We need Curation.

Curation of choice

Something I’ve been following for years in several retail sectors is the ability to walk the line with your choices being curated and the necessary belief in a freedom to choose.

Unlike others who apostolate the belief of, give the customer a wide range of choice, my personal proposition is curation that is disguised as choice

I’m not trying to trick you but I am trying to make you believe that I understand you. If I can give you just enough choice to still that threat of removing my freedom of choice, I can make us both happy.

Let’s look at a real-life example. Take McDonald’s.  As a family, we generally stop for McD’s once a month. They had made a business out of curation. The selections were pretty straight forward and even the variety within the order were pretty much non-existent. If you didn’t want ketchup on your burger, or that pickle…well you were pretty much out of luck. We accepted that as we knew our orders would be consistent and fast. No confusion, no fuss and less wait. Now of course I’m making some assumptions on their business model but I’m only looking at it from my curation eyes. So back to the order. I drive up to the menu board now and I’m inundated with choice. I’ve got literally 8 ways to get a piece of chicken in bread. And I can personalize any burger of my choice. Plus, my breakfast sausage’n egger is an all-day thing. (Which I personally liked as missing it at 11:02am was always disappointing.) The menu board is enormous. I’m all for holiday specials and general seasonal delights but they’ve gone to the deep end of choice. With this new direction, the biggest disadvantage is getting my order wrong. Which, since the new, give them more choice direction world has been thrust on us, has given me way more wrongs orders than right. We have to stop and double check our bag every time now. Even to the point of opening every box and wrapper to see what we have. More often than not we just take the pickle off my daughter’s burger and resolve it efficiently.

In their efforts to feel they have to accommodate the choice they left curation in the dust and offered up confusion and disappointment. Again, now please McD’s take this with a grain of salt as I have no idea what’s in your heads. I just use this as an example of when my wife says, “Why can’t they just get back to their old reliable menu?” The curated one. Of course, once Pandora’s Box is open, well you know the story.

So, I’ve dragged fastfood through the mud. We can also direct our attention to clothing and travel if we wish. Although both of these industries seem to be getting smarter algorithms that can seemingly offer me anything I think I want yet curated based on my past behavior or my input of personal choice. The Travel industry is doing the best job of that. Once my personal choice is defined it can readily choose my plane seat, my hotel preferences and even some destinations. And their Ai/algorithms are improving leaps and bounds every day. Although when we recently went to Hawaii, Disney did a pretty good job with curation through their resort. Not a lot of choice within the Hotels but enough to make two families happy. They got it.

My next task would be liquor. Do we really need one brand with five different flavours all the time? I’ll have a premium whiskey with a mainstream bar brand, with two premium editions of that and now available in honey, apple, vanilla, and maple. Really? Brand extension is great but at what cost? Curation is important and if the Brands don’t start doing it the retailers will. Because the consumer is faced with too much choice at any one time.

Choice is a gift that we’ve been given. But at what cost? I say let the curation begin. Give me your best and let me feel like you know I’m going to be happy with that choice. If we don’t then others will start to make that for us. Stocking only your apple whiskey and not your best brands is letting someone else curate you. And that’s the last thing you want.

Oh, and don’t get me started on toothpaste.