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The Conference Board Review® Article
Making Things Simple
The marketing of complexity.
By Sol Hurwitz
Sol Hurwitz is a freelance writer. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and Harvard Magazine. He wrote "Can You Learn to Think on Your Feet?" for the March/April 2006 issue of Across the Board.
Americans worship freedom of choice. But by giving consumers so many product choices and features and options, marketers are producing dazed and confused customers. This abundance of riches, it's argued, has reached a tipping point and customers are being turned off.
This view has strong academic underpinnings. In The Paradox of Choice, Swarthmore psychology professor Barry Schwartz wrote the bible on the subject: "As a culture, we are enamored of freedom, self-determination, and variety, and we are reluctant to give up any of our options. But clinging tenaciously to all the choices available to us contributes to bad decisions, to anxiety, and dissatisfaction—even to clinical depression."
Not a pretty picture, and it raises some hard questions for companies struggling with marketing in a complex world:
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A Consumer's Manifesto Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore, is widely considered the grand old man of choice. In The Paradox of Choice, he offers consumers an agenda for deciding what and how to choose. It's an agenda that marketers might also keep in mind in introducing new products and services: Decide which choices really matter. Focus your time and energy on the decisions that really count. "It isn't this or that particular choice that creates the problem; it's all the choices taken together." To "view limits on the possibilities we face is liberating, not constraining." Settle for "good enough." Even when the "best" could be just around the corner, we should spend less time looking for the perfect thing and settle for "good enough." "There is a world of marketers out there trying to convince you that 'good enough' isn't good enough when 'new and improved' is available." Make your decisions nonreversible. "When we can change our minds about decisions, we are less satisfied with them. When a decision is final, we engage in a variety of psychological processes that enhance our feelings about the choice we made relative to the alternatives." |
Can More Really Mean Less?
Various experiments belie the commonsense assumption that more choice results in greater satisfaction. A landmark study—cited so often it has almost acquired a life of its own—is one by Columbia University Business School's Sheena Iyengar. The study found that when asked to choose among thirty different varieties of jam, consumers almost always regretted their decisions, believing they failed to make the optimal choice. But when choosing among only five jams, most seemed satisfied, even when choosing the same jam they had chosen from the original thirty.
Another Iyengar study—also a prerequisite in the Choice curriculum—examined employee decisions on whether to invest in 401(k) retirement savings plans. The conclusion: The more investment options offered, the less likely employees were to participate in any program at all (the rate of participation went down 2 percent for every ten funds offered). Not only did they have a hard time distinguishing among "low risk," "moderate risk," and "high risk" investments, she says, "they didn't know how to apply them to their own financial needs. They were most likely to invest when given a small number of choices and the option to create their own portfolios."
A somewhat paradoxical gloss: A study by Stanford researcher Jonah Berger found that people ascribe higher quality to brands that have greater variety in their product line. Berger also found, however, that variety can work against a brand if it is unfocused. For example, consumers top-rated a restaurant that offered a wide variety of food in one category—say, Thai cuisine. But when the restaurant also offered food in other cuisine categories, consumer ratings went down.
We've come to the point, however, where studies aren't necessary to support the proposition that the public is overwhelmed by choice. A leading example that has already become a classic: Americans' response to the Bush administration's Medicare Part D prescription-drug plan. In New York State, for instance, the elderly have a choice of 157 plans at 45 different companies. Small wonder that so much choice generated bewilderment rather than gratitude.
A "Choice Explosion"
Today's profusion of choice dates from the late 1960s and early '70s. In the wake of an unprecedented economic boom, the nation witnessed a sharp increase in real incomes, living standards, and material wealth. Freedom to choose from an abundance of options defined the American dream. At the same time, a social revolution created vast new cultural and lifestyle choices. The convergence of these forces triggered an expansion of choice in every sphere: fashion, religion, sex—and, most emphatically, consumer goods.
A couple of decades later, aided by the computer and the Internet, consumers found a global marketplace of products and services at their fingertips. Some of them loved all the options available. Others found them tiring, even debilitating. And for still others, Schwartz says, the multiplicity of choices led to an increase in "cocooning"—the tendency of individuals to become insulated from the normal social environment.
