News Release

Nothing to do with it

Totally irrelevant choices lead to greater buyer satisfaction and brand loyalty

Peer-Reviewed Publication

University of Chicago Press Journals

Intuitively, one would think that firms should keep their transactions with customers as brief and efficient as possible. However, new research from the March issue of the Journal of Consumer Research suggests that by adding unnecessary but straightforward steps – called "superfluous choices" – at early stages of the buying process, marketers can increase not only customer satisfaction, but also brand loyalty.

"Superfluous choices extend a consumer's deliberation over a decision and, when they are easy to make, they engender a sense of taking small steps in the right direction that might impart a subjective experience of fluency," write A.V. Muthukrishnan (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) and Luc Wathieu (Harvard Business School).

In one experiment, the researchers asked a group to select a package of rewritable compact disks. But first, the consumers were asked to decide how many different colors of CD cases they would like to have in the package. Pretests revealed that consumers placed absolutely no importance in this attribute. However, the addition of this superfluous step increased the probability that consumers would repeat the choice on a future occasion from 47 percent to 74 percent.

Superfluous choices are those that can be removed without affecting the final choice context and outcome. Instead, their effect is long-term: Consumers misinterpret the extra deliberation time and ease of decision-making. They end up being more satisfied with the buying process and more confident with their final choice. Thus, while superfluous choices may not have an immediate impact on which option the consumers choose, they do increase the chances that consumers will persist with the same option in the future.

As the authors write: "We argue by means of a series of experiments that superfluous choices (even though they have no impact on the final option selected) induce a perception of greater deliberation and fluency in decision-making such that consumers find the process more satisfactory and make, on future occasions, the naïve (and often erroneous) inference that their earlier choice was a particularly good one."

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A. V. Muthukrishnan and Luc Wathieu. "Superfluous Choices and the Persistence of Preference," Journal of Consumer Research: March 2007.


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