Last week, someone pointed me to a clever mind trick that’s worth testing. On Marketingfacts, Bart Schultz wrote about a technique called the Hobson’s +1 Choice Effect. So what is Hobson’s Choice? It’s the choice between taking a single option or leaving it. When you’re buying a product, for example, the choice is simply to buy it or not. Studies suggest that when consumers face lots of options, they often walk away because there’s too much to choose from.
Hobson’s Choice +1:
The hypothesis is that the subconscious, emotional part of the brain often wants your product, while the conscious part makes more rational decisions about whether or not to spend money on it. With just one option, these conscious, rational processes still have plenty of mental energy left to keep those emotional impulses in check.But when you add an extra option (Hobson’s+1 choice), such as ‘buy product X’ or ‘share this on Facebook’, the brain uses both processes to make that decision too. And the conscious, rational part of our brain in particular runs out of mental energy very quickly.
So by getting someone to think consciously and rationally about sharing on Facebook, you wear down their rational thinking a little (of course, almost everyone on an online store’s product page chooses ‘no, don’t share on Facebook’). As a result, there’s less rational resistance when the next decision comes along: buy or don’t buy. The brain’s grip on its ‘greedy’ emotional side has loosened, and your conversion rate goes up.
