Sheena Iyengar Quotes

When you give people too many choices it makes them hesitate and not buy stuff.

I mean it wasn't that they sat around thinking oh gosh I needed more choices in my grocery stores the way I had come to think about it as an American growing up.

In fact, even in that store Draeger's they had 348 different kinds of jam actually in the jam aisle. And what we found over about, say, 10 years of research is that as the number of choices actually increase people are less likely to make a choice and sometimes they do this even when it's really bad for them.

About 60% of the people stopped when we had 24 jams on display and then at the times when we had 6 different flavors of jam out on display only 40% of the people actually stopped, so more people were clearly attracted to the larger varieties of options, but then when it came down to buying, so the second thing we looked at is in what case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam. What we found was that of the people who stopped when there were 24 different flavors of jam out on display only 3% of them actually bought a jar of jam whereas of the people who stopped when there were 6 different flavors of jam 30% of them actually bought a jar of jam.

What we found was that of the people who stopped when there were 24 different flavors of jam out on display only 3% of them actually bought a jar of jam whereas of the people who stopped when there were 6 different flavors of jam 30% of them actually bought a jar of jam.

I mean we know that some choice makes you better off than no choice. Now do we get better off if we go from a lot of choice versus a few choices? And there I think the answer is much, much, much more complicated.

We are a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice.

I am a compulsive and concise shopper.

Too many choices can overwhelm us and cause us to not choose at all. For businesses, this means that if they offer us too many choices, we may not buy anything.

When people have too many choices, they make bad choices.

I think we are living in a time where the consumer has lots of choices, whether it's coffee, newspapers or whatever it is. And there is parity in the market place, and as a result of that, the consumer is beginning to make decisions, not just on what things cost and the convenience of it.

I'm an impulse buyer. I don't really go out with a list.

I'm not an impulse shopper. I will wait three days after I see something. Am I still thinking about it? Then I'll get it.

When my boys were little, I'd throw so many toys at them, but they didn't want to play with any. Then I'd give them a truck, and they would play for hours. I believe the same thing applies to a consumer - edit their choices, and they will be more intrigued.

The first thing we looked at, in what case were people more likely to be attracted to the jar or jam, so in which case are people more likely to stop when they saw the display of jams and what we found was that more people stopped when there were 24 jams.

People were actually 6 times more likely to buy a jar of jam if they had encountered 6 than if they encountered 24, so what we learned from this study was that while people were more attracted to having more options, that's what sort of got them in the door or got them to think about jam, when it came to choosing time they were actually less likely to make a choice if they had more to choose from than if they had fewer to choose from.

We either put out 6 different flavors of jam or 24 different flavors of jam and we looked at 2 things. First, in what case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam?

There is a different attitude about, you know, how much differentiation there needs to be between our options and how many choices do I need to have in order to make a choice.

If you do something really cognitively demanding, like buying furniture, it turns out buying furniture is one of the most difficult things we do. Go into a furniture store and look at a sofa.

I mean we cant even rock them shoes if it dont got a comma on the price tag ya know. I mean.. I mean but then again who looks at the price tag ya know?

I don't believe in asking people to spend $15 on something they've never heard before. That's just unreasonable.

Consumers do not buy products. They buy product benefits.

The idea of choice is easily debased if one forgets that the aim is to have chosen successfully, not to be endlessly choosing.

A man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales resistance.

The main purpose of advertising is to undermine markets. If you go to graduate school and you take a course in economics, you learn that markets are systems in which informed consumers make rational choices. That's what's so wonderful about it. But that's the last thing that the state corporate system wants. It is spending huge sums to prevent that.