When I was a junior copywriter at BMP, one of the first commercials I did was for Pepsi Cola.
“Lipsmackin,thirstquenchin,acetastin….(etc)……”
I asked the account man, David Jones, how it was doing.
He said, “Well it’s certainly caught on. But I’m not sure how much good it’s doing us.”
I asked him what he meant.
He said “Well, I was at a motorway services at the weekend, and a father came in with two young boys.
The father said “What do you want to drink?”
The boys said “Two cans of Pepsi.”
The father said to the man at the counter “Two cans of Coke please.”
And the man gave him two can of own-label cola.
And no one noticed any difference.”
That’s how it is in the real world.
We like to think the public inspect all brands under a jeweller’s eyepiece.
The truth is they don’t.
Sheena Iyengar is Business Professor at Columbia University.
She specialises in the way people make choices.
In her TED lecture, she talked about conducting research groups in Russia.
As you’d expect, her team provided refreshments for the respondents.
First the basics: cans of Coke.
But, as some people prefer Pepsi, they had cans of that too.
Then, for people watching their weight, cans of Diet Coke.
And, again, Diet Pepsi for people who preferred that.
Then some cans of Sprite, which has a lemon flavour.
Cans of Dr Pepper, which has a cherry flavour.
And cans of Mountain Dew, which has a fruity flavour.
So they laid out a choice of 7 different canned drinks.
The interesting thing was that the Russian respondents saw it as one choice. Cans of fizzy drink.
For them the ‘brands’ were artificial, just different labels on the can.
They hadn’t been ‘educated’ in brand preferences.
For Sheena Iyengar this was surprising.
She’d grown up in America, the land of the brand.
So she’d assumed infinite choice was everyone’s goal.
The more choice the better.
For the first time she saw that was just an artificial construct.
That the mind doesn’t see, or need, infinite choice.
In fact infinite choice can be unsettling, disorientating.
Recently, I heard about an experiment conducted in a supermarket.
They set up two displays of spaghetti sauce.
One display featured 6 different kinds of sauce.
The other display featured 24 different kinds of sauce.
As you’d expect, thirty per cent more people stopped to look at the display with more kinds of sauce.
But here’s the bit you wouldn’t expect.
Thirty per cent more people actually bought sauce at the display with less kinds of sauce.
Malcolm Gladwell talks about choice on TED.
Gladwell says the fact is, the mind doesn’t need and can’t handle infinite choice.
The mind works on ‘clustering’.
When the choice is over a certain size, the mind clusters the choices into groups.
Because 24 is too big a number to handle, we need to reduce the choice to something manageable, say 6.
So we look for similarities and create, say, 3 or 4 clusters.
Then we choose one particular cluster and we choose from within that cluster.
What was difficult for Sheena Iyengar, was the realisation that clusters take precedence over brands.
People don’t choose a brand first, then see what they make.
They create clusters first, and then brand preference may make a difference.
The truth is we don’t want infinite choice.
With infinite choice it’s almost impossible to choose.
It’s too much.
So we are always looking for a way to reduce choice.
To find ways to knock options off the list.
To get it down to manageable size.
That’s what clusters are about.
When I was a youngster, some of my friends used to go to the wasteland near the Thames and collect eggs from birds’ nests.
I said I thought it was cruel.
They said it wasn’t cruel if there were more than five eggs in the nest.
I asked why.
They said “Birds can’t count beyond five.
So if there are 7 eggs in the nest and you take one, she won’t notice.
She’ll continue to hatch all the eggs as if nothing’s happened
But if there are only 4 eggs there and you take one, she will notice.
Then she might abandon the nest and all the eggs will die.”
Living beings naturally think in clusters.
That’s how the mind works.
That’s what makes thinking manageable

The trick isn’t just to increase choice.
The trick is to manage choice.