An article about consumer choice in the Globe and Mail’s Adhocracy column caught my attention the other day.

The article focuses on a new book called The Art of Choosing.  Author Sheena Iyengar, a professor at Columbia Business School, asks why we make the choices we do, when it comes to making a purchase. Is it science or just the luck of the draw?

In the article, Iyengar offers plenty of support for the theory that although we might think we make  well-considered choices, we really don’t. As an example, she points to the 2000 U.S. federal election. Ms Iyengar states that thousands of Florida voters cast their ballots for George W. Bush simply because his name was at the top of the ballot.

 We can’t get no satisfaction.

Part of our problem is the barrier of too much. Without question, consumers have more choices in the marketplace than ever before. In her book, Iyengar notes that “while the average U.S. grocery store offered 3,700 products in 1957, it now offers about 45,000. Meanwhile, the number of consumer goods available in the United States jumped from about 500,000 in 1994 to almost 700,000 by 2003. Yet research shows that consumers are perhaps more restless and certainly less satisfied than they’ve ever been.”

Far from creating more personal freedom, one of Ms. Iyengar’s studies suggests that too much choice might instead caise a kind of “consumer paralysis.” But we’re in complete control of our wallets, right? Maybe not.   

Iyengar finds “compelling evidence that people may not really know what they want, or even why they want what they say they want. (This alone has the potential not just to throw marketing research into a spin, but also the very basis of economics, which seeks to study how people maximize their utility.)”

So what does this have to do with agri-marketing? Everything, because whether you’re in the market for a soft drink or a post-emergent herbicide, you have to make a choice.

How do you decide which products to choose? How do marketers influence those choices? 

For more on the subject, you can watch a one-on-one interview with Sheena Iyengar and Globe and Mail writer Simon Houpt. And whether you watch it or not, you’ve made a choice.

 Ron Wall is a writer at AdFarm. He believes in free will, as it applies to online shopping.