Today’s shopper has plenty of choices when it comes to the products they buy and where the buy them. Too many choices, really.

While having choice isn’t necessarily a bad thing having too many options can lead to confused, ultimately less happy shoppers. But regardless of whether more choice is always better or not, shoppers must make choices all the time. So how are shoppers accounting for the surreal abundance in choice with a typical supermarket stocking more than 50 varieties of bottled water, 300 breakfast cereals, and having increased in size by more than 20% since 1994?

The answer, many are finding, is that shoppers rely on their “emotional brain,” that welter of gut instincts and feelings generated by the unconscious. This is largely because the unconscious is able to handle an inordinate amount of information, digesting the data without getting overwhelmed, which is better suited for the complexity of 21st-century shopping.

Yet, most people (marketers included) still assume that the best way to select a product is to carefully consider each option, selecting the one that best fits the shoppers preferences. The problem with this approach is that human reason is severely limited.

When deliberating in the supermarket aisle, a shopper can only consciously contemplate about four bits of information at any given moment. So rationality is quickly overwhelmed, short-circuited by the bounty on display.

So how does a brand marketer ensure that their product ends up in the shoppers basket and not sitting alone on the shelf?  The first step is to realize that today’s shopper isn’t so different from their primitive hunting and gathering ancestors; after all we derive many of our subconscience and instinctive mechanisms that we utilize in shopping and making decisions from them.  By realizing that there is a mismatch between the modern retail environment and the stubborn limitations of the mind marketers can better position their products through in-store marketing to stand out by tapping into the “emotional brain” of the shopper.  It’s just a matter of acknowledging that while the shopper wants to be rational he/she can’t cope with the plenitude on display. Luckily, in-store marketing can help bridge the gap by leveraging shopper insights, basic psychology, and  a dash of creativity.