Sixteen years ago, researchers Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper published a paper now known as “The Jam Study.” They found that consumers were ten times more likely to purchase jam when presented with 6 jams to taste versus 24 of them. The conclusion? The more choices we have, the more psychological effort we need to put into making the right choice.
That study is a fun glimpse into the science of decision-making. Life is full of choices, and never is that more true than during a hotel stay. And while most executives in our industry pay attention to what choices our guests make—what rooms are being selected, what packages are most popular, and so on—far fewer leaders really delve into complex motivations behind those decisions. But that’s a mistake.
Say you have two guests: Alice, a young, able-bodied woman, and Bob, a 95-year-old man who uses a wheelchair to get around. Both Alice and Bob choose rooms on the first floor. Though these choices might seem the same, there’s a significant difference: Bob’s limited mobility meant he had to choose a first-floor bedroom, while Alice could have taken any room, including one with a much higher view—so we can learn a lot more from her decision to opt for the ground floor.
My company, OfferCraft, specializes in the art and science of presenting options. The end goal when you examine choices, of course, is to make every guest and employee interaction with the brand more enjoyable, and in the process, learn much more about what your audience really wants.
It is important to start by looking at all the details to understand the context behind customer decisions. There’s an incredibly rich world of insights that can be gleaned from observing not only what your guests choose, but how and why they make those decisions.
Once you start thinking of presenting choices this way, it changes how you see everything. Thinking about the “how” and “why” behind every decision means you start viewing each choice as a kind of personality test, giving you a tiny but revealing window into the thoughts and personalities of your customers and staff.
For example, let’s say you notice a certain business guest always chooses the free gym access amenity over the free drink amenity. At first blush, you might think that this guest likes the gym, so you might start peppering her with other fitness-related promotions. And maybe that’s right.
But there are so many other things that could be going on here. What if, when digging deeper, you notice that even though she always chooses gym access, she never uses it? Could it be that when she travels on business she is concerned that it would be frowned upon by her supervisor if she chose the drink? Could it be that she is just too tired to use the gym when she travels for work? Or maybe she just chooses it because all her colleagues do when they check in? Should we offer her a different amenity, like free WiFi instead? Or, since WiFi is covered by her work anyway, could we more effectively lock in her loyalty by giving her something she can’t expense, like a free movie download when she checks in?
Sure, you could always just circulate a survey to ask her directly. Only three problems there: first, these can be expensive to run; second, response rates often hover in the low single digits; and third, what people say they want in a survey is often very different from what they actually want and do in real life. Analyzing actual decisions reveals real-world actions, not just hypothetical opinions.
Build a strategy around how you present options to guests, and how you analyze their decisions. You’ll learn more and create happier, more loyal patrons. Just don’t ask them to choose from 24 different jams.
About the Author
Aron Ezra is the CEO of OfferCraft, a gamification company that makes blends software and science to make day-to-day incentives more fun, and thus more effective.
