Making choice easy....

Often on the web, you get told what products you might like. On many sites you get told what the top 10 in your genre are(I’ve discovered some very cool stuff on internet radio stations like Last.fm ). These recommendations work well because:

a. You can serendipitously discover new stuff you hadn’t heard of.

b. The merchant can sell more stuff(often obscure stuff that you wouldn’t have known otherwise).

One reason this works so well is that we all love to be surprised. We all love to discover and stumble upon stuff.

What would be cool is if this experience were replicated in offline markets. Often, customers don’t quite know what they want. It is possible to create experiences that help people make decisions, even if you don’t quite have the precision of an algorithm-generated recommendation.

Imagine if your waiter gave you suggestions for new dishes (my favourite restaurant does this – I suspect they’re not alone). Or if you had clothing shops or supermarkets that had a board listing out the top 10 products from yesterday.

Most marketers approach this indirectly – they mark bestsellers at a discount, or advertise them more heavily. It’s not often that people have tried out telling customers up front – “these are the top 10 products – you should consider buying one of them”.

Being simple and direct is an easy way to prompt a customer to make an impulse purchase. If it’s worked so well online, it should work offline too. This is something I’d love to see being tried out.