Chapter 8

Why people choose

So far a choice has been a list, a moment and a way of buying. It's also a person, and people don't choose the way a spreadsheet does.

Good enough beats best

People rarely compare every option. They take the first one that clears the bar. Herbert Simon called this satisficing. It's why buyers pick from a list written on day one. So being on that list matters more than being slightly better than whoever is on it.

Familiar feels safe

A name people have met before feels like the safer pick, even when they can't say why. In 1968 Robert Zajonc showed that "mere repeated exposure" to something improves people's attitude towards it (Zajonc).

Feeling first, reasons after

It was around 2020, and I'd made up my mind about Intercom long before I compared anything.

I'd been on their website a few times and I loved it. The story pulled me in. The design was beautiful, and the product was explained completely without ever going on too long. I'd been building websites for more than twenty years by then, and I was impressed. Some of the suppliers I dealt with used it too, so I'd been on the other end of it as a customer, and I'd enjoyed that.

So when the question came up of which chatbot to put on websites, ours and our clients', it was Intercom's to lose.

We did a proper competitive review. It showed Intercom was well and truly the most expensive, about four times the price of the others in most cases. I argued for it anyway, for my own business and to clients, and most of them took the bite and bought it too.

Being fair to the numbers, it probably shouldn't have won. The alternatives cost much less and were good enough for most of what people needed. But Intercom had already won the emotional argument with me. I'd made the decision on feeling, then gone looking for the rational case to back it up.

The review was real work. The answer was in my head before it started.

Les Binet and Peter Field studied campaigns in the IPA's effectiveness databank. Emotional campaigns were almost twice as likely as rational ones to report very large profit effects (IPA). Their later business-to-business work found emotion did more there too, over the long term (Chapter 23).

Those are award entries, successes by selection, but they fit what psychologists find: people are poor witnesses to their own reasons.

Reasons still matter, because a buyer has to explain the choice to a partner, a boss or a board. The feeling picks, and the reason defends.

Losses loom larger than gains

A loss hurts about twice as much as an equal gain pleases, though less when the stakes are small. So in a serious purchase, the buyer fears choosing wrong more than they hope to choose right. That's why so many deals end in doing nothing.

We follow other people

In 2006 three researchers built an online music market for 14,341 people. Only some could see what others had downloaded (Salganik, Dodds and Watts). Where people could see each other's choices, the hits were bigger and harder to predict. Quality sets the range. Other people's choices decide where in the range you land.

A hard choice stalls

The famous finding that too many options paralyse people is weaker than its fame. A review of 50 experiments found an average effect of almost zero (Scheibehenne and colleagues).

A later meta-analysis of 99 results found when it does bite (Chernev, Böckenholt and Goodman): complex options, a hard decision, and a buyer unsure what they want. So the number of options isn't the problem. The difficulty of choosing is.

What it asks of you, stage by stage

The table is my reading of the evidence, not a measured result.

The machine has no feelings, though it has habits of its own. It can do the comparing, but it's still the person who feels, fears and decides.

Whose evidence this is. The IPA is an agency trade body. LinkedIn, which funded the B2B work, sells advertising. The other sources are peer-reviewed.