7 Points on How Product Choices Affect Your Brand
Even if you’re working on an extremely niche product, you still need to offer a variety of choices for your consumers and your investors. However, what makes having choices so important for a brand?
Why can’t you have one product and be done with it? After all, you probably think that adding multiple choices dilutes the importance of your main product, don’t you?
Well, you’re wrong; probably the reason you’re unsure whether it’s worth it to offer more choices is because you’ve never been faced with the dilemma of lack of choices ever since everyone started offering multiple packages by default.
Take a look at your local milk provider; you might take their regular whole cream product. However, are you sure everybody’s doing the same? As a business owner, you have to take into account the different mentalities, choices, and afflictions that other people have, in this case, it’s allergies.
If someone’s lactose intolerant, no matter how much you market to them, you’ll never get them to buy your product, that’s because they’d probably have a bad time regardless of how you improve the quality of your product. That’s why there are whole, skimmed, and lactose-free versions for your milk.
Do You Think Customers Come Back After Choosing A Replacement?
Sounds simple? Well, it goes even deeper. Because you probably won’t feel negatively about a brand if they don’t offer your specific product, but there are certain situations where a lack of choice or even too many choices does affect the brand image for consumers.
These situations can probably cost you money, time, and tank your brand reputation. Think back to when you were short on cash, and you wanted to buy your necessities from the market, yet you came across your usual grocery or food product, but it would’ve been too much of a strain on your budget, so you reluctantly leave it and pick a brand you don’t particularly enjoy.
Would you come back to your previously preferred brand after your budget becomes freer? Some would. However, a portion would definitely link this negative memory with that particular brand, stopping a previously loyal customer from continuing to buy your products.
Can lack of choice be devastating?
During the pandemic, when public transportation was a high-risk choice for getting around, everyone decided to invest in cars for their transportation. However, you could imagine how much car manufacturers were swamped with orders when they had such a smaller workforce.
As a result, people couldn’t find the choices they had, and some people ended up buying used cars that had higher mileage than they would’ve wanted, while others had to settle for cars that weren’t their first choice.
We’re not saying that car manufacturers were at fault for not predicting that the world would be on lockdown. But we are saying that their reputation suffered a huge blow during that time period as if losing thousands of prospective clients wasn’t enough.
Having too few choices to pick from, with the priority going to whoever’s paying for the higher variants, gave a sense of negativity and a sour taste in everyone that could’ve been clients for the car manufacturers.
How can too many product choices turn people off?
It’s definitely possible to present the prospective customer with too many choices. While you might say that you cater to a certain type of customers, limiting your choices could affect your sales.
Take Starbucks; how many times has anyone above the age of 40 dreaded going to that place to get a regular ol’ coffee? Because instead of getting the usual “Your coffee will be ready right away” response any other coffee shop would give them, they’ll be bombarded with 20 different questions.
“Would you like a venti or a grande? Oh no, large means small here. Late? Caramel? Sugar?”
For somebody untrained in the art of ordering from the Starbucks counter, it’s not hard to figure out that for them, ordering a cup of coffee is going to feel like an interrogation. And it’s exhausting when all they want to do is to have a relaxing cup of coffee.
Is it possible to be diverse and not too complex?
If you stop reading right about now, you wouldn’t be wrong to think that you’ve been put between a rock and a hard place. After all, you can’t be diverse and simple at the same time, can you?
You can, and there are 3 benefits that your choices should have if you’re looking to capitalize on choices to sustain, and even improve your brand image.
Easy to Choose → Your choices need to be simple enough that they require the minimum effort and time. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Meta (Previously Facebook) says he only has black shirts in his wardrobe, so that he can simplify the process of choosing what to wear in the morning.
That’s because too many decisions and choices lead to fatigue and poor decisions. They also put out that burning desire to buy something, which causes the customer to second-guess whether they want your product after all.
Easy to Use → However, what happens after they pick your product? If they go back home and try to use it, yet to find a thick manual book that needs to be read from start to end, they’re going to have a negative impression on your brand.
Most likely, they’ll just throw the guidebook away and decide to try their luck in using your product by themselves.
Ikea is a heavy culprit of having difficult-to-use products yet a surprisingly ease of choice. You see every piece of furniture you can get on display right in front of you, and it makes it that much easier to get it for yourself.
But when you come back home, and you’re finally ready to set up your new table, or chair, you find that you’re looking down at a bunch of screws, oddly shaped wood and metal pieces, and a step-by-step instruction book. You weren’t planning on a relaxing evening, were you?
Choices need to align with morals
Most brands would stop at these 2 benefits. However, we mentioned that there’s a 3rd benefit that your choices need to offer, and it’s probably the most important one of the three benefits.
Easy on the Mind → Your customers must feel comfortable with your product or image in order to agree to choose from you.
According to 5WPR’s 2020 Consumer Culture Report: 83% of millennials want companies’ values to align with their own. And you know what happens when a company weighs too heavily on the minds of a group of people?
They get canceled, and we know that it’s incredibly difficult to recover from such a thing. A boycott would be the worst thing you want to happen to your brand…
Can choices provide future-proof and long-term sustainability?
Choices in your product line is a great way to guarantee that you’ll always have something for everyone. No matter their gender, habits, or spending styles.
iPhones are a great user of multiple choices for their product line. Do you like the regular iPhones, yet you can’t quite stomach the price range? You can take a look at their S series if you want the same features in a smaller package. What if you’re looking for a bigger screen with more features? You’ll probably enjoy the “max” line.
The reason smartphones such as Apple took the market by storm is because previously, the monopoly fell to traditional phones such as BlackBerry, which was a huge sensation at the time.
The BlackBerry was a great phone, and it probably had the same brand impact as owning an apple smartphone. However, you couldn’t deny that all their models looked more or less the same.
Choices affect the perceived quality
Limiting your choices on your product would also be limiting your ability to attract multiple customers. We’ve previously talked about how choices can help ease the burden of thinking on your client. However, they do work wonders with dealing with judgemental customers as well.
If you have somebody that’s looking for a reliable product with a smaller price range, and might even top some of the trending phones, then you can offer them a product that can contend with the best quality items at a price that compares with the cheapest ones.
The oneplus phone series has been known as the “flagship killer” for years now, simply because they give the same (or even better) features with their own phones, yet charge half the price of brand moguls.
Yet, even those brands get the people that go on and on about how they’re looking for the best of the best, and obviously, a higher price would equal a higher quality. That’s where the importance of choice comes into play.
You could offer a highly specialized version of your product that excels in quality and offers special perks that somebody looking for the necessities wouldn’t bother with, while someone interested in a better service would.
And that’s how you can control your brand image through implementing choices that benefit both your consumers and your prospects.
If your products are sorely lacking in choices, you can count on Cosmic Agency for your advertising, marketing, and choice-based needs, just schedule a call and leave the heavy lifting for us!
We hope this article helped you understand how choices can be impactful on your brand and why you should use them to your advantage. We’ll see you again in the next article!