The Paradox of Choice: Is Less Always Better?

You might be familiar with the famous "jam study," which suggested that offering fewer choices leads to more sales. However, in the world of horticulture, the brain works differently.

Imagine walking through a garden center and spotting two tables of identical houseplants (a "single-genus" display). Table A is overflowing with twenty-four plants, while Table B is nearly empty with only six. At a regular price, you are far more likely to choose from the full table. Research by Li et al. (2025) using eye-tracking technology with participant surveys indicates that at a regular price, purchase intention increases as the display size and complexity grow. Participants in the study immediately associated the fuller table with a higher standard of quality.

However, this dynamic shifts completely the moment a discount sign appears. In that case, the size of the display stops mattering to the brain; the likelihood to buy remains stable whether there are six or twenty-four plants on the table.

Imagine this: You’re scrolling through travel photos online. A bright coastal landscape catches your eye. You pause for a moment, zoom in, and look again. But when it’s time to choose your next trip, you pick somewhere else entirely. This small contradiction happens more often than marketers think.

A recent neuromarketing eye-tracking study from Rùben Pinhal and colleagues explored how people visually engage with destination images.

When ‘More Ads’ Backfire

Picture this. You’re scrolling through your favorite social app. A few posts from friends, a quick meme, then another ad. And another. Soon the entire feed feels like a sales pitch. Even the brand posts you used to enjoy start to feel suspicious.

This reaction isn’t random. A large-scale meta-analysis by Yin and colleagues (2025) found that the more ads a platform displays, the weaker the connection becomes between user engagement and actual sales. When a social media environment feels too commercial, people still interact with content, but they no longer buy.

That’s a problem for marketers. We’ve been trained to celebrate engagement metrics like likes, comments, and shares as signs of success. But the study shows that context matters as much as content. The same post that drives results on one platform can fail completely on another simply because the platform feels overcrowded with advertising.

Remember the 2017 Pepsi "Live for Now" campaign with Kendall Jenner? The model joined a protest march and handed a police officer a can of soda. Suddenly, the tension evaporated. The crowd cheered. World peace had been achieved by a soft drink.

The backlash was instant. It was not just anger. It was something stickier. Internet users called it a "giant cringe festival". Mentions of Pepsi on social media spiked by over 21,000%. People could not stop talking about it.

As a marketer, you look at that disaster and you shudder. You assume that negative word-of-mouth destroys brands. But new research suggests something more complex is happening in the consumer’s brain.

Cringe is not just an emotion. It is a social signal. Your customers are using your failures to boost their own egos.

Finding a marketing goldmine in unexpected situations

Do you take negative feedback with a pinch of salt, or do you react with fervor even at the risk of losing goodwill and customers’ business? Most brands will find themselves the subject of questionable public scrutiny at some point or another, with unfiltered social media channels fuelling unwarranted insults. Common responses include denying the accusations, ignoring them completely, or accommodating to the situation, even apologizing for no real cause.