Unfettered choice without curation, inspiration and discovery is paralysing. Retailers should make it easy for people to buy.

Choice is paralysing, it demands effort from customers. You have a primary job as a retailer: to make it easy for people to buy things from you. Choice without curation, inspiration and discovery does the opposite.

“Nobody ever got fired for providing ‘the largest ever choice’, well maybe they should…”

Richard Hammond, managing director at Smart Circle

Insight managers will say, ‘customers they tell us they want choice’. Of course customers say that; nobody votes to restrict choice, because we’re inured to the idea that choice and freedom are synonymous.

As behavioural psychologists have long known, customers are gigantically vulnerable to suggestion and bias. Frankly, you shouldn’t ask us about choice at all, because however you ask, we will give a dumb answer that is biased to what we mistakenly think choice represents.

Customers rarely vote for a restriction of choice but in practice they crave exactly that restriction. IKEA, Aldi, Asos are prime examples where choice is curated (for function and design, for price and effectiveness, and for style).

The Amazon mirage

Amazon appears to offer the ultimate in unlimited choice but that’s a mirage too: amazon’s curation and discovery is done for it by media and customer reviews, by brands’ own marketing, and by word of mouth. Amazon as a business is philosophically anti-curation, yet utterly depends on it.

Unhelpful retail choice is summed up on Clarks’ website: click ‘mens casual shoes’ and the result is a list of 91 pairs, all identically presented within a rigid visual grid, an illustrated spreadsheet. This is choice as boring chore.

Before their administrations, HMV and Game merchandised stores as clumsy physical databases. As digital media and social sharing made it easier to find that perfect new song, game or film. Flicking through racks lost its appeal. Contrast that with music retailer Rough Trade, whose inspiration, discovery and curation-led approach is so successful that this British team are now the proud owners of New York’s largest record store.

Rough Trade aren’t afraid to tell customers what to like; to be active in that recommendation, even operating subscription schemes that send customers the specific tracks Rough Trade think they should be listening to.

Magpie merchandising

Compare Marks and Spencer’s failing ‘throw everything at it’ approach on clothing with ASOS’s socially curated magpie merchandising. Tesco’s stuttering cover-all-bases philosophy with Aldi’s singular focus. Never make the mistake that customers choose Aldi on cost alone – it’s the easy-to-shop combination of curated quality at a brilliant price that so appeals.

There’s an issue of bravery here: the retailer who chooses to limit choice is worried they are taking a risk. And they are, to an extent – curation is harder than unfettered assortment; merchandising for discovery is tougher than standard visual merchandising, inspiration requires active communication and creative adjacencies. The response to that fear is often massive ranges offering lots of choice. CEOs will even turn this into a positive for the annual report ‘Our ranging and logistics management have resulted in the largest ever choice for our customers’.

Nobody ever got fired for providing ‘the largest ever choice’, well maybe they should because unfettered choice is confusing and disabling. It’s not smart retailing.

  • Richard Hammond, managing director at Smart Circle