If you see a prospective purchaser swallowing hard during negotiations, you could take this to mean they’re gagging on the price of the item. However, researchers at Northwestern University find that the hard swallow might better be interpreted as the prospect drooling over the possibility of purchase. When that’s the case, let your selling continue to take wing rather than assume you need to descend to a lower price point.
In one study, the researchers showed a group of men photographs of physically attractive women and asked these men to decide which one they’d prefer to take out on a date if ever given the opportunity. A matching group of men were asked to think about getting a haircut at the barber. Although we might consider the first group the fantasy condition and the second group the boring-life condition, the researchers were aiming for something else: They considered the first group as developing more of a mating goal than the second group.
Once this difference was produced, all the men in both groups were asked to look at images of high-end sports cars while hosting in their mouths the type of cotton rolls you encounter in the dental chair. The objective was to measure any differences in amount of salivation.
Sure enough, the men in the mating goal group salivated more when viewing the sports car images than did those in the haircut group.
Thinking about purