Contagious magic refers to the belief—commonly encountered in consumers and usually subconscious—that two inanimate objects which touch will exert an influence on each other. It operates not only to enhance the attractiveness of the merchandise you sell, but also in the other direction. As an example, suppose you sell toys in your store:
Your order of toys arrived. The distributor gave you an excellent purchase price, great store displays, and even videos to train staff on selling the toys. You ordered these toys because you'd learned customers are buying them well in other market areas, and you're the first in your area to carry them. You expect to see high sales profits.
Then today as your staff were stocking the first group of the toys onto the store shelves, you saw a front page newspaper story saying a dangerous defect has been found in some toys from this manufacturer. Now you notice that each time a child picks up a box to look it over, an adult with that child tells the child they can't get the toy because of the manufacturer.
You do your own checking and find that none of the toy product lines you're selling has been found to contain defective items. There is every reason to believe these toys are perfectly safe. Knowing this, what can you do to improve sales of those toys?
Plenty. And one method that might not occur to you is to space out the boxes containing the products. University of Utah research findings suggest that when a product is feared to have a defect, putting the boxes further apart leads shoppers to think the one they purchase is less likely to have the defect.
Going back to the guitar example, the researchers concluded that the contagious magic increased the confidence of the performer and reduced their anxiety, thereby producing an objective improvement in performance.
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Space Out “Bad News” Products on Shelves
Head Off Concerns About Touching Products
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