Assortment, Revisited
Draeger’s Grocery Store in Menlo Park, California is a nice place. Like really nice. Like cooking school in a grocery store nice. 250 types of mustard nice. 300 types of jam nice.
In fact, it’s that type of nice that makes Draeger’s notable for purposes of this newsletter.
Because two psychologists—Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper—used Draeger’s to run an experiment 20 years ago that began shifting our thinking on the value of choice.
It’s long been considered that choice is important and that more choice is beneficial.
Iyengar and Lepper, though, set out to see if that was the case, so they set up a tasting booth a Draeger’s for two consecutive Saturdays, serving jams.
One Saturday, the booth has six jams. The other, it had 24.
When the booth had less jam, 40% of shoppers stopped to taste a jam; when the booth had more—24 different types—60% of shoppers stopped to taste.
More choice, it seemed, was a better way to encourage discovery of a new product. Not too much better than a limited choice, mind you, but better nonetheless.
But when Iyengar and Lepper observed who actually bought jam, the story changed.
When shoppers tasted jams from the limited choice booth (six jams), they bought 30% of the time. When shoppers tasted from the booth with 24 jars, they bought 3% of the time.
In other words, the vast selection of jams negatively impacted purchases.
You might push back here and say, “Well, hey, those people who were tasting from a larger set of choices were probably just sampling a bunch of jams. They were enjoying the experience.”
That would be a reasonable, but wrong, assumption.
Both sets of shoppers sampled roughly the same amount of jam (1.38 jams for the six-jam table versus 1.5 jams for the 24-jam table).
We share this story this week, because there is talk—significant talk—of late about how brands might benefit from Shopify building a marketplace. That such a marketplace might solve some demand generation problems brands face today.
(Shopify, it should be noted, seems willing to quietly test this through continued development of its Shop app.)
Perhaps this would help. Perhaps it wouldn’t.
What seems to be missing from the conversation, though, is a discussion around what value this solution would bring.
That’s not a trivial detail. As we covered in Assortment:
While customers do, largely, prefer greater variety, they are more likely to accept a smaller assortment of choices when they are more focused on selecting a specific product than when they are focused on building a consideration set (i.e., deciding which products to weigh against each other).
For customers in a product evaluation stage, Chernev found, a larger assortment can be more challenging.
There are, after all, 1,150 search results for “apricot jam” on the Shop app today.