Combine Flavors for Bonus Effectiveness

“The whole is more powerful than the sum of its parts.” That’s the fundamental motto of an approach to human behavior called “Gestalt psychology.” Allow the research evidence for the motto to inspire you to apply Gestalt psychology to your retailing.

• Reinforce your message through consistency. For example, if you make your living from selling merchandise, you might be considering how you can most fully use services as an additional profit center. If so, keep the product-service identity strong. Consumer psychology research verifies the importance of you projecting a consistent personality across products and services.
• Produce attractive offerings by blending components. If you operate a restaurant, you might be looking over the McCormick & Co. Flavor Forecast for the 2010 holiday season. With the best of the blends, one component brings out the strengths of another. In the cinnamon-bacon blend, for instance, McCormick says the robust cinnamon leads our palate to experience the rounder flavors of the bacon which the smokiness usually overshadow.
• Highlight superiority via contrast. This is the rationale for comparative advertising. It’s also one of the reasons we sprinkle in discounted items among regularly-priced items in our merchandising. The value of the discount is made more apparent to the shopper by the easy comparison with surrounding items that are not discounted.

     In choosing what elements you’ll combine, decide if your primary objective is to reinforce a message through consistency, produce attractive offerings from a blend, or highlight superiority via contrast.
     Gestalt psychology emphasizes the importance of trying things out in the real world, not as an isolated study in a laboratory. The real-world context and individual circumstances can make all the difference. Again, this reflects the Gestalt attention to the whole over the parts. So try out various combinations in your retailing.
     Not every blend will be a winner, of course. While announcing their Flavor Forecast combos last year, McCormick & Co. acknowledged that one of the pairs on the 2007 list may have been creatively inspired, but, if truth be told, failed to inspire many cooks in the world: Wasabi and maple.

Click below for more:
Project Your Store’s Personality
Profit from Product-Service Synergy
Sprinkle In Discounted Items with Regularly Priced Items