New technologies are a key factor in choice overload. The convergence of media—computer, telephone, TV, film, camera, and the iPod—has put a global marketplace and an abundance of information and entertainment within close reach. But a recent study found that nearly a third of people surveyed felt personally overwhelmed by the number of media options available to them. If they are not overwhelmed, then their attention is fragmented by multitasking—at the same time, they are surfing the Internet, talking on their cell phones, and checking e-mail.
Then there are the choices generated by the characteristics of new products themselves—what Roland T. Rust, chair of the marketing department at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, calls "feature fatigue." Among them: the mystifying items displayed on a typical new car's dashboard and the cell phone that also serves as a wireless Internet connection, digital camera, MP3 player, game console, and global positioning system. Maryland University's National Technology Readiness Survey finds that 56 percent of those who purchase high-tech products feel unable to cope with the overload of features.
Indeed, technology provides a perfect window into the problems and opportunities provided by choice overload. A standard in computer marketing is the idea of so-called mass customization, whereby the components of the product are mass-produced but then customized by the individual consumer. Ideally, of course, the customer will create a product that better suits his needs. But to get to that point, says marketing professor Stefan Stremersch of Emory's Goizueta Business School, "consumers go through a lot of cognitive hassle during the complex decision-making process. Let's say you can customize ten attributes within a PC, and for each attribute you have ten choices. On the one hand, I get a better value out of the product if it's closer to my needs. But to get it closer to my needs, I need to make an intellectual effort in choosing and composing my product."
Stremersch and a fellow professor tested this thesis by asking consumers to customize PCs under various experimental conditions that mimicked real-world mass-customization configurations. Surprisingly, the consumers "did not perceive significant increases in complexity." Still, the professors argue, it's important for marketers to strive for an optimum balance between complexity and utility. "If you have a very complex process," they conclude, "it will not only get consumers a lower utility out of the mass-customization experience, but it will also get them a lower utility product."
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Choice Entrepreneurs Psychologist Barry Schwartz foresees a time when there will be "a whole host of filtering aids"—humans, computer software, and other resources—that will simplify and narrow the choices that people have available to them. Plenty of online aids are as close as a Google search, from the computer-generated selections that Amazon and iTunes offer to the user-made recommendations on websites such as CNET. But in many cases, the filtering process demands expert help, and a growing cadre of "choice entrepreneurs" has risen to help people make choices and cope with the complexities of the products and services they buy. Think of computer consultants, healthcare advisers, personal shoppers, dating services, and wedding planners. Some are built around a single person's expertise, but others are becoming big business indeed. For instance, Geek Squad, founded in 1994 by a college student, has grown into a company with seven hundred locations and twelve thousand employees. Besides promising to fix "any PC problem anytime anywhere" with twenty-four-hour emergency service, Geek Squad also advises customers on their technology choices at the retail locations of Best Buy, which acquired Geek Squad in 2002. Then there's HealthGrades Inc., a publicly held company headquartered in Golden, Colo., which offers ratings of doctors, hospitals, and nursing homes. In a similar vein, there's Angie's List, which rates the work of home-service contractors for quality, price, and timeliness, and posts the ratings on its website. It has 425,000 homeowner-members in fifty-two cities. The rich, of course, usually have first dibs on new products and services, and those that make everything simple for the customer are no exception. Take, for instance, Marquee Concierge, which promotes itself as "a global network of luxury lifestyle specialists." Shoshanna Zuboff and James Maxmin, authors of The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism, extrapolate this trend to the limit. As the title of their 2002 book suggests, they believe that a new "enterprise logic" is superseding the logic associated with capitalism and will take us from transaction economics to relationship economics. Zuboff, a Harvard Business School professor, and Maxmin, a former CEO, talk enthusiastically about the prospect of "federated support networks." In an interview with Across the Board, they said that these networks will "assume accountability and responsibility for every aspect of the consumption experience. The result is deep support—and individuals gain control of their lives." Which ultimately means that people who understand your needs and desires will make decisions for you. (However, there's no escape from having to choose the people who are going to make those choices for you.)—S.H. |
So What's a Marketer to Do?
