Offering your customer’s more choices is better, right? Maybe not. Harvard Business School professor John Gourville in “Overchoice and Assortment Type: When and Why Variety Backfires” counters the belief that variety is good.

The research paper, co-written by professor Dilip Soman of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, found that sometimes offering too many choices prompts the confused customer to defer a purchase or run to the arms of a competitor with a less cluttered product line.

It’s normal to succumb to competitive pressure to expand your product lines. If your competition comes out with new “flavor”, perhaps you feel you have to keep pace. The end result for many companies is a constant proliferation of offerings, which according to this research, suggests is a bad call. Certain types of variety can actually overwhelm your buyer or make a buyer question whether they are choosing the right item from among that assortment. This can lead to what is known as choice deferral or drives them to another brand that offers few choices.

Does your product variety have a downside?

Is it Time to Prune Your Product Portfolio?

Product adoption rate is potential indicator that you may be experiencing choice deferral. If you have an extensive portfolio and a recently introduced product is seeing slow product traction and adoption, the overwhelming number of choices in your portfolio may be the culprit. Before you consider additional line extensions, consider how well the products vary along a single dimension, such as size, speed, or capacity. This is known as alignable assortment.

Alignable assortment enables buyers to select a product that provides the best fit for their needs. In this research, the authors caution companies about non-alignable assortment, which involves trade-offs across dimensions. When your buyer has to choose among alternatives that provide some features but force them to forego needed/wanted features, you have created non-alignable assortment. What do you do? Help you buyer navigate the variety so they make the right selection for their use.

When your customers are demonstrating choice deferral, it’s time to either reduce the number of alternatives, reduce the complexity of the choice, or help your customers through the decision-making process. Before you add that next solution to your roadmap, make sure it is truly adding value to your customer and portfolio. A key part of product marketing and product management is portfolio management. This includes regularly reviewing your portfolio and culling and pruning products. You may need help to dive deep into your data to analyze and understand customer product preference.