We're now at the final module of this course, module number seven, decision making. You made it this far, just stick with me a little bit longer. And I think you'll be happy you did. In the course, so far, we've talked an awful lot about the factors that influence which of your messages, your customers are going to pay attention to, how they're going to interpret those messages, and how important those messages are to their daily lives. So in this module, we're going to focus on the decision making process. In other words, some of the factors that influence how your customers now put together whatever information they've chosen to assemble in their minds to come up with a final decision.

So let's jump right in and I want to emphasize here that every purchase decision your customer makes is a response to a problem. Obviously, those problems vary quite a bit in terms of how difficult they are and how difficult it is to find a solution. So some of them are literally no brainers in that we come up with a solution very quickly and pretty much without conscious thought. Others really that's not the case at all. So we know that problems vary in complexity and importance. Let's look at a vintage commercial that takes a humorous look at the decision making process.

And I have DirecTV and I'm poor decision making with DirecTV can just restart it from the beginning. I'm going to miss my show this cheating With DirecTV I just ate this tuna sandwich I found an upgrade to DirecTV. So that ad campaign, which has been very popular in recent years, is a nice illustration of the consequences of making good decisions versus bad decisions. In many cases, consumers really just make a snap judgment. And we talked about this in the last module on attitudes, especially for fairly low involvement categories. there's just not a lot of conscious thought that goes into many of these choices.

But as I noted in that module, that makes it even more important to focus on a lot of the environmental factors that cause consumers to choose one option over another such as The color of packaging or literally the placement of the package on a store shelf. At the other extreme, of course, we all make decisions in our lives that are extremely important and that carry a high degree of risk. So for example, looking for a new house or buying a new computer, perhaps buying a new car or even a new suit, these are all much more complex decisions, where we're much more likely to weigh a lot of information, do a lot of outside research and really sweat the details. We talked much earlier in this course about the difference between functional and hedonic needs. Hopefully you remember that far back. And we can make a similar distinction when it comes to decision making.

So we can talk about rational decisions in other words where we are kind have like computers and that we carefully look for the information that we need. We evaluate the merits of the information. And we give a lot of thought to this and make what we hope is a very carefully measured decision. On the other hand, we've also seen that many of our responses are very emotional. We kind of shoot first and ask questions later. So we have a lot of product decisions that don't require careful thought and rather are made on the basis of whether something makes us angry or sad or happy.

And indeed, some of the decisions we make are actually quite irrational. In that they may be bad for us, they may not be the optimal decisions they they may actually hurt us in the long run. A good example of this is research on What has been called purchase momentum. And this refers to the tendency for people to buy more after they have started to make purchases. So rather than satisfying needs and being happy with those, we sometimes find that people get whipped into kind of a buying frenzy where their initial decisions, instead motivate them to go back into the marketplace and do even more damage there. One of the biggest problems that we face, ironically, in the Western world, in particular, is that we suffer not from too few choices, but from too many choices.

So our brains, perhaps even when they're trying to be rational, are overwhelmed by the profusion of options that are out there. And the availability of all these choices, actually results in making poor decisions. So consumer researchers talk about the phenomenon of hyper choice. Where the availability of too many options in a purchase environment actually causes consumers to short circuit the process, become overwhelmed and often make choices that are not in their best interests. Let's look at another commercial. You may remember from back in the day, that was a nice illustration of the importance we attach to personal choice, even when it makes our decision making process too complicated refers to upper juniors and four co The color and we'll have to wait long if you may notice that you have the extra catching.

Sure. So although Burger King famously promised that we could all have it our way, this can actually be kind of a self defeating strategy. Because when everything comes our way and we have so many different options, we just don't know what to make of it. A study that was conducted in a grocery store nicely illustrates some of the consequences of having too many choices. In this study, shoppers tried sample of flavored fruit jams in two different conditions. In the limited choice condition, they got to pick from six flavors of the fruit spreads.

In the extensive choice condition, the group saw 24 flavors. 30% of consumers in the limited choice group actually bought a jar of jam as a result. But only 3% of those in the extensive choice group did. So think carefully. To what problems do you offer a solution. It's not always a good idea to overwhelm your customers with too many solutions, especially to problems they don't have or at least don't think that they have when Researchers look at the amount of effort we put into solving these problems.

And considering all the different choices that are available, they find that we often undergo what they call constructive processing. This means that we evaluate the effort that we'll need to make a particular choice, and then tailor the amount of cognitive effort we expend to get the job done. When we think the task requires a well thought out rational approach, we'll invest the brainpower to do it. Otherwise, we look for shortcuts such as just do what I usually do, or perhaps we make gut decisions based on our emotional reactions.