Selection Bias

Items for sale in a physical store. Remember physical stores? So cute… (Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash)

If, like me, you do the bulk of your annual shopping between Thanksgiving and Christmas, you are currently grappling with one of the challenges of modern commerce: a seemingly infinite number of choices for any purchase you want to make. In nearly every product or service category, selecting from the myriad options can be overwhelming. I very much relate to Scott Galloway’s observation that most consumers “don’t want more choice, but more confidence in the choices presented.” We need someone or something to curate the infinite number of products, options, and analyses down to a pre-selected set of the “best” stuff. A choice that is manageable. A self-inflicted shopping selection bias.

I’ve been guilty of this many times this holiday season. Instead of “shopping” in the conventional sense, I get lazy and just enter some asinine search into Google, like “top gifts for teenage boys under $100” and end up on some ad-laden, click-baity page that barely loads in my browser because it’s so bogged down with pop-ups, promotions, self-playing videos, and tracking data as to be almost unusable. But without these crutches, we’re overwhelmed by choice. We want someone else to do the work for us. To reassure us that the random hunk of plastic and batteries we’re about to buy for our kids, that will briefly be considered a “toy” before it transforms into “junk” and is sent to a landfill, is, in fact, a “best music gift for kindergartners!”

Of course, there’s a flip side to all this decision-making—namely how manufacturers and their legions of marketers leverage technology to manipulate us into choosing their products. These aren’t bad people. I’ve spent most of my career as a marketer. We have good intentions. There are just too many of us hocking too many products using too many techniques. It’s enough to rob you of your Christmas spirit!

If you shop online, as almost all of us do, you’re subjected to these digital marketing techniques on the daily. Shopping online has metastasized from a convenience into a medieval bazaar. Tell me if this sounds familiar... eager to tick another gift off your list, you enter some desperate search, like “best puffy jackets for women.” Then you wade through pages of “content marketing” that is all search-engine optimized (“SEO” in marketer parlance) as “organic” search results on Google, which, of course, appear below a half dozen paid ads (search engine marketing or “SEM” in marketer-ese). Then, suddenly your Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter news feeds are cluttered with large format “sponsored” updates that are coincidentally similar to your search. You make the mistake of clicking on one of these ads and going to a “landing page” which promises a one-day-only sale or first-time-customer discount. A cookie warning pops up that you have no choice but to accept, an email newsletter subscription window pops up (I’m guilty of this one myself!) with a 15% discount, today only, if you opt into a lifetime of spam. A chat bubble pops up with a virtual, or maybe even human, agent (who can tell anymore?) eager to help you make a choice. Good luck finding that chat agent if you have a customer service issue.

A minuscule sample of the ads I’ve seen this year as a result of my holiday shopping.

If you leave without buying, God help you. Now you have the taint of that brand all over you. I can practically smell your digital tracking from here. Every site you visit, every search you make, every email you read, ads pop up like a zombie apocalypse. Once you’ve been tagged as a shopper for puffy jackets, suddenly you face an entire internet full of puffy jackets. The world will not continue until you buy a damn puffy jacket! Some even haunt you long after you’ve bought the puffy jacket, like ghosts of Christmas past. This technique, called “retargeting” or “remarketing” by marketers (or “stalking” by laypeople), uses those cookies that you can’t decline to target ads “personalized” to you. Limiting your options, reinforcing your inclinations, nudging you to buy with discounts, special offers, and limited availability. An onslaught of tracking pixels, 300-character URLs, MRECs and banner ads from something called “AdChoices” that remind you, harass you, berate you until you finally add the product to your cart and check out.

Each item breathlessly promises to be “The best sweatpants you’ll ever own,” or the “The hoodie that renders all other hoodies obsolete,” or “The sneakers everyone is talking about.” (Do people really talk about sneakers?) Superlative claims, 5-star reviews, and social proof designed to reassure you that the purchase decision you’re about to make will be the right one—perhaps even “life changing.” As consumers, we rely on these reassurances to give us confidence in our choices. We can’t possibly evaluate every puffy jacket, every hoody, every pair of sneakers, or every book published. Without the “top 10” lists, “holiday shopping guides,” and “best of” articles, where would we be? We’d be paralyzed by limitless choice.

I realize this complaint of too much choice is a high-class problem—in the grand scheme, a minor nuisance of modern life. In the trade off between privacy and convenience, most of us pick convenience. But here are some some tips if you’re finding the decision-making process of holiday shopping particularly onerous this year.

Identify filters—Finding the “best” of any product category is impossible, because “best” is subjective. It might mean lowest price to one buyer, or highest quality to another. It might mean a preferred color, size, or availability. It might pertain to values or ethical behavior that is important to you—fair trade, vegan, sustainable, or carbon neutral. These “bests” will be different by person, and often differ for each product you purchase. So give thought to those “filters” in your search terms to at least limit your choices to criteria relevant to you as you dive down the rabbit hole.

YouTube’s “Privacy Warning”—which really means “Warning, you can’t watch this without losing your privacy.”

Make fewer, better choices—We each only have so much mental bandwidth to make purchase decisions. So something I’ve tried to do when I find a product I like, is to stop thinking about it. Essentially, put it on decision-making auto-pilot. For everything from toothpaste to tennis shoes, floor wax to dessert toppings, if you’ve found a product that meets your needs, just keep buying it. I’ve found Instacart helpful for this, at least for buying groceries. Rather than standing in the aisle deliberating over 30-cent differences between largely identical products, I just return to “Buy it Again” and only select from items I’ve purchased before (with the “Do not replace” option on). With minimal decision friction, my choices are made, which, in theory, frees up time and attention for me to make more considered choices on new, unfamiliar, or important purchases.

Install ad blockers—There are many tools for reducing your promotional overload, from the best ad blockers (see what I did there) to anonymous search engines like DuckDuckGo that deprive Google of the information it needs to auction your intentions to marketers so they can stalk you on the internet. Unfortunately, these tools can also make much of the internet not work (see YouTube), but at least you can browse and click with less harassment.

And finally, if none of these techniques work, there’s always the most tried-and-true, pull-in-case-of-emergency option of last resort…

BUY LESS SHIT!!!