Social media and the paralysis of choice
By Molly FlattMy October social media column for WARC’s new-thinking bible, Admap Magazine, looks at the psychological underbelly of the Long Tail. Have a read below and let me know what you think.
Travelling by plane has never felt as strange as it did this summer. Forget the carbon footprint; it was the old pasta/chicken conundrum that really had me stumped. Cramped in my one-size-fits-none seat, glared at by the graceless hostess, it took me a whole three panicky minutes to decide which to have. But what sort of pasta is it? What comes with the chicken? What if I see it and I don’t like it? Is there really no other choice?
The concept of free will underpins the human condition; our instincts tell us that choice is good. If, as Camus claimed, life is a sum of all our choices, then the social media generation should have the richest lives to date. We are the children of the drop-down menu, and our playgrounds are Amazon, iTunes and eBay. Technology has enables us to break products down into smaller and smaller constituent parts so we can customise every aspect of our consumer experience to suit our idiosyncratic needs. Books, music and TV are now tiny scraps of data waiting to be assembled on demand. And offline retailers have followed the trend, from Custom Nikes to Walkers’ consumer created crisps.
The explosion of our newly niche-driven economy, as described by Chris Anderson in his seminal work The Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand, is financial proof that vast choice drives successful commerce 2.0 - albeit only when accompanied by excellent aggregators which allow us to pick our wheat from someone else’s chaff. But on that same plane, despite the bad food, I started to wonder: is there an accompanying hunger for limitation that could have equally powerful consumer appeal?
The thing is, chewing my nasty chicken, I ironically found the airline’s tiny film library something of a relief. When I am used to the monthly dilemma of choosing my next LoveFilm from a stable of thousands, having this burden of responsibility lifted - not to mention the excuse to watch ‘Ghosts of Girlfriends Past’ – left me feeling unexpectedly satisfied with the slush I settled for. In a sense, I rediscovered the pleasure of browsing. I knew that I really could dig out the best on offer, rather than suspecting that, if I had ten more minutes, I’d find something better yet.
US psychologist Barry Schwarz agrees that this makes good emotional sense. His TEDTalks presentation on The Paradox of Choice emphasises that, even with excellent aggregators available, too much choice results in paralysis and dissatisfaction as both our expectations and perception of missed opportunities rise sky high. As Schwarz puts it: “Adding options to people’s lives can’t help but increase the expectations people have about how good those options will be. And what that’s going to produce is less satisfaction with results, even when they’re good results. Nobody in the world of marketing knows this. Because if they did, you wouldn’t all know what this was about.”
As he suggests, marketers are missing a trick. One of the deep joys of social media is the opportunities for discovery it provides. However, as we get more accustomed to the bounty on offer, we are developing a suspicion that we are simply surfing on the tide of the capricious attention of millions of other people. In other words, we are not really choosing, just capitulating to the most visible meme or product that has surfaced to the top.
This is reflected in our social media behaviour. We’re currently like kids in a sweetshop; the sheer novelty and ingenuity of the space has us buzzing on a permanent sugar high. As every new platform arises and every cool customisable product surfaces we want a piece of it, but many of us are making ourselves queasy with our customisable pick and mix wares. There’s already something of a backlash, as Twitter users get fed up with one-tweet followers, Facebook pages become crowded with frenemies, and brands get motion sickness jumping from hot new platform to hot new platform. Does a world built around crowd wisdom mean that ‘choosing’ has simply become ‘following the herd’?
There’s an opportunity here to enhance product satisfaction by restoring the pleasure of limited choice. Focusing on fewer varieties with a bold assertion that ‘we know what you need’ takes serious faith in the quality of your product, but also inspires intrigue in the current it’s-up-to-you environment. Creating micro-aggregators for the best products in your field and encouraging an in-depth ‘battle it out’ mentality, where users rigorously test the best, can restore a sense that this really is the cream of the crop. Above all, brands need to find a way to reintroduce the experience of pleasant surprise for their customers. With such high expectations, we rarely now feel the buzz of ‘above and beyond’ delivery. So why not hold something back in the marketing? Don’t talk about a particularly great little feature or extra or freebie that consumers will discover when they buy. Let them do the discovering and the evangelising for you.
I’m not suggesting that brands go on a mission to lower expectations for consumers; more that they remember that quality over quantity, discrimination over diversity, can work for conversational products as for conversational marketing. Schwarz tells us that “everyone needs a fishbowl.” It may sound a little Eric Cantona, but maybe brands should look at building fishbowls, rather than just tossing fish out into the sea.
