Choices, Choices – Keep It Simple

You’ve probably heard it all before, but it’s worth repeating: giving customers too many choices is bad for business. We’ve all been raised to think that the more choices we have – whether it be products, services, or whatever – the better. However, all these choices tend to leave potential customers feeling confused – there’s just too much to choose from! Think about going into most restaurants or even coffee shops. If you’re like me, you end up staring at the menu for what feels like hours trying to make up your mind. If you’ve been to a place often enough, you often just pick “the usual”, always picking from two to five options out of a mass of others.

If you’re a billionaire company like Starbucks, you can afford an overload of choices. If you’re a t-shirt printer or a coffee mug decorator, you might want to limit your customers’ choices to save them (and you) a lot of headache. As any professional from carpenters to web designers know, highly custom jobs often pay well, but take far longer, are easy to get wrong and can become unprofitable or blow up altogether quickly. “Spec” (pre-built) projects, as they’re known in the construction industry, are less upfront dollars but also less trouble.

Not only that, the simpler you make your customers’ choices, the easier (and the more likely) it is for them to buy your product. They’re less likely to suffer from buyer’s remorse (“What if I’d tried that other shiny thing?”) and less likely to get bogged down in trying to decide between a mass of what looks like about equal choices. Too many choices, and the customer may leave your website or your office in confusion.

Of course, custom work is unavoidable in the product decorator world, if for no other reason than each company’s logo will be different; but you can keep it much simpler for everyone.

So what can you do to make everyone’s life easier?

• Sit down and decide who your target market is – you need to know what the emphasis of your business is and who your ideal (most profitable, best-fitting, and within-reach) customers are. Don’t try to be everything to everyone.
• Invest in a simple, clean website with a clear focus on selling select products to your target market.
• Focus your marketing on your target market, and be clear and concise on what you want them to do.
• Categorize your offering and offer ways for your website or salesperson to guide the customer through narrowing down the options to what they need.
• Offer pre-made designs, easily customizable templates, standard colors, and a good but limited choice of shirt (or mug or pants) styles tailored (pun intended) to your target market.
• Hire or train a professional designer who can create simple, clean designs for custom jobs.

(A possible side benefit – keeping things simple and focusing on a particular target market can act like a bowling ball hitting the front pin and hitting the related pins – i.e., related markets.)

As the old marketing acronym puts it, Keep It Simple. Your customers, your employees and yourself will all be grateful.