A builder designs a new flyer for the neighbourhood. At the top, in large letters, is the thing he’s genuinely known for: beautiful, watertight loft conversions. Then, because he can also do them, he adds kitchens, bathrooms, painting, tiling, gutter cleaning, fence repairs, “odd jobs” and “free quotes”. By the time the flyer is finished, it lists seventeen services in four colours.
He reasons that more services mean more chances to catch someone’s interest. Surely listing everything can only help?
It’s one of the most natural instincts in business: when in doubt, add. Another benefit, another feature, another testimonial, another service. Each addition feels like it increases the total value on offer. And from the seller’s side of the table, it does.
But customers don’t experience it that way. A striking line of research suggests that adding modest extras to a strong offer can actually make the whole thing seem less impressive. The flyer listing seventeen things may communicate less, and less convincingly, than the one that says a single thing well.
One Like insight: You add up your strengths. Customers average them.
The presenter’s paradox
In 2012, Kimberlee Weaver, Stephen Garcia and Norbert Schwarz published a paper in the Journal of Consumer Research that put this instinct to the test. Across seven studies, they split participants into two roles: “presenters”, who put together an offer, and “evaluators”, who judged it.
In one study, presenters chose between two bundles to offer customers: an iPod Touch with a cover, or the same iPod Touch and cover plus one free music download. Almost everyone, 92% of presenters, chose to include the download. More is better, surely. But the evaluators who saw the bundle with the free song were willing to pay substantially less for it than those who saw the iPod and cover alone.
Another study used hotel advertising. Presenters, imagining they owned a hotel, could promote just its five-star-rated pool, or the five-star pool plus its three-star restaurant. Most, 72%, chose to mention both. Yet people planning a holiday were willing to pay significantly less per night for the hotel when the ad included the perfectly decent restaurant.
As Live Science reported, the researchers called this the presenter’s paradox. The person making the offer adds up its good points, so every extra feels like a bonus. The person receiving it forms an overall impression, which works more like an average. A strong item plus a modest one averages out to something less impressive than the strong item alone.
Highlight: Presenters add up the good points. Evaluators average them.
Why weaker points drag down stronger ones
The researchers’ explanation is that presenters and evaluators look at an offer differently. When you build an offer, you think about it piece by piece: this is good, and this is good too. When someone else judges it, they tend to take it in as a whole and form a general impression. In that overall impression, a modest item doesn’t just add a little. It pulls the average down.
For small businesses, this applies far beyond product bundles. A home page that leads with your best work and then lists twelve lesser services. A proposal that adds three “nice to have” extras to a strong core offer. A testimonial section where five glowing reviews sit beside three lukewarm ones. A pitch with one powerful reason to choose you and six weaker ones. In each case, the additions may be quietly diluting the thing that should win the customer over.
It’s worth being honest about the limits of the research. When the conversion-research company CXL later tested the iPod example with a larger online sample, it found the same direction of effect, but the difference was small and not statistically significant, and one product it tested showed the opposite. The averaging effect appears to be real but context-dependent, probably strongest when the added item is clearly weaker than the main one.
[Infographic placement] Adding versus averaging. Two side-by-side scales. Left, labelled How the seller sees it: a large block (“5-star pool”) plus a smaller block (“3-star restaurant”) stacked together, total rising. Right, labelled How the customer sees it: the same two blocks placed side by side with a line drawn across at their average height, lower than the pool block alone. Caption: Weaver, Garcia and Schwarz (2012): evaluators paid less for a hotel when its five-star pool was advertised alongside a three-star restaurant.
Highlight: Every weaker point you add doesn’t just sit beside your best point. It quietly pulls it down.
How to choose your one thing
Weaver’s own advice was straightforward. The remedy, she said, is to “take the perspective of the evaluator” and ask how the whole package will look to someone who averages across it. In practice, that leads to a few useful habits.
Lead with your strongest point, and protect it. Decide what you most want customers to remember, and make sure nothing beside it weakens it. If you’re genuinely excellent at loft conversions, that’s the headline, and it doesn’t need fifteen supporting acts.
Separate rather than bundle. Saying less in one place doesn’t mean hiding your other services. Put them on their own page, in a separate brochure or in conversation once a customer is interested. The aim is to stop modest extras from sitting right next to your best offer.
Cut the “also-rans”. Look at your list of benefits, reasons to choose you or testimonials, and remove anything that’s merely fine. Three strong reasons usually beat seven mixed ones.
Check the gap. The effect seems strongest when an add-on is clearly weaker than the main item. A genuinely valuable extra may well help. A token freebie or a filler service is more likely to hurt.
Highlight: Saying less in one place doesn’t mean offering less. It means protecting what matters most.
What this means for a small business
Try a simple exercise. Write down everything your business currently says about itself on its main marketing piece: every service, benefit, claim and testimonial. Then rate each item honestly from one to five on how impressive it is to a customer. Anything scoring a five is a candidate for the headline. Anything scoring two or three is a candidate for moving somewhere else.
This can feel uncomfortable, especially for owners who do many things well and don’t want to turn away any work. But clarity isn’t the same as narrowness. You can still offer seventeen services. You just don’t need to shout about all of them in the same breath.
A few questions can help:
- If customers remember only one thing about us, what should it be?
- Which of our claims or services are merely “fine” rather than impressive?
- Where are modest extras sitting right beside our strongest offer?
- Would our best testimonials look even better without the average ones next to them?
Which brings us back to the builder and his seventeen-service flyer. He might find that a simpler version, one that leads boldly with loft conversions and shows a single striking photo, brings in more of the work he wants. The kitchens and fences can still find him. But the thing he’s best at gets the chance to make the impression it deserves.
Sources
- Remy Melina, “Gift-Giving Surprise: More Isn’t Always Better”, Live Science, 15 December 2011. Summary of Kimberlee Weaver, Stephen M. Garcia and Norbert Schwarz, “The Presenter’s Paradox”, Journal of Consumer Research 39(3), 2012 (DOI 10.1086/664497). Source of the study figures and the Weaver quote.
- CXL, “Testing the presenter’s paradox: Do people really average, not sum, object values?” (original research), reporting a weaker, non-significant replication.
