of your customer being dissatisfied with their choice of your product and service.

Brands that become great at eliminating decision fatigue often make positive progress towards growth.

Crocs is a great example of that. They don’t intimidate their consumers with too many options to compare. Their footwear product line isn’t wide-ranging, yet their annual revenue for 2023 grew over 11% and peaked at nearly $4 billion with industry-leading operating margins and double-digit earnings per share growth.

Hick’s Law & The Paradox of Choice

Coined by American psychologist William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman, Hick’s Law or Hick-Hyman Law is based on the principle that the more options a person has, the longer it will take them to make a decision.

If we apply this to marketing, we’ll see that the more choices you give to your customers, the longer they take to decide whether they should buy from you.

That’s not ideal for any business, especially when someone looking to make a purchase prefers to go through the process as quickly as possible when deciding what brand or retailer to go with (about 80% of them to be precise).

While they take different approaches, both Hick’s Law and the paradox of choice share a common goal: too many options can negatively impact the decision-making process of your customer.

Now that we’ve addressed the elephant(s) – Decision Fatigue & Hick’s Law. Let’s get to some examples of businesses in the real world who have addressed this challenge and learned from their mistakes or found a way to offer their consumers an abundance of choice whilst avoiding the pitfalls that come with it.

Brands That Beat the Paradox of Choice

The Netflix Death Scroll of Content Options

The Paradox of Choice and Decision Fatigue is very real, but we can’t deny that brands like Netflix need to expand their catalogue in order to be one step ahead of the competition. So, how are they tackling the problem of choice overload?

Remember their ‘Play Something’ feature? It was created to deal with the challenge of binge-scrolling that would usually end with their users not finding anything they actually want to watch; leaving them disengaged and frustrated.

The feature suggested random content as a way to eliminate decision fatigue and avoid that binge scroll of death.

Unfortunately, they discontinued the feature. However, it’s introduction to the platform highlighted they had an issue when it came to the paradox of choice.

Since then, they’ve continued to face the issue by adding the feature of personal recommendations by analysing their users viewing habits and making recommendations of what they might like and providing them with stats on the probability they’d like that recommendation based on those viewing habits.

Menu Simplification at McDonald’s

British restaurant chain Prezzo, which serves Italian cuisine, surveyed over 2,000 people in the UK about how at ease they felt when they ate out and it found that 86% of Gen Z had been impacted by “menu anxiety”.

Over a third of millennials said having too many options on a menu was also a trigger. This problem has caused 38% of Gen Z and Millennials to not go to a restaurant if they didn’t look at the menu prior to going to the restaurant.

No wonder Mc’Donald’s simplified their menu back in 2015 when sales in their restaurants started to decline. Too many options also meant an increase in service times. To resolve the issue, they removed several of their underperforming menu items (we can thank Pareto Principle for that) to streamline their selection and focus on their core offerings.

It clearly worked because they’ve rolled out the same concept to their entire chain; including here in the UK where they only add select items to their menu at different periods of the year temporarily before removing it again to improve their selection, whilst also maintaining decision fatigue.

How to Avoid The Paradox of Choice for Your Brand & Marketing Efforts.

Avoid Information Overload by Curating & Streamlining your Content

Offering fewer, more relevant options to your customers is perfect for simplifying their decision-making process of whether to buy, not to buy or simply avoid them taking too long to make a decision.

Your website is often the first place new and potential customers engage with your brand, so it’s often a good place to start when it comes to curating and streamlining your content. That means no bombarding your customers with excess information.

Look at the below page for example.

As you can see, there are 2 menus, 3 CTA’s to purchase on different product categories and cluttered images on their home page. This is a clear example of how the paradox of choice can affect user experience in web design.

Limit the number of CTA’s in your designs

Your CTA’s or call-to-action is a crucial element in any marketing design you create for your brand. It’s necessary and needed on your social media, marketing emails, paid ads, print designs; you name it. After all, how else will your customers know what to do next once they’ve looked at your offer?

That being said, you can’t overload your marketing and brand designs with too many CTA’s. You’re creating one too many options for your customers to make – leading them one step closer to that undesirable place of decision fatigue.

Instead, you should be using design to create a clear-cut path for your customers to ensure they can confidently go to the next step in the buying process. That also means streamlining all your customer touchpoints and ensuring they’re optimised for customer engagement.

Look at email marketing, for example, data shows that sales increase by approximately 1617% when marketing emails have a single CTA. Take the below example from the American brand Home Depot for example. It does a good job of promoting the offers in focus, but the CTA’s are generic and will probably end up confusing their audience.

Chances are, they’ll scroll through, have a gander and leave without any further progression in the buying process.

Your best bet is to hone in on what your most important CTA is and incorporate it seamlessly into your design to give your audience a singular point of focus.

Design Whilst Prioritising a Visual Hierarchy in Mind

When you have a lot of information to convey, it’s crucial you structure and lay that information out correctly; especially if there’s no option for the reader to skip or you think the information itself is just that important for them to read.

If that’s the case you need to prioritise what goes where and how it’s displayed when it does. Newsletters are a great example of this. They usually have bite-sized chunks of information that provide your audience with updates right across your business.

Organisations usually have a lot going on, so there’s a lot of information, which probably includes long lines of text and visual information.

Your design elements will be key in avoiding the paradox of choice, to convince users to digest the information. Use design elements like headings, subheadings, bullet points, and clear visuals to guide the user’s eye and create a clear hierarchy.

Remember…Less is More

So you’ve seen how the paradox of choice can affect customer behaviour, from product selection to site navigation. When you understand this concept as a marketer and business owner, you’ll be able to create more seamless user experiences that deliver the results you need.

With that comes the bonus of better brand engagement, customer experience and higher conversion rates. You might not have the resources or time to create those types of marketing material yourself – that’s okay.

Our on-demand design subscription fills the gaps where you can’t. It’s a cost-effective way to create customer-focused marketing designs for your brand – from website design to social media graphics along with all the sales and marketing collateral you need.

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