Are you giving your customers the right number of choices to make when buying from you? One school of thought is that giving customers more variety will result in making more sales, since they’ll be able to find something that’s just right for them.
This thinking has been especially prevalent in recent years, where companies believe that the Y-generation so wants to be unique and different that every product must come in a full spectrum of outlandish colors, for example.
But does this really result in making more sales or instead make it harder for customers to choose something they’ll buy at all?
A confused mind always says no.
The Accidental Product Manager says “Stop Giving Your Customers Too Many Choices – They Don’t Want Them!“. As product managers, we have somehow convinced ourselves that our customers both want and need more choices when it comes to our products.
This thinking has allowed us to heap on more and more choices for our customers to make: colors, pricing plans, features, etc. However, it just may be the case that the one thing that our customers really don’t want is to have to make more decisions in order to buy our products.
Product managers at one company seem to have figured this out and they are using this knowledge to kick Netflix’s butt…
Life today is complicated for everyone including our customers. We like to add options to our products so that we can appeal to even more potential customers. Maybe what we should be doing instead, is simplifying how our products appear to our core base of potential customers and making it easier for them to buy our product.
This would require you to go back and look at all of the different variations of your product that you are currently offering. How many units of each variety are you actually selling? If you dropped the low performers, would you make your product more attractive to potential customers because it was less complex? This is a lesson that we all need to learn before our competition does…
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