31 Flavors: Cell Phones of Japan

Having already a pretty good sense of what to expect well in advance, I was still surprised by what I found. In Japan, it's not necessarily the features (we're only two years behind them, and catching up slowly), but the sheer variety. This image is not an exaggeration. If marketers worry about consumer fatigue when faced with an overwhelming selection of choices, they haven't been to Japan.

But upon further inspection, this appearance of unlimited choice is actually quite constrained: The variety of which features are offered are limited to certain combination, much in the same way American car manufacturers only offer leather seats with the the "sports option" (which also includes the overpowered stereo and ugly two-tone paint job, neither of which you wanted, but was the only way you could get leather seats).

In addition, the combination of features offered were consistent across manufacturers, making it relatively easy to quickly determine which "category" of features were needed, allowing ample time for figuring out which Pantone color matches your corporate color guide (Pantone 471, in case you were curious about ours).

What this tells me is that we can handle a large array choices, so long as we can focus on them categorically, and that we do better when those are consistent and predictable each time we have to make choices. While I can easily see this blog rambling into a post about cognitive psychology and decision theory, I'll spare the reader of that concern and move onto a few other observations.