Imagine you’re out with a group of friends and trying to decide where to eat dinner. If you’re craving pasta, you can take one of two general approaches to getting your way: you can try to build low-level support among a larger number of people (“Spaghetti could be nice, right?”) or you can work to get a smaller number of die-hards on Team “Italian Food or Bust.” Which tack would you take to convince the group?

If you’re like most people, you probably instinctively favor the first strategy, which emphasizes consensus, over the second, which relies on extremity. But is that always the right strategy? This week we’ll discuss. Plus: does a direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketing strategy have a ceiling?

Attracted to consensus

New research led by Derek Rucker, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School, finds that people have a remarkably strong preference for consensus-based persuasion strategies.

“Time and time again, people tend to gravitate toward getting more people on their side at the cost of having people who are true advocates,” Rucker says in Kellogg Insight.

In the research, study participants were told they were giving a speech in hopes of persuading a group of ten people to support an idea. Their goal, the researchers explained, was to convince a simple majority of the group. Support could range from maximally positive to somewhat positive; similarly, dissent could range from maximally negative to somewhat negative.

Next, participants were shown diagrams depicting two different approaches to winning the group’s support and asked to pick between them. Under Strategy A—a consensus strategy—everyone in the group would support the idea, with eight people feeling somewhat positive and two feeling very positive. With Strategy B—an extremity strategy—only six of ten group members would support the idea, but five of them would feel very positive.

Importantly, both strategies accomplished the stated goal of convincing a majority, just in different ways. As such, participants could not make a wrong choice when it came to winning this game. Despite the choice being seemingly irrelevant, the consensus strategy was the most popular by a landslide—of the 102 participants in the experiment, 88 (or 86 percent) chose Strategy A.

“We learned people exhibited an overwhelming preference for consensus,” Rucker says.

In subsequent studies, the research team found that participants still opted for a consensus strategy even when an extremity strategy was objectively superior. Seeking consensus, Rucker says, can be an “effective strategy and even an objectively correct strategy in some cases, but the issue is we can become so attached to it that we misapply it.”

You can read here more about this bias toward finding consensus—and how we can stop being so susceptible to it.

DTC has a ceiling

Though about 85 percent of all goods and services in the U.S. are still sold through brick-and-mortar stores, e-commerce has been steadily biting into that dominance. To help make sense of the rapidly changing e-commerce landscape, Kellogg Insight interviewed Jim Lecinski, a clinical associate professor of marketing at the Kellogg School and a former Google vice president of consumer solutions.

One highlight from that conversation was the insight that continued growth for direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands often requires going into stores. As Lecinski tells Insight:

“DTC brands use what we call a uni-channel route to market—there’s only one way to purchase. Warby Parker started out this way. If you wanted to buy their glasses, you either went to their website or opened their app. This channel strategy serves certain buyers, but not all. Some customers want to get advice, expertise, and service when they try on a product.

So the DTC route only appeals to a certain set of buyers and, by default, means those brands can only scale to a certain size. Even successful uni-channel DTC brands struggle to grow much beyond around $300 million. This is because they’ve soaked up all the buyers whose service demands are met through that uni-channel.

[If you’re looking to grow,] one option is you expand to multichannel, where you sell online and in stores, whether that’s your own stores or in places like Walmart or Macy’s. Warby Parker did this. It sells through more than 200 retail stores as well as online. It now has $600 million in sales—half of that is DTC, while half is brick-and-mortar. For any DTC brand, every expansion option into stores is margin-degrading. But they have no choice if they want to keep growing.”

So entering stores is one way around the DTC ceiling. The other, even more ambitious option, is to go omni-channel by delivering a seamless experience across a range of channels. But an omni-channel strategy is incredibly difficult to execute, says Lecinski, and not many brands are capable of pulling it off.

The problem is that customers enter their ecosystem in a lot of different ways. They might sign up for a newsletter, attend an event, fill out a warranty card. Companies need to know it’s you, however you enter. ... It’s easier if you’re H&R Block, with your own stores and software. But what if you’re Nike, and you’re selling at Dick’s or Footlocker in addition to your own channels?

Read the full interview about e-commerce trends with Lecinski here.