“Consumers are irresistibly drawn to product specifications,” says The Atlantic this month, drawing on findings published in the Journal of Consumer Research.
In short, people will buy cars with more horsepower, cameras with more megapixels regardless of whether they will actually make a difference to how they end up using the products. For example, people can’t tell the difference between a one megapixel picture and a five megapixel picture and 500hp doesn’t help you much if the speed limit is 55 mph.
Lots of technology companies (and many of my clients) understand this enough to provide detailed product specifications but not enough to zoom in on the two or three that really differentiate their product.
It is telling that Apple have two models of iPhone, one with 8GB and one with 16GB. The choice is simple and numeric. It aligns with what this research tells us. BMW do the same thing with their model names – a 325 is ‘better’ than a 318, for example. As with writing, if you try to say everything, you end up saying nothing. Nokia has dozens of models, each with a long list of specifications, making it much harder to choose between them.
If consumers don’t make rational choices, companies can do much more to help them make irrational ones in a rational way by simplifying and highlighting key specifications. When it comes to ‘more is more’, sometimes ‘less is better.’
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That’s an interesting insight. I’d seen Barry Schwartz’s talk “The Paradox of Choice – Why More Is Less” (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6127548813950043200) but it hadn’t occurred to me that this is the kind of thinking that goes into Apple’s product line.
You must understand the needs of your company TODAY and where do you see your company in the next 5 years for CRM to be cost effrective.