When Consumers Go to Extremes

Conventional wisdom holds that consumers faced with a large product assortment, like PCs with varying processor speeds, would rather choose a product that is middling than one at the extremes. But John Gourville, professor of marketing at Harvard Business School, and Dilip Soman, Corus Chair in Communication Strategy and professor of marketing at the University of Toronto’s Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, believe that tendency can get flipped around under certain circumstances as the number of options rises.

Gourville and Soman conducted three studies on different sets of shoppers to test whether avoiding extremes depends on the menu of choices. In the 2007 working paper “Extremeness Seeking: When and Why Consumers Prefer the Extremes,” they describe how the alignment of options is a key factor. Aligned options vary on two or more continuous dimensions, such as price and processor speed. So, as Gourville says, “In a sense, you are buying none, a little, more, or a lot of a feature.”

With more aligned options, consumers tend to choose a middling option. Providing more options makes deciding more difficult, so consumers cut through their indecision by eliminating the cheapest and most expensive options. Sommeliers, for example, know that the least and most expensive vintages on their wine lists are far from the best sellers. Apart from the occasional oenophile, most diners don’t want to take the risk that the cheapest wine could be vinegar or that they won’t appreciate the delicate nose of the priciest reserve, so they pick an option from the middle of the list.

On the other hand, as Gourville and Soman show, sometimes choices are not so neatly aligned, and consumers face tradeoffs when they make their decision. For example, a car dealer might offer a sporty SUV with four-wheel drive, or a luxury SUV with leather seats and a sunroof (but no four-wheel drive). When those non-aligned choices multiply and the tradeoffs become complicated, consumers tend toward a stripped-down or a fully loaded model instead.

Why do consumers like extremes when options are nonaligned? Ironically, it’s for the same reason they prefer compromises when the options are aligned: Deciding is hard. “What’s happening,” explains Gourville, “is that people can’t decide, so they are, in a sense, simplifying their choice. They’re throwing up their hands and just saying, ‘Give me the basic version or give me everything.’ The last thing they want to do is pick some of the options but not all of them, and find out after the fact the ones they picked weren’t the right options.” Consumers reflexively eliminate the middling options so they won’t kick themselves later.

In fact, it’s the risk of second-guessing that could be driving those decisions. The need to justify one’s decision exacerbates a consumer’s attraction to the extremes in these circumstances. It is easier to justify an extreme option when the spectrum of options is nonaligned.

When marketers draw up their product menus, they might want to keep this phenomenon in mind. “If you had three alternatives — say, good, better and best — you would think that you would be better serving your customer to add more choices in the middle,” says Gourville. “Well, in fact, you may be inadvertently driving them toward the extremes, which might not be in your best interest.” Then again, it might be, depending on the marketer’s preferences, although it’s hard to know which extreme the consumers will go for.

“If you have a complex, nonaligned assortment, you really have two alternatives: to simplify that assortment — reduce the number of options to decrease the difficulty of making any one choice — or to help people along on the [decision-making] process.” So hand in hand with adding more nonaligned choices, the market could offer tools or advice to help consumers make their choice.

For more information, download the paper or contact John Gourville at jgourville@hbs.edu or Dilip Soman at dilip.soman@rotman.utoronto.ca.