Too Much?

With the amount of information at their fingertips, had people begun to be more indecisive?

It seems that the more information is given to a person, the more confused one tends to be. A simple illustration: menus in restaurants are becoming thicker and thicker. It is standard now for a restaurant to carry 3-4 different kinds of soup, at least 5 appetizers, around 3 salad options, 4-5 dishes EACH for poultry, pork, beef, and seafood, and several options for desserts. And the thicker the menu in a restaurant is, the more difficult it is to choose. How many times have you asked the food server what was recommended, not just because it was hard to decipher which was the specialty, but because it was simply too tiring to scrutinize each item listed there? The same observation may be applied to other decision-making processes, such as choosing a celphone, or a hotel, or ketchup.

A huge amount of information is available to everyone. It is no longer just in law that ignorance is not excused. However, the problem facing everyone now is how to make use of these available information. I always told my marketing students, when I guide them through their market research exercises, that information gathering is the easiest part of the task. Filtering which information is relevant to their cause is the more challenging and important part, and ultimately, how they will make use of these information will make or break their marketing strategy.

Unless people are also equipped with the skill to make use of these information, all these are useless. They may even be detrimental as it encourages a culture of indecisiveness.

Danielle Rieza
2nd Entry