"We have put the consumers in charge and they're not happy about it," psychologist Schwartz says, "so they're looking for experts to help them organize and filter their choices—to tell them what to do."
Ultimately, marketers face two options:
Reduce the number of choices to the consumer. Is there anybody in favor of complexity? There isn't—at least, anybody willing to admit it—which is why simplicity has become such a driving commercial force. As MIT's John Maeda points out in The Laws of Simplicity, "the marketplace abounds with promises of simplicity. Citibank has a 'simplicity' credit card, Ford has 'keep it simple pricing,' and Lexmark vows to 'uncomplicate'" the consumer experience. But these are essentially marketing slogans. Take it a step further: "Imagine a world," Maeda writes, "in which software companies simplified their programs every year by shipping with 10 percent fewer features at 10 percent higher cost due to the expense of simplification. For the consumer to get less and pay more seems to contradict sound economic principles."
And yet, he argues, there are enough examples of successful simplification to make simplicity a growth industry. As examples, he cites "the iPod that does less but costs more than other digital music players . . . and the deceptively spare interface of the powerful Google search engine, which is so popular that 'googling' has become shorthand for 'searching the Web.'"
Offer the same number of choices—or even fewer of them—but make them palatable to the consumer. In a landscape of unlimited choice, Edward C. Rosenthal, a Temple University management professor and author of The Era of Choice, believes that companies must strike a better balance between the traditional and the trendy. "Enterprises need to realize that people desire the comfort that familiar objects or surroundings provide, at the same time that they feel the urge for change, the desire to be on the cutting edge," he says. "This balance is not provided by compromise candidates but by offering both kinds of choices to consumers.
"It is obvious," Rosenthal continues, "that what is deemed 'cutting edge' constantly changes. But what is not obvious is that our sense of what is classic and traditional also evolves. It takes a great deal of work to determine which styles, for example, people will consistently return to when they are tired of chasing trends." He cites the athletic-shoe industry as an important example of overdependence on trend. "When designs constantly change," he says, "consumers are not offered the option of purchasing the same shoe when it wears out. I suspect that a lot of people continue to wear shoes that are worn out, merely because they don't like the styles that are available at a particular time—for example, if shoes are clunky or too brash. Sales would actually increase if shoe companies devoted a small but significant percentage of sales to styles that consumers return to consistently."
To David Altschul, holding on to a customer whipsawed by many brands and brand promises means telling a story. "Consumers are looking for meaning," says Altschul, president of Character, a Portland, Ore., marketing consulting firm, "and meaning comes from a story. Consumers relate to big iconic brands, like Nike or Harley-Davidson, as if they were characters in a story. The way to find dimension in the character of the brand is to understand its story framework—that is, what does this brand mean? Why should I care about it? And what are the core principles for expressing that meaning in everything the brand does? If you have honest and compelling answers to those questions—answers that come directly out of the brand's actions in the world, not stuff you make up—then the story of the brand will be believable. Marketers know that the audience is hungry for authenticity."
For Cheerios, Altschul developed a story framework that centered on its connection with the family. As a result, General Mills abandoned an advertising campaign based on the cereal's cholesterol-lowering benefits in favor of one stressing its role in the family. For example, a one-minute TV spot shows a couple adopting two children from another country; on the plane trip home, the new family forms a bond by playing with Cheerios.
Another way to keep the customer from being confused and overwhelmed by choice is to organize choices and make them accessible. The digital-entertainment industry is leading the way, with features that recommend selections based on customers' previous choices. In The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, Chris Anderson argues that providers of intermediary filters—that is, those who can help buyers make choices—will be increasingly essential to both providers and consumers.
