We have too much choice today
Published July 25th, 2005 in PersonalConsumers have too much choice today. Companies overcater for people and it ends up hurting their profits. For example, HB has a limited edition range of ice creams available for its Magnum brand - I think it’s the Seven Deadly Sins promotion running at the moment. This is a far cry from the days of having a choice between a regular cone and a 99!
I went to buy a Magnum ice cream the other day and looked into the refrigerator at the shop. I ended up buying a plain Magnum simply because I was confused by the amount of choice. This wasn’t a case of being unable to decide between mint and strawberry, but not having a clue what all the different kinds of Magnum were. All I knew was I wanted an ice cream, the ice cream I wanted was a Magnum and all I was prepared to decide between was a regular, white chocolate or almond ice cream.
The whole marketing ploy was lost on me and almost resulted in me buying a different ice cream altogether. If companies want to stimulate consumers interest in their product then they should make sure not to confuse them. The Magnum Seven Deadly Sins promotion makes no sense to me - they’ve got a great ad for it, but that’s about it.
There’s a lot of people that believe in the power of three, they think it’s the best number of choices that a consumer should be offered and I would tend to agree with them.
3 Responses to “We have too much choice today”
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I have often, when confronted by the sweet counter and forced to choose a chocolate bar from the serried ranks of bars on display, thought that a Soviet system, where there was one brand of chocolate (called ‘Chocolate Bar’) has something in its favour.
‘Power of 3′ - now where’ve I heard that before?
There’s really 2 reasons behind a single company offering so many choices. Firstly, rather than it being a consumer choice between Magnum and say 9 other competing brands, it’s a choice between 5 Magnum offerings and 5 other products - so they increase their market share by introducing products that seem to compete with themselves.
Secondly, the new age of consumerism is ‘massclusivity’ - where people want exclusive, custom versions of mass produced products. Okay, Magnum or HB are never going to fill this with different brands of ice cream, since you can’t actually customise them in any way (unless they let you buy on-line, but surely they’d have melted before you’d get it !!!) but having only slightly different products allows individual taste selection.
I take your point about confusion though … consumers don’t want ‘massclusive’ versions of simple, commodity products like sweets and ice cream.
“Consumers have too much choice today. Companies overcater for people and it ends up hurting their profits”
Not in the telecoms arena in this country though. Consumers don’t have much choice at all and it shows. Landline wise, eircom dominate it all. What do we have? The hioghest line rental rate in the whole of the EU. €8 per month more than the EU average and €6 more than the next most expensive country.
And for the mobile market, 3 telecom companies, and yet Ireland has the highest ARPU in the EU and one of the highest in the world. Telecoms spend in this country is massive, do we really have choice?