Acknowledge Customers’ Willful Ignorance

Your customers can’t handle the truth. Or at least your customers at times find it emotionally challenging to consider the whole truth. One circumstance in which this happens has to do with a shopper’s sense of social consciousness.
     Your customer loves the design of a shirt on your store shelf, but despises the labor practices of manufacturers of some of the products your store carries. So they don’t look at the label before putting the shirt into their shopping cart.
     Your customer instantly realizes the mahogany table now on your showroom floor would look perfect in their dining room, but they could never look themselves in the eye if they thought the mahogany came from an endangered rain forest. So they don’t give it a thought.
     Researchers at Washington State University and University of Texas-Austin called this phenomenon “willful ignorance.” They found that willful ignorance operates subconsciously and it occurs because handling the full truth would be overly painful for the person.
     This led the researchers to a strange conclusion: Shoppers who care the most about an issue are the ones most likely to hide from the reality. The furniture shopper who would feel the deepest amount of grief at having in their home any wood from an endangered rainforest turns out to be the shopper most likely to avoid asking about the origin of the material after they’ve decided they deeply love the item for sale.
     Willful ignorance happens when strong emotions—like grief and love—are in conflict. It happens not only with matters of social consciousness, but also with issues like price, delivery time, and installation difficulty. In relationships with merchandise as with humans, once love sets it, we subconsciously avoid asking too many questions.
     Decide how much information you and your sales staff will volunteer. As a general rule, I’m against overloading customers with information or answering questions that haven’t be asked. However, the nature of this sort of willful ignorance is such that doubts are quite likely to bubble to the surface after the purchase. This can lead your customer to be sorry they made the purchase from you and even to blame you for withholding information from them.
     If you sense something is important for the customer to know, tell it to them.

For your profitability: Sell Well: What Really Moves Your Shoppers

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