The Netflix Effect

You sit down. Remote in hand. Ready to watch something.

Twenty minutes later you’re still scrolling.

You haven’t picked a thing.

That’s the Netflix Effect. Too much choice, so you make no choice at all.

And it’s happening to your customers right now.

Why more choice doesn’t help

We think choice is a good thing. 

But the research says the opposite.

In a now-famous study, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper set up a jam stall in a supermarket. One day they offered 24 flavours. Another day, just 6.

The big display pulled in more curious browsers. But the small display sold ten times more jam.

Fewer options. More sales.

Barry Schwartz wrote a whole book on this called The Paradox of Choice. The idea is simple. When we’re faced with too many options, we don’t feel liberated. We feel overwhelmed. So we freeze, delay, or walk away.

There’s even a name for it in design. Hick’s Law – the more choices you give someone, the longer they take to decide. And the longer they take, the more likely they are to decide nothing.

Choice is cognitive load

Every option you put in front of someone is a small tax on their brain.

Humans avoid that. We’re wired to conserve effort. When something feels complicated, we default to the easy answer, or no answer at all.

You already know this from your own life. The menu with 200 dishes makes you nervous. The one with 8 makes you hungry.

Now look at how most businesses communicate.

A homepage with fifteen services and no clear starting point. A proposal that lists every capability you’ve ever had. A pitch that shows everything, so it lands nothing. A product range so wide the customer can’t tell what’s for them.

We think we’re being helpful. We’re actually being Netflix.

The businesses that win make choosing easy

The strongest brands don’t offer more. They offer less.

Apple could bombard you with specs. Instead they hand you one clear reason to care. 

Yahoo had a homepage full of search, news, weather and everything under the sun. Google choose to just show a search box, and hide everything behind it.

They’ve done the hard work of narrowing down, so you don’t have to.

A confused customer doesn’t buy. They scroll on.

This is the commercial bit, and it’s the bit most people miss.

When a customer can’t quickly work out what you do, which option is for them, or what to do next, they don’t email to ask.

They leave.

You never even know you lost them.

There’s no line on a spreadsheet for the sale that didn’t happen because the choice felt too hard.

That’s the real cost of the Netflix Effect. It’s invisible.

So what do you do about it?

Take a hard look at what you’re asking your customers to choose between.

Your website. Your services. Your proposal. Your pitch.

Then start cutting.

Guide people to the obvious next step. Reduce the number of decisions. Make the easy choice the right choice.

Clarity isn’t dumbing down. It’s respect for a busy person’s time.

Is your business giving customers a shortlist, or handing them the whole of Netflix and hoping they pick you?

If it’s the latter, that’s a conversation worth having. Drop me a line on oli@smith.co.uk.