A recent trend in our industry that I’m quite suspicious of has been the vast proliferation of new brands, sub-brands and soft brands. Starting my career off at Procter & Gamble, effective branding is in my DNA, and it makes my blood boil to see these events unfold, as they will certainly have a dilutive effect on customer awareness.

It seems as though the solution nowadays to any brand problem is to simply make a new brand. How can we in all honesty believe this to be the best option for every situation? Fuming with anger, I switch on the satellite radio and on comes the perfect song for this moment – “One Love” by Bob Marley. I doubt this 1977 reggae legend had the hospitality industry in mind when he wrote this classic, even if it makes for the perfect title to this diatribe.

While I acknowledge that only the big corporate bigwigs have any real say in what direction to take a brand, it’s nonetheless vital that every hotelier have a basic understanding of the underlying principle as to why a multitude of brands hurts us all in the grand scheme of things. After all, you may soon be promoted to bigwig status sometime where you will have an opportunity to shape top-down ventures such as rebranding initiatives.

Yes, there are extenuating circumstances that are contributing to this issue like owners’ gross capitalization or market saturation, but that shouldn’t preclude you from knowing the fundamental rationale behind said problem. And if you are an independent or small chain operator, this forthcoming tenet has immediate applications in hotels from F&B menu design and amenity packages right through to the types of guestrooms you offer and how many promotions you should run at any single time.

It’s called ‘The Paradox of Choice’ and it governs how consumers sift through the noise to find exactly what they want in as little time as possible. When you give customers too many options, it makes the sales process all the more grueling and intimidating, so much so that it can halt the process altogether.

A classic example: when you buy most vehicles, your options for paint colors are limited to two, three, four or sometimes five colors (special, higher priced metallic options excepted). Manufacturers do this even though nowadays with robotic sprayers it would be fairly easy to offer a plethora of options. The fact is that cars cost a lot of money, and dealerships want to reduce any hiccups in the sales process so that potential buyers don’t get cold feet.

Like automobiles, hotel rooms are a big investment for the average person, especially when you also have to factor in other expenses like airfare, car rentals, time off work and food. Because of the stakes involved, hotel purchases are thus a highly emotional purchase, meaning that customers can be easily dissuaded from following through with acquisition all the way to the point where they must provide their credit card information. The more choice you give customers, the more they will look for ways to ‘cut through the noise’ and simplify this decision making process.

In this sense, whenever a brand splits or a new hotel product enters the fold, we are only making ‘streamlined’ services like Airbnb and OTA websites all the more powerful. Think about it: instead of a guest having to peruse the differentiated brand standards of all the major chains and their sub-brands, he or she need only do a citywide query on his or her favorite OTA, and then find a property with decent reviews and an affordable price point. Similarly, for Airbnb one need only know the name of the travel destination and desired price range, then everything else will be populated to meet those criteria.

On a microcosmic level, consider how this paradox of choice applies to your own branded website, your booking engine and what types of rooms you offer. How are you making the process easy for customers to funnel them towards the credit card (booking) input screen? Are promotions and products clearly labeled to immediately infer what guests will receive? For instance, instead of giving fancy names to each room type, why not just call them ‘Gold’, ‘Silver’ and ‘Bronze’? I know, a very crude example, but it nonetheless demonstrates how we should be over-simplifying the sales process to help speed it along.

This paradox of choice is so foundational to how we operate that it can be applied to nearly any operation at your hotel. Is your food menu too long, thereby forcing people to select the safest option or, worse, reducing the number of turns? Does your spa menu list so many treatment options that consumers are deterred from making a purchase in the first place? Are you offering so many different promotions on your website that customers can’t decide which one to buy?

And for all those naysayers, consider Coca-Cola – yes, THE Coca-Cola, one of the largest beverage companies in the world – which around this time last year felt compelled to consolidate and streamline their four main product labels by reducing the text on the can and color-coding each (classic red, light is silver, zero is black, life is green). This change makes it extremely easy for customers to get what they want – all they need to know which of the four colors they want!

If Coca-Cola is factoring in these psychological principles into what products it offers, then why aren’t you? As a happily married man for over 35 years, I can proudly support Bob Marley’s “One Love” philosophy. Real men only have time for one woman in their lives, and all of us only have time to care about a select few brands or product lines. So, do us a favor and limit our options for us so that we can make the right decision instead of no decision at all.

(Article by Larry Mogelonsky, published by HotelsMag on March 25.2016).