The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

by Barry Schwartz

Unfortunately, providing consumers with useful decision-making information is not the point of all this advertising. The point of advertising is to sell brands. According to James Twitchell, the key insight that has shaped modern advertising came to cigarette manufacturers in the 1930s. In the course of market research, they discovered that smokers who taste-tested various cigarette brands without knowing which was which couldn’t tell them apart. So, if the manufacturer wanted to sell more of his particular brand, he was either going to have to make it distinctive or make consumers think it was distinctive, which was considerably easier. With that was born the practice of selling a product by associating it with a glamorous lifestyle. We probably like to think that we’re too smart to be seduced by such “branding,” but we aren’t. If you ask test participants in a study to explain their preferences in music or art, they’ll come up with some account based on the qualities of the pieces themselves. Yet several studies have demonstrated that “familiarity breeds liking.” If you play snippets of music for people or show them slides of paintings and vary the number of times they hear or see the music and the art, on the whole people will rate the familiar things more positively than the unfamiliar ones. The people doing the ratings don’t know that they like one bit of music more than another because it’s more familiar. Nonetheless, when products are essentially equivalent, people ...