Kitcatt Nohr Digitas

Go into a coffee shop and ask the baseball capped teenager behind the counter for a coffee. Not so easy.

Even this staple product now comes in more than 75 different sizes, flavours and temperatures. What exactly is an extra-hot, skinny, double, decaf, vanilla, soya macchiato topped with cinnamon?

And it's not just coffee. Have you tried buying a mobile phone recently? Or a car?

As a society we fetishise consumer choice. And as an industry we're dedicated to promoting it. So, what's the problem? Clients protect market share by offering lots of varieties of their product, and suppliers make money by creating and analysing the associated campaigns.

There are two problems here. One is identified in a recent book entitled The Paradox of Choice. If consumers have too little choice they're deprived to the point of depression. If they have too many choices, they feel saturated to the point of depression. And not just because they're overwhelmed by a seemingly endless variety of products. But because of a range of other psychological drivers such as regret, raised expectations and inadequacy (all of which we exploit as marketers to stimulate demand).

There's also a navigation problem. As marketers we need to help customers make sense of abundant choice so that they can choose our products. A recent study showed that an inverse relationship exists between choice of pensions and worker participation in pension schemes - too much choice leads to inaction.

Given these two problems, what can we do to help consumers navigate their way through the thicket of offers to our products? We can try to position our brands as navigational tools (like price comparison sites or search engines), or one stop shops (like Tesco).

Unfortunately neither of these two strategies is available to most marketers. We can deploy the tools of brand strategy, particularly brand positioning, as shortcuts to decision making. We can also devise smarter product propositions - which provide clearer and simpler choices to consumers.

As direct marketers we also have at our disposal a powerful armoury including targeting (demographic, behavioural, psychographic) and filtering (such as Amazon-style collaborative filtering) to help simplify customer choice.

The DM industry has a bad rep when it comes to wastage. But when it comes to the problem of consumer choice - we should be able to come up with some of the answers too. It's time to show what we can do.

This column originally appeared in Marketing Direct.