Most businesses think giving customers more options is always better. The evidence says otherwise, and the smartest CRM programmes have been quietly exploiting this for years.
There is a well-known study from 2000, where Professor Sheena Iyengar from Columbia University conducted the ‘jam study’ as an exploration of choice and decision making1, in which shoppers at a food market were shown either 24 varieties of jam or six. The larger display drew more attention. But shoppers who saw the smaller display were ten times more likely to actually buy something.
This is choice paralysis. The assumption that more options equals better outcomes is wrong, for customers and for the businesses serving them. More choice demands more cognitive effort, and that effort tends to produce anxiety, indecision, and abandonment rather than satisfaction.
So why do businesses keep doing it?
The smarter ones don’t overwhelm you with all their options. They offer the illusion of choice.
Netflix is the obvious example. The catalogue is vast, but what you actually see is a curated, algorithmically personalised slice of it, shaped by your behaviour and the behaviour of people like you. You feel like you have endless options. What you’re really seeing is a managed shortlist designed to get you to press play.
Even supermarkets with many options of similar products will frequently highlight the products they (or the brands that have agreed endcap promotions) want you to buy by placing them in prominent positions.
What this means for CRM
You don’t need Netflix’s immense data infrastructure to apply this logic. It’s possible with your own data.
Dig into your purchase or conversion history. For each first-time conversion, what does the second purchase most commonly look like? What’s the average time between them? That pattern, even a rough one, is the foundation of a next-best-action model.
From there, you can build something deceptively simple: a triggered communication that arrives when a customer is statistically most likely to convert again, presenting the two or three options most relevant to their behaviour. You see it on sites all the time. The product that’s placed in the centre and is slightly larger than those either side, the “this is the most common” selection nudge.
The customer believes they’re choosing freely and they are, but within a range you’ve designed to direct them to purchase.
The practical starting point
Most CRM teams already have the data to do this. What they’re missing is the segmentation logic and the trigger architecture to act on it. Start with your highest-volume first purchase and map the most common second purchase from that cohort. Build one journey, then measure how it lands properly. Do sales for that product or service increase, does it move sales away from the less profitable options?
The goal isn’t to restrict consumer choice it’s to remove friction from too many choices.
Graeme Lawrenson is a CRM and Marketing Strategist with 12+ years of Director-level experience across B2B and B2C markets. If you’d like to talk through how this applies to your business, get in touch.
Leave a Reply