Pair Preferences with the Shopper’s Entourage

Are your customers crazy? You might get that impression sometimes. However, through the lens of shopper psychology, it almost always makes good sense.
     What I’m thinking of now is that to say a shopper can have a multiple personality is not to say the shopper suffers from the sort of pathology portrayed in the Showtime series “United States of Tara” about a woman with what’s formally called Dissociative Identity Disorder.
     And now my multiple mental set is suddenly shifting to where I’m thinking about how a shopper whose preferences you think you know very well can have quite different preferences when coming in with a different group of people. For instance, when shopping with family members along, a consumer is more likely to take financial risks in purchases than when shopping with a group of friends. But the shopper with family is less likely to select highly unusual products or services.
     It can be frustrating for the conscientious salesperson. Here you and your staff are priding yourselves on knowing what each customer likes as soon as they walk through the door, and here you find that your assumption was all wrong this time. The way to get back on track with your mindreading is to start pairing the shopper’s preferences with the group they’re associating with at that time.
     As it happens, the group is not only what you see right there in the store. It also can be the group in the shopper’s mind. Researchers at UCLA and University of Washington-Seattle find that if you can get a shopper to think about their association with a group, it slants their preferences toward what they will like as a member of the group.
     These researchers saw the effect with advertising. In many ads, the imagery and text portray a particular group to which the target consumer belongs. It might be a group of people who enjoy clubbing or vacationing. It might be a group that’s in college or using a walker.
     Past research had shown that shoppers associate certain merchandise and services preferences with each such group. What the newer research indicates is that a salesperson’s reminders of group membership also can shape the shopper’s relative rankings of purchase alternatives. You can change item and brand preferences by guiding the personality toward the one of the multiple possibilities that shopper is carrying in their mind.

Click below for more:
Assume Multiple Personalities to Merchandise
Sell Identify Affirmation to People
Spread Risks to Family for Values-Laden Buys
Expect Shopper Conformity & Variety Seeking