John Timmer over at Ars Technica has a terrific posting about at the cognitive load associated with choosing new products and ways of doing things. The Journal of Consumer Research sound bite isn't exactly easy to read, but the implications of its main concept, which they term "Cognitive lock-in" are huge:

The authors of the study point out that previous research has shown that cognitive lock-in is not just an abstract concern, but one comes with real-world costs: "the costs associated with thinking about and using a particular product decrease as a function of the amount of experience a consumer has with it. Thus, repeated consumption or use of an incumbent product results in a (cognitive) switching cost that increases the probability that a consumer will continue to choose the incumbent over competing alternatives." This suggests that, even if a product isn't especially easy to use, familiarity with it may overcome that drawback as, ultimately, its users don't have to think about their actions in order to get things done anymore.

The authors note that this is borne out by real-world data, as Internet usage statistics show that visit times at commercial web sites decline over time. That decline, in turn, leads to positive results: those which show the biggest decreases in visit times rack up the most sales. The paper contends, however, that these sorts of effects are actually separate from any affection or trust, or even objective measures of product superiority. The authors suggest that a user's ability to detect a product's actual ease-of-use is quite limited, and familiarity is ultimately in control of cognitive lock-in.

Said another way, actually considering another unfamiliar product is hard mental work compared with sticking with what you know, even if what you know isn't as easy to use as the alternative. In short, we humans just don't like to learn new interfaces and ways of doing things unless there's a huge payoff.

This has big implications for tech marketers. We've known for ages that the "best" product -- i.e., the one that has the most benefits for the least cost -- rarely wins in actual markets. But this study says even more than that: it says that the act of considering another product is itself a high-cost effort in terms of cognitive load. The guys at IBM in the 1980s had it right -- an IBM competitor had to offer at least 10 times better performance/price ratio for it to get any traction in the market. And in a market where we are flooded with choices and messages every day, consumers unconsciously value cognitive load more than to money. That's why consumers are loyal to brands like Coca Cola when confronted with a supermarket aisle full of different soft drinks -- even if it is more expensive and doesn't taste any better than the store brand.

But this study says something else as well that we've promoted before: giving consumers choices actually increases their cognitive work and makes an offering less likely to succeed. We said that back in 2004 in our essay, The Tyranny Of Too Much, and it is even more true today. That's why products like Apple's iPods and coming iPhone are so attractive -- the very lack of choices in buying and using them makes users appreciate them more. And of course, when users get used to that type of low cognitive load experience, it makes them even less likely to change. If you ever wanted to know people became so-called "Apple faithful", this study certainly has some data to back it up.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Brain science, Cognitive lock-in, IBM, Psychology, brand loyalty