Amazon, eBay, Netflix, and iTunes offer a huge number of choices but make it possible for consumers to easily access them—or to have them accessed for you. As Maeda points out in The Laws of Simplicity, if you're searching online for a book, "you probably will be looking for books similar to what you've purchased in the past. Amazon.com already has this suggestion engine, and although it isn't 100 percent accurate, increased computing power in the future will only aid machines trying to understand each of our particular quirks."
Harvard Business School associate professor Luc Wathieu argues that marketers must go further in "enriching the interaction" between the seller and the buyer. He believes companies should create a series of "choice steps" to guide consumers through the decision process in a way that gives them a greater sense of engagement with the enterprise. In a series of experiments for a forthcoming journal article, Wathieu and Hong Kong scholar A.V. Muthukrishnan discovered that superfluous choices, which have no impact on the final option selected, "induce a perception of greater deliberation and fluency in decision-making . . . that the consumers find the process more satisfactory." Further, they found that on future occasions these consumers often made "the naïve (and often erroneous) inference that their earlier choice was a particularly good one." So a marketer in turn might infer that the more choices the better, so send up as many brand extensions as possible. But as we'll see, things are never so simple.
There's still another way to make an extravagant number of choices palatable to the consumer: organize them under one overriding brand umbrella. In Mavericks at Work, William C. Taylor and Polly LaBarre of Fast Company ask: "How do you forge a relationship with customers . . . that leaves [them] confident that they've made the right choice and eager to keep making the same choice. It's tempting to answer . . . with one word: Starbucks." Yet Starbucks, by its own count, turns out 55,000 different beverages, to satisfy every conceivable taste. As Taylor and LaBarre point out, however, Starbucks thinks of itself not as a "caffeine-delivery system but as a rich, consistent, and distinctive experience that embraces how the stores look, what they sell, who works there, even the exotic language customers speak to place an order." Even so, Starbucks realizes that seemingly unlimited choices can be intimidating. To make them less so, the company produces an eighteen-page booklet—complete with a worksheet—all this, just to help customers buy a cup of coffee.
Finally, Maeda suggests still another approach to making complexity palatable is: Hide it. "A classical example of this technique is the Swiss Army knife," he explains. "Only the tool you wish to use is exposed, while the other blades and drivers are hidden."
What Does It All Mean?
Two things seem to be happening at the same time: Consumers want it all, but they want it easy. Yes, they want a product that's customized to their individual preferences; but, no, they don't want to work at it. Barry Schwartz begins The Paradox of Choice with a now-classic story—how he visited the local Gap to buy a pair of jeans and was confronted with variations galore: slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit, baggy, or extra baggy; stonewashed, acid-washed, or distressed; button-fly or zipper-fly; faded or regular. All these options when all the poor guy wanted was a pair of pants.
Should the Gap, like Starbucks does with coffee, offer a directory explaining the various design niceties of its jeans? Should it take design a step further and, like some manufacturers allow, let each customer design a unique jean to his or her unique body? On the other hand, it could drastically simplify the buying experience by reducing the number of jeans it offers. Instead of ten versions, why not three? Who'd be the wiser? The Gap could go even further and offer only one Gap jean—straight, no chaser; take it or leave it. That might make Schwartz happy—except, of course, if that one style didn't quite fit him. But, then, who ever said simplicity was simple?
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John Maeda Is a Simple Man He was also recently in the market for a simple phone. Instead, he found phones overloaded with complex features. "All the options on the phones were killing me," he complains. "I was so ticked off, I finally gave up. I still don't have a cell phone." Maeda, a professor of media arts and sciences and founder of the MIT Media Lab's Simplicity Consortium, is, like many consumers, fed up with complicated technology. In his new book, The Laws of Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life, he points out that "improved" doesn't have to mean a product with added features. Maeda, 40, spoke—on his land line—from his Cambridge, Mass., office about why companies need to strip their products of various add-ons in order to help us all live the simple life. —Vadim Liberman |
How did simplicity become your passion?
I was born and raised in Seattle, where I worked at a tofu store in the Chinatown area. It was a very simple life. There was no complex intellectualization of life. It was just surviving, making a product, and working at a family business. We only sold one variety of tofu. Many customers asked for more, but my father said, "This is all you get. It's simply the best." The next thing I know, I'm at MIT, in a very complex world of media. One day there, I discovered that the letters "M," "I," and "T" occur in perfect sequence inside the word "simplicity." In fact, the same can be said of "complexity." Given that the "T" in MIT stands for "technology"—the very source of our feeling overwhelmed today—I felt doubly the responsibility that someone at MIT should take a lead in correcting the situation by finding ways to avoid living a more complex life with the gadgets that surround us.
You say marketers should simplify products by removing features in order to differentiate them. Why aren't more companies doing this?
Some are. In fact, someone from Toshiba was telling me how in Japan they reduced the number of features by half on one of their cell phones and their sales went way up.
But don't many consumers like to have extra features in a product?
Sure, those are the power users. They love mystery. They love complexity. They're usually younger, because as we age, we realize that time is more precious, so we're less likely to want to spend time understanding how a product works.
Now, will the consumer who enjoys complexity ever want simplicity? I think so, because I was one of them. I was the guy who wanted more, more, more. But I had my fill. So even in this super-geek culture, more and more people are now ending up like me. They not only buy but, more importantly, love designs that can make their lives simpler. Those consumers who continue to want all the extra features are living by the deserted-island principle. It's as if they are asking themselves: What if I'm stranded on a deserted island? I'll need a can opener to do things other than open a can. And I'll need such-and-such a product to come with a calendar feature.
A can opener with a calendar feature?
Crazy, right? The reality is that most people rarely use many of a product's features. They think they want all these extra features, but it's only because they aren't aware of how great a simple product can be. Take the computer. It's extremely complex and gets more and more complex every day. Most people have no idea how much simpler computers used to be and how some were easier to use simply because they've never seen such alternatives.
Because people's starting points are very advanced today, they don't know what could be, or are too busy to want to figure it out. When a new product launches, the on ramp is clear, and to be successful, the concept has to start out simple, like the iPod. When it first came out, it was pretty easy to use; it could only play music. Now, five years later, the average consumer can't use an iPod. It plays videos, video games, and does other things. It's actually a very different product.
Simple products have a way of becoming more complex. This becomes a problem for those people who are the later adopters—they get frustrated. We don't design for that later adopter, oddly. I don't know why. We should. It makes sense. It's just that technology is made by technologists, who all ask: "Why would someone want something that's so brain-dead?" Simplifying products is almost impossible to most people who make technology.
If people are drawn to simplicity, why do they then accessorize their products with various add-ons?
Because consumers like having the power to do what they want with their product. They don't like giving the power to complexify to companies. Accessorizing a product themselves gives consumers the benefit of expressing their own feelings for their objects.
Now, of course, at the same time companies are making things more complex, they're making them smaller. Does that impact people's attitude toward them?
Making things smaller doesn't make them necessarily better, but when they are made so, we tend to have a more forgiving attitude toward their existence. When a small, unassuming object exceeds our expectations, we are not only surprised but pleased. Our usual reaction is something like, "That little thing did all that?" The smaller the object, the more forgiving we can be when it misbehaves.
You write: "I realize that although the idea of ridding the earth of complexity might seem the shortest path to universal simplicity, it may not be what we truly desire." If so, then why write a book on it and why encourage manufacturers to make things simpler?
If anything, my intention was to create a modern dialogue around simplicity. We're in a phase now where we are over-complexed, and someone has to say that. We have to make things simpler again. However, once things do eventually become simpler, we're going to swing back toward complexity. It's like with art. When modernism came out, people eventually tired of it, and postmodernism came about. We always want what we don't have. So I'm just stating the obvious, which is that we already have complexity, so we now want the opposite. And when we get that, we'll want complexity again. Think of LCD watches. It wasn't till Casio launched the G-Shock, a very hip-hop LCD watch, that people finally asked, "Why would you buy this overly ornate thing?" Because people were so tired of plain LCD watches. Now we are swinging back, tired of all these froufrou-style watches. We want simpler, clean watches. It's just part of the rhythm. None of this dawned on me till I started writing this stuff down.
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