The Long Tail (22 page)

And finally, there’s the notion that “too much choice” is overwhelming, a belief so common and ill-founded that it deserves its own chapter.

In 1978,
Saturday
Night Live
featured a skit about the “Scotch Boutique,” a store in a trendy mall that sells nothing but Scotch tape in many varieties. Its proprietors puzzle over the absence of customers—they offer so many kinds of tape that surely one should appeal to nearly everyone. And yet no traffic. The skit reveled in the cluelessness of the tape-obsessed store owners. Could anything be more absurd than a Scotch Tape store?

Yet in 2004, a store called “Rice to Riches” actually opened in Manhattan. It sells rice pudding in more than twenty flavors and nothing else. It is reportedly doing well and expanding into a mail-order business. Meanwhile, the White House chain just sells home furnishing in white. It has proven so successful that it’s been joined by the Black House. Yesterday’s joke is today’s reality.

We are in the midst of the biggest explosion of variety in history. You can see it all around you, but sometimes a few numbers make the point even better. There are precisely 19,000 variations of Starbucks coffee, according to the advertising firm OMD. In 2003 alone, 26,893 new food and household products were introduced, including 115 de
odorants, 187 breakfast cereals, and 303 women’s fragrances, according to Mintel International’s Global New Products database.

Back in the 1960s, Chevrolet’s Impala sedan accounted for more than 1 million of the 8 million cars sold each year, close to 13 percent of a market that had no more than forty different kinds of cars. Today, in a car market nearly ten times that size, there are more than two hundred and fifty models available (more than one thousand if you count all the variants). Fewer than ten of those sell more than 400,000 units, or one-half percent of the market.

Why has there been such an explosion of variety? Part of the answer is globalization and the hyperefficient supply chains it brings. Merchants in one country can now pull from a truly global range of products. Indeed, the National Bureau of Economic Research estimates that the variety of goods imported to the United States grew more than threefold between 1972 and 2001.

Another part of the answer is demographics. As
Business Week
recently put it:

In the 1950s and 1960s the country was far more uniform in terms not only of ethnicity—the great Hispanic influx had not yet begun—but also of aspiration. The governing ideal was not merely to keep up with the Joneses, but to be the Joneses—to own the same model of car or dishwasher or lawn mower. As levels of affluence rose markedly in the 1970s and 1980s, status was redefined. We’ve had a change from “I want to be normal” to “I want to be special.” As companies competed to indulge this yearning, they began to elaborate mass production into mass customization.

Finally, there is the Long Tail itself. ITunes offers nearly forty times as much selection as Wal-Mart. Netflix has eighteen times as many DVDs as Blockbuster and would have even more if there were more DVDs to be had. Amazon has almost forty times as many books as a Borders superstore. For the likes of eBay and the average department store, the multiples are impossible to calculate, but no doubt go into the thousands.

TOO MUCH CHOICE?

The overwhelming reality of our online age is that
everything
can be available. Online retailers offer variety on a scale unimaginable even a decade ago—millions of products in every possible variant and combination. But does anyone need this much choice? Can we handle it?

This is the question that is being raised more and more these days as the online cornucopia expands. The conventional view is that more choice is better, because it acknowledges that people are different and allows them to find what’s right for them. But in
The Paradox of Choice,
an influential book published in 2004, Barry Schwartz argued that too much choice is not just confusing but is downright oppressive.

He cited a now-famous study of consumer behavior in a supermarket. The details from the paper, “When Choice Is Demotivating,” are as follows.

Researchers from Columbia and Stanford universities set up a table at a specialty food store and offered customers a taste of a range of jams and a $1.00 coupon to use against the purchase of any single jar of jam. Half the time the table held six flavors; half the time it offered twenty-four. The researchers were careful not to include the most common flavors, such as strawberry (so that consumers didn’t just pick the usual), and they also avoided weird jams such as lemon curd.

The results were clear: 30 percent of the customers who tasted from the small selection went on to buy a jar, while just 3 percent of those who sampled from the larger selection did. Interestingly, the larger selection attracted more tasters—60 percent compared to 40 percent for the smaller selection. They just didn’t buy. The more choice the researchers offered, the less customers bought, and the less satisfied they were with any purchase they did make.

The customers appear to have been confused, even oppressed, by the abundance—why should they have to become an expert on jam varieties to make a selection with confidence? The extra options put them outside their jam-selection comfort zone—strawberry, blueberry, raspberry—and into the more exotic territory of boysenberry and
rhubarb. Indecision and buyer’s remorse began to cloud the picture. It suddenly felt like too much trouble.

Schwartz describes the conclusion this way:

As the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear. As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.

As an antidote to this poison of our modern age, Schwartz recommended that consumers “satisfice,” in the jargon of social science, not “maximize.” In other words, they’d be happier if they just settled for what was in front of them rather than obsessing over whether something else might be even better. (One wag commented in an Amazon review of
The Paradox of Choice
that he came across twenty books on the same topic and couldn’t make up his mind, so he didn’t buy any of them.)

I’m skeptical. The alternative to letting people choose is choosing for them. The lessons of a century of retail science (along with the history of Soviet department stores) are that this is not what most consumers want.

Vast choice is not always an unalloyed good, of course. It too often forces us to ask, “Well, what
do
I want?” and introspection doesn’t come naturally to all. But the solution is not to limit choice, but to order it so it isn’t oppressive. As Schwartz himself notes, “A small-town resident who visits Manhattan is overwhelmed by all that is going on. A New Yorker, thoroughly adapted to the city’s hyperstimulation, is oblivious to it.”

My suspicions about the jam research that Schwartz cites were first raised when I happened to be in the jam section of my local supermarket. The selection covered more than twenty feet. It started with the usual strawberry and raspberry and then kept going. Here’s just a sample: Lemon Curd, Golden Mint, Tomato Cinnamon Clove, Cinnamon Pear, Pear Fig, Pepper Jelly, Huckleberry Raspberry, Peach Apricot, Plum Cherry, Strawberry Rhubarb, Sour Cherry, Fig, Mixed Berry, Black Cherry, Passion Fruit, Pineapple, Pineapple Papaya, Guam Strawberry, Black Currant, Jalapeno Pepper (both Red and Green varieties),
Rhubarb, Rosehip, Mint-Flavored Apple…and so on, including Light variants of many of the above.

There were not six varieties or twenty-four; there were more than three hundred. All in all, the store carried forty-two brands, with an average of eight kinds of jam each. I spoke to the manager. In the five years since the original jam study came out, the supermarket had roughly doubled the variety of jams it offers. “There are a lot more available and people seem to like to try the more exotic ones,” he told me.

VARIETY IS NOT ENOUGH

This was confusing. Either there was something wrong with the original study or the nation’s supermarket owners were remarkably oblivious to what consumers really want. I emailed the authors of the original study to ask them if they had an insight into why the people who should actually know the most about consumer choice in a supermarket were ignoring their conclusions.

As it happens, they did have an answer, which they were about to publish in a new study. In “Knowing What You Like versus Discovering What You Want: The Influence of Choice Making Goals on Decision Satisfaction,” Columbia professor Sheena Iyengar and her colleagues conclude:

Despite the detriments associated with choice overload, consumers want choice and they want a lot of it. The benefits that stem from choice, however, come not from the options themselves, but rather from the process of choosing. By allowing choosers to perceive themselves as volitional agents having successfully constructed their preference and ultimate selection outcomes during the choosing task, the importance of choice is reinstated. Consider the request in
Forbes
’ recent “I’m Pro-Choice” article: “Offer customers abundant choices, but also help them search.” We now know how.

The solution, they found, is to order the choice in ways that actually help the consumers. Let’s turn to an online retailer to see how that might work.

As it happens, Amazon, too, sells jam. Not six kinds, or twenty-four kinds, but more than twelve hundred kinds, thanks to its Marketplace partnerships with a host of small specialty food merchants. Yet there is a huge difference between the presentation of variety in the physical world and online.

In a bricks-and-mortar store, products sit on the shelf where they have been placed. If a consumer doesn’t know what he or she wants, the only guide is whatever marketing material may be printed on the package, and the rough assumption that the product offered in the greatest volume is probably the most popular.

Online, however, the consumer has a lot more help. There are a nearly infinite number of techniques to tap the latent information in a marketplace and make that selection process easier. You can sort by price, by ratings, by date, and by genre. You can read customer reviews. You can compare prices across products and, if you want, head off to Google to find out as much about the product as you can imagine. Recommendations suggest products that “people like you” have been buying, and surprisingly enough, they’re often on-target. Even if you know nothing about the category, ranking best-sellers will reveal the most popular choice, which both makes selection easier and also tends to minimize post-sale regret. After all, if everyone else picked a given product, it can’t be that bad.

The problem with the jam experiment is that it was disordered; all the jams were shown simultaneously and to guide them the customers had only their existing knowledge of jam or whatever was written on the labels. That’s the problem on the supermarket shelf, too. All you have to go on is your domain expertise, whatever brand information has been lodged in your brain by experience or advertising, and the marketing messages of the packaging and shelf placement.

Most of the information that online retailers use to order their massive variety and make choice easy—popularity, comparative prices, reviews—is available to supermarket owners, too. But they typically don’t share it with you, the customer. That’s because there’s no good way to do it, short of a mini-screen on each shelf. The paradox of choice is simply an artifact of the limitations of the physical world, where the information necessary to make an informed choice is lost.

The conventional wisdom was right: More choice really is better. But now we know that variety alone is not enough; we also need information
about
that variety and what other consumers before us have done with the same choices. Google, with its seemingly omniscient ability to order the infinite chaos of the Web so that what we want comes out on top, shows the way. The paradox of choice turned out to be more about the poverty of help in making that choice than a rejection of plenty. Order it wrong and choice is oppressive; order it right and it’s liberating.

Virginia Postrel, a writer on the economics of variety, explains why so much academic research in choice seems to contradict the lessons from decades of real-world business experience:

For good scientific reasons, psychology experiments systematically screen out the habits and business practices that make real-life choices, especially shopping decisions, manageable. This is because the experiments are designed to understand the mind, not the market…In reality people don’t dislike choice, even overwhelming choice. They have mixed feelings about it. And in the real world, especially the real marketplace, they often have help making decisions.

Writing in her
New York Times
column, Postrel points out that real estate agents, financial planners, search engines, and the recommendations services at Amazon all do the same thing. “Each knows something about us and something about what’s valuable. They don’t just reduce the number of options. They do so intelligently, with an eye to what we’re most likely to want. They help us be ourselves.”

Hence the rise of wedding planners, a profession that barely existed twenty years ago. “As the constraints of tradition have loosened and the bridal market has produced more alternatives for everything from invitations to limousines, weddings have gotten more complex and personalized,” Postrel explains. Membership in the Association of Bridal Consultants had grown to 4,000 in 2004, from 27 in 1981.