Why having more choice of venues isn't a good thing
'The more, the better' is simply not true. Where we used to see this as great service, we now know it actually confuses people. Remember those restaurants with a 5 page menu? How long dit it take you to choose a dish?
When I listened to the podcast: 'De Podcast Psycholoog' (in Dutch) last week, where Professor Frenk van Harreveld, Professor Social Psychology explained this concept proved by an experiment, I instantly saw the parallels with venue finding for meetings & events.
The experiment
The experiment was held at a marmelade shop. On day one, the owner placed a plate with 5 different marmelades in her shop for customers to try and taste them. On day two, she put many more marmelade flavours out for the exact same reason. This second day it started to become much more busy in the shop then the day before and people loved it! Customers tasted more and more and they seemed to be very happy with such great service!?But...
Funny enough, at the end of day two, she counted her revenues, and guess what! Day one turned out te be much more profitable with higher selling numbers. And so a more busy day with more tasting options not only costed her more, it also resulted as less profitable. How come? Because when having fewer options, the choice is much easy.
The experiment was done by Sheena S. Iyengar, who is the S.T. Lee Professor of Business in the Management Department at Columbia Business School and is widely and best known as an expert on choice. Her research focuses on the many facets of decision making, including: why people want choice, what affects how and what we choose, and how we can improve our decision making.
?? Curious to listen to this podcast too? Click the link and enjoy.
Freud
What this tells us is exactly what is going on right now with so many things in our daily lives. There is an overkill on so many things, like clothing, restaurants, cars, banks, and so, for meetings & event venues too. The more there is, the more complicated it gets. This is what Freud told us already over 100 years ago:
'For all daily choices a human being trusts its rationality. But when it gets complicated the answer comes from our subconsciousness'.?
Now I'm not saying that choosing a marmelade flavour is complicated, but when having too many options, even choosing the right flavour of marmelade is getting complicated. And what you see is that people won't take choices at all and just walk away.
I have that too when I shop online for let's say new sneakers. The never ending webshop pages, even after filtering, make me not buy at all. I get frustrated and eventually I close my laptop and start doing something else.
A needle in a haystack
Now back to venue finding for meetings & events. When you as an organiser are looking for a great venue, you either (1) start Googling, (2) call an agency or (3) search on one of the many online platforms. Off you go! You'll end up in an opaque process where you never know where you'll end up with.?
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By using all these different channels, there is two very important and crucial things. (1) You have no clue if those venues you select have the availability on your preferred date(s) and (2) if these venues fit your budget. As said before, you're looking for a needle in a haystack.
A venue's risk
Something important for an organiser to understand is that venues pay a tremendous amount of time and money into updating venue finding profiles, doing sales, visiting trade shows, creating websites with loads of landing pages, paying high commissions to agencies, etc. All with 0,0% of guarantee on winning business. A venue is just left to luck. Let's be honest.
A small boutique venue with a small team and small (sales & marketing) budget, will never win from the giant brands out there. But what if this small beautiful venue is the perfect one for your event? Chances are less then 5% that you'll actually find it.
For the option on that online platform where you as an organiser can target ALL 4 and 5 star hotels all at the same time, and it turns out that there are, let's say 50 hotels, you are giving them a 1:50 chance to win your business. Which also means that there are 49 hotels creating tailored offeres, all for nothing.?Knowing that in fact one of the top 3 pains an experiences with venue finding is, yes I'n not kidding you, long response times. So when you think of the example just given you can conclude that these response times are (partially) created by organisers themselves.
The solution
Easy. Give less choice, proved when referring to the experiment. But that's only possible when the options are of good quality for you as an organiser. For you specifically. Which means, the channel that you are going to use for venue finding needs to know what kind of "marmelade" you like. What kind of texture, color, jar size and packaging you want. And even what allergies you have and what kind of budget you want to spend. Only then the choice will be the right choice. And, as Freud says, with difficult decision making, a person needs to trust its subconsciousness. And this is exactly the goal of Wice.?Delivering better matching venues to organisers and better pre-qualified leads or requests to venues. So it makes it easy and successful for an organiser to choose the right venue.
With Wice we are building a digital marketplace for venue finding. Your event request will be automatically matched with the right venue. All based on data. With the right personal input, by asking you the right questions, we pre-qualify your choice options. Only the right few venues will receive your request, with only 'yes' as their response in your inbox.
Let's get it together
Are you curious to find out more about Wice and why we do what we do? Get in touch!
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