Confession – I think a lot about choice and decision making. I believe ‘choice’ is one of the biggest issues facing business today. For one thing, it’s a challenge facing consumers, knowing they have choice. But ss businesses, if we ignore this challenge we fail to grasp the context of our role in consumer’s lives. We risk failing to grasp how and why they, in turn, ignore us. Choice is a major communications challenge. Mastering choice is a huge opportunity for differentiation.
24 hours per day is all we have so by nature attention is finite. Work or play we are bombarded by choice, and content has no respect for time. Books, Events, News, Music, Websites, Blogs, SMS, Emails and of course Videos. Each category offers seemingly infinite choice to acquire content. So are we always choosing? Well, no, we filter on auto-pilot. We snack, skim, channel hop, and tune-out. I use the term ‘Info-Snacking’, inspired by Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows”. Are you an Info Snacker? – Confess!
‘The Paradox of Choice’ by Barry Schwartz was the first book to expose me to concept of ‘too much choice’ being a bad thing. I included his Google Talk video in an earlier post on choosing a Christmas Tree
When I think about choice and content, the geek in my laughs about ‘DiVISION BY ZERO’ errors. When you slice our attention so thin, we end up with zero attention. As a culture are close to this point, yet the sense I get is we don’t know we’re in trouble. So how have we changed the way we communicate to accommodate this new reality?
It should be no surprise that there is a lot of great content on the subject of choice. Here are some fantastic videos focused on choice. They each add a unique perspective. Perhaps one of them will speak to you and get you thinking more about choice. They speak to me in the context of HuStream’s methodology for Conversational Video. I’d argue these methodologies are highly relevant for your business. I talked about framing in my “FCUK: Fashion Your Vision Around Your Tiger” post. All products and services compete for our attention. You’d better get used to it. To some extent Time is the new Tiger.
- Sheena Iyengar: The Art of Choosing
It’s important to understanding how people decide. Until I came across Sheena’s talk I hadn’t thought about how choice varies by culture. We live in in a diverse world. I now know choice varies massively by culture. Who is your audience? Your target persona? Do they make choices differently? Are you responding to that?
- Richard H. Thaler: Nudge – Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
Nudge is about how to help people make the right choice and a lot of that comes from pre-loading the correct defaults. Thaler and Sunstein demonstrate how thoughtful ‘choice architecture’ can be established to nudge us in beneficial directions without restricting freedom of choice.
- Jonah Lehrer: How We Decide
Lehrer explores neuroscience as it helps us make the best decisions. As scientists break open the mind’s black box with the latest tools of neuroscience, they re-discovering that this is not how the mind works. Our best decisions are a finely tuned blend of both feeling and reason and the precise mix depends on the situation. The trick is to determine when to use the different parts of the brain, and to do this, we need to think harder (and smarter) about how we think.