Produce Aha Experiences for Shoppers

Can you guess what the following sentence means?
     “The haystack was important because the cloth would rip.”
     Researchers at State University of New York-Stony Brook, University of Minnesota, and Vanderbilt University asked people to remember sentences like that, which at first hearing seem to be nonsense.
     It’s the sort of thing your customer might experience when they ask you a question and you assume they have knowledge they don’t have. You’d be requiring your customer to make a guess, to fill in the blanks. The customer might do this for you or might say, “I don’t understand what you mean. Please tell me more.” But there’s also a good chance they’ll turn around and walk away from the sale you’d like to make.
     Sometimes it is only one word that makes all the difference. In my guessing game, I’ll make a guess. I think that if I say to you the word “parachute,” the sentence “The haystack was important because the cloth would rip” not only makes sense, but also produces a memorable mental image.
     This is the sort of phenomenon we’d like to produce when answering a customer’s question. An aha experience in which what you’ve said to the customer brings things together for them.
     Want another example from the research study? The sentence is “The notes were sour because the seam was split.”
     Again, one word can make all the difference, turning nonsense into perfect sense. In your retailing, it often will take more than one word to produce the aha experience as you explain an answer you’ve given to a customer. But in this case, the word “bagpipe” should do it.
     Am I recommending that you give encyclopedic answers to each question a customer asks? No, actually I’m recommending the opposite. If you assess that the customer is an expert, you might actually hold back on a comprehensive answer to signal respect for the person’s knowledge. With all customers, keep each answer brief and to the point. Finish it off with the item of information that brings it all together. The punch line.
     That’s how the best stories produce the aha experience. An example? With credit to Reader’s Digest and emailsanta.com, here’s what seven-year-old Bri wrote to the big guy: “I’m sorry for putting all that Ex-lax in your milk last year, but I wasn’t sure if you were real. My dad was really mad.”

Click below for more:
Give a Vocabulary for Richer Shopping
Respect Customers Who Claim Expertise
Offer Aspirational Shoppers Subtle Signals
Joke Around to Facilitate the Sale
Use Humor in Unexpected Ways