What do shelter cats and jars of jam have in common? A simple marketing trick can help get more of them taken home.
At the 2014 NAVC Veterinary Conference in Orlando, Fla., Margaret Slater, DVM, PhD, told the audience attending the shelter medicine track that there is such a thing as too many cats — at least on the adoption floor. This is due, she said, to a sort of option-overload that causes people to become overwhelmed instead of making a decision.
Dr. Slater shared a fairly well-known study in which a gourmet shop compared sales when six flavors of jam were available to sales when 24 were available. While the display with 24 kinds of jam got more traffic than the display with only six, 30 percent of those who tasted at the six-jam display purchased jam, but only 3 percent of those who tasted at the 24-jam display made a purchase.
What does this have to do with cats? The jam experiment and others like it are examples of what’s known as the “paradox of choice,” where the more choice you have, the less likely you are to actually choose something. The theory does not apply universally and it has its naysayers, so the ASPCA, where Dr. Slater is senior director of epidemiology, decided to see if it applied to cats in an animal shelter.
They tested the theory at the Humane Society of the Pikes Peak Region in Colorado. The shelter kept track of how many people came in to look at the cats, and how many adopted cats in a two-week period.
They then hid around half the cats so adopters couldn’t see them, and did the same.
The outcome? They more than doubled their adoption rate for cats during the second phase.
And of course, as the cats moved out into their new homes, the “hidden” cats were moved right out onto the visible part of the adoption floor. This study and the concept it examined, Dr. Slater stressed, are not about reducing the number of cats overall in the shelter, simply how many are visible to adopters at any given time.
She suggested that shelters try to phase cats in and out of the visible adoption areas of the shelter to avoid “option overload,” and keep track of how that impacts adoptions.
One final note: Cats and jam might have this one thing in common, but don’t smear the kitties with peanut butter!