4. Don’t overwhelm consumers with choiceWhen a default option isn’t possible, marketers must be wary of generating “choiceoverload,” which makes consumers less likely to purchase. In a classic fieldexperiment, some grocery store shoppers were offered the chance to taste a selectionof 24 jams, while others were offered only 6. The greater variety drew more shoppersto sample the jams, but few made a purchase. By contrast, although fewer consumersstopped to taste the 6 jams on offer, sales from this group were more than five timeshigher.1Large in-store assortments work against marketers in at least two ways. First, thesechoices make consumers work harder to find their preferred option, a potentialbarrier to purchase. Second, large assortments increase the likelihood that eachchoice will become imbued with a “negative halo”—a heightened awareness thatevery option requires you to forgo desirable features available in some other product.Reducing the number of options makes people likelier not only to reach a decision butalso to feel more satisfied with their choice.5. Position your preferred option carefullyEconomists assume that everything has a price: your willingness to pay may be higherthan mine, but each of us has a maximum price we’d be willing to pay. How marketersposition a product, though, can change the equation. Consider the experience of thejewelry store owner whose consignment of turquoise jewelry wasn’t selling.Displaying it more prominently didn’t achieve anything, nor did increased efforts byher sales staff. Exasperated, she gave her sales manager instructions to mark the lotdown “x1⁄2” and departed on a buying trip. On her return, she found that the managermisread the note and had mistakenly doubled the price of the items—and sold the lot.In this case, shoppers almost certainly didn’t base their purchases on an absolutemaximum price. Instead, they made inferences from the price about the jewelry’squality, which generated a context-specific willingness to pay.19The power of this kind of relative positioning explains why marketers sometimesbenefit from offering a few clearly inferior options. Even if they don’t sell, they mayincrease sales of slightly better products the store really wants to move. Similarly,many restaurants find that the second-most-expensive bottle of wine is very popular—and so is the second-cheapest. Customers who buy the former feel they are gettingsomething special but not going over the top. Those who buy the latter feel they aregetting a bargain but not being cheap. Sony found the same thing with headphones:consumers buy them at a given price if there is a more expensive option—but not ifthey are the most expensive option on offer.Another way to position choices relates not to the products a company offers but tothe way it displays them. Our research suggests, for instance, that ice cream shoppersin grocery stores look at the brand first, flavor second, and price last. Organizingsupermarket aisles according to way consumers prefer to buy specific products makescustomers both happier and less likely to base their purchase decisions on price—allowing retailers to sell higher-priced, higher-margin products. (This explains whyaisles are rarely organized by price.) For thermostats, by contrast, people generallystart with price, then function, and finally brand. The merchandise layout shouldtherefore be quite different.Marketers have long been aware that irrationality helps shape consumer behavior.Behavioral economics can make that irrationality more predictable. Understandingexactly how small changes to the details of an offer can influence the way peoplereact to it is crucial to unlocking significant value—often at very low cost.