Discuss Attributes to Guide Choices

By discussing with customers the product attributes important to them, you can guide both their choices and your own choices to greater profitability.
     Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and University of Southern California find that with packaged food items with which the shopper is familiar, shoppers pay the most attention to the attributes of taste and brand name, more than they do the size of the package. Researchers at University of Pennsylvania and University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign find that across all product categories and levels of shopper familiarity with products, the attributes of color and shape have special importance.

• Consult online reviews for products you carry. Encourage people to post product reviews. Look at the online reviews maintained by other retailers who sell the same products you sell. Read impartial reviews, such as in Consumer Reports, for the products. In all of this, notice what attributes are being mentioned. Is it color? Speed? Reliability? Guarantees? Support services? Country of origin? Researchers at New York University and University of Florida find that when a shopper sees an attribute discussed in a review, the shopper significantly increases their use of that attribute in product assessments and significantly decreases their use of other attributes. Know what your shoppers are thinking.
• Discuss benefits in terms of attributes. Every consumer from about age 7 pays closer attention when you say what the product can do for them, not just what attributes the product has. But the consumer will be better able to compare benefits of a set of products when you present them in terms of attributes. “Because this can is square and squat, you’ll be able to stack more inside the locker when you take your boat out.”
• Use attribute information to prune down inventory. Remember that I said the attribute information could guide your own choices more profitably? Those Carnegie Mellon/USC researchers found that when a major grocery retailer trimmed back stock-keeping units (SKUs) to omit product and category attributes relatively unimportant to customers, sales did not decrease. They increased 11%. The researchers say this was due to decisions being made easier for shoppers.

     You can guide the choices of your shoppers by the ways in which you arrange the merchandise. But it often works even better to present the alternatives in terms of what attributes you discover your shoppers using already.

Click below for more:
Encourage Balanced Customer Reviews
Cultivate Kids as Future Customers
Feature Country-of-Origin Advantages