Nick Liddell
Nick Liddell

Most ambitious businesses find themselves with the same defining problem: a paradox of choice. For customers, a growing offer may create more possibilities, at the cost of more complex decisions.

This is well researched within the consumer sphere; in fact, a 2024 review in the International Journal of Consumer Studies, drawing on 92 articles spanning 22 years, examined choice overload and the circumstances that can make selecting between options difficult. Its subject raises a practical question for expanding businesses. How easily can customers understand what is available?

For businesses, it comes down to understanding how to grow without adding unnecessary complexity. And this issue expands far beyond the consumer sphere.

A company may need different teams and processes to serve different markets, but its customers approach those offerings with their own needs. Research reviewed in Frontiers in Psychology suggests that how choices are presented, and how readily people can compare them, can influence the difficulty of deciding. This is a universal issue and occurs for both consumers and commercial buyers alike.

For businesses, those findings suggest that making an offering easier to navigate warrants attention alongside expanding it. The review discusses organizing options into groups as one way to ease choice overload.

Nick Liddell, founder of Baron Sauvage, a brand strategy consultancy, helps organizations grow their offer without complicating choice. "Even when a business is complex internally, it can still make its products and services clear and understandable to customers," he explains.

In Liddell's view, the difficulty can emerge gradually as ad hoc decisions are made about how to name and categorise new products and services, without a clear long-term plan. Sales teams may struggle to explain where an offering belongs, while customers may find its relevance unclear. He sees brand architecture, the organization and presentation of a company's offerings, as a way to address that disconnect.

Using the organization's brand as a lens for decision-making is a vital tool, Liddell believes. "A business can be clear about what it sells, who it sells to, and how it organizes its offering, regardless of how complex the work behind it may be," he notes. That involves connecting what a company stands for with the products it emphasizes.

His approach reflects a career that, he notes, began in branding in 1999 and included brand valuation at Interbrand. As the author of The Brand Architecture Book, Liddell continues to place commercial priorities early in the process. "I start by looking at where value is created and where growth comes from," he explains.

He draws on the Pareto principle, or 80/20 rule, to explain a pattern he has observed in portfolios, where a relatively small portion of an offering accounts for much of its value. Liddell uses that perspective to identify priorities within a particular business. He considers which products express its purpose and how their roles could become clearer.

A pub menu illustrates his reasoning. Liddell suggests that a dish presented as a starter might also appeal to someone stopping for a drink. Grouping suitable dishes as snacks or sharing plates could help customers recognize those possibilities. In his view, reconsidering the categories creates another way to understand food already available.

Clear definitions come before names and visual presentation in that process. "Once we understand what we are selling, we can define the categories and organize them so people can navigate the offering more clearly," Liddell explains. He applies that reasoning to terms such as products, services, platforms, and suites, which he believes need distinct definitions.

For Liddell, growth brings a continuing responsibility to make a business's offerings understandable. Each new product or service should have a clear purpose, a defined audience, and a recognizable place within the brand. He believes a company can become more complex behind the scenes while keeping the customer's decision straightforward. The ambition is to give people more possibilities without leaving them with more confusion.