What Drives Perceived Variety
What Drives Perceived Variety
When a shopper looks at an assortment and thinks, “There’s not much to choose from,” it’s easy to assume the problem is simple.
Not enough products.
That assumption drives a lot of decisions. Add more SKUs. Expand the line. Fill the shelf. Increase the catalog.
And sometimes, that works. But often, it doesn’t change perception nearly as much as expected.
That disconnect is what Victor D. Mejía examines in “Assortment Management Strategies That People See: Insights from a Meta-Analysis of Experimental Research on Perceived Assortment Variety.” Drawing on dozens of experimental studies, he looks at what actually makes an assortment feel varied to customers.
A key insight is that variety isn’t a single idea. It has two parts: how many items people believe they have and how different those options feel.
These perceptions—numerosity and diversity—don’t move together.
Adding items increases the sense that there are more options. But that effect weakens as assortments grow. The jump from five to ten is easy to see. The jump from 150 to 160 is not.
Across the research, this pattern is consistent. Assortments get larger, but each added item contributes less to perceived variety.
About the Research
Assortment management strategies that people see: Insights from a meta-analysis of experimental research on perceived assortment variety
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS), 2025
Authors:
Victor D. Mejía
Download the paper >
Full Citation:
Mejía, V.D. Assortment management strategies that people see: Insights from a meta-analysis of experimental research on perceived assortment variety. J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. 53, 1230–1259 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-024-01075-0
At a certain point, more stops feeling like more.
If increasing quantity has limits, the next instinct is to increase difference, adding new styles, formats, or attributes. Mejía refers to this as assortment composition.
But here again, perception sets the boundary.
Customers don’t process every feature or compare every option. They rely on what’s visible and easy to interpret. If differences are subtle or hard to read, they go unnoticed and don’t add to perceived variety.
An assortment can become more complex without feeling more varied.
Beyond the products themselves, the research points to another set of levers: how the assortment is structured and presented. Arrangement, visual layout, and information all shape how customers interpret what they see.
These choices create a tradeoff.
Organizing an assortment—grouping items, adding boundaries, clarifying layout—makes it easier to navigate. But it can also reduce perceived diversity.
When products are neatly grouped, customers focus on what they share. Distinct items can start to feel like a smaller set of similar ones: all white shirts, all jeans, all basics.
In smaller assortments, that can make the set feel less varied.
In larger assortments, the effect shifts.
Here, the challenge is complexity. Without structure, customers struggle to process what’s available at all. Organization becomes essential. It helps customers make sense of the assortment and can support the perception of variety.
The same tactic—grouping, categorizing, refining layout—can either reduce or support perceived variety, depending on scale.
That interaction is one of the most practical takeaways from the research. There isn’t a single lever that consistently increases perceived variety. Size, composition, arrangement, layout, and information all work differently depending on context.
What ties these findings together is simple: perceived variety is shaped by how customers process what they see.
Customers don’t evaluate every item. They form impressions quickly, based on what stands out and how easy the assortment is to interpret.
For brands and retailers, that reframes assortment decisions.
Adding products, increasing differentiation, and reorganizing shelves are often treated as operational choices. But if the goal is to influence perceived variety, they function as design decisions. They determine what customers notice, and how much variety they believe is available.
More inventory can expand an assortment.
But variety lives in how customers make sense of what they see.
From the Authors
What marketing challenge(s) does your article address?
What assortment management strategies (size: changing the number of items, composition: replacing items, arrangement: categorizing items, visual layout: changing visual perceptions and textual information: changing information content) are the most effective to increase consumers’ perception of variety, contingent of number of items comprised in the assortment.
What companies/organizations/industries will benefit from your findings?
Retailers and brands, both offline (shelves) and online (websites). Any company having an assortment of items
How and to what extent may this research benefit these companies or industries?
How to improve assortment perception by consumers, at low or no cost. Depending on the number of items sold by the brand or retailer, what could be done to improve perception of variety: to what extent the items are different from one another, how to group them into categories, how to change the visual perception (e.g., shading of color, etc.)
How can the recommendations from your findings be implemented?
Experiment-like process: changing an assortment (e.g. arranging it in a specific way) and observing how consumers react to it, then changing visual perception, etc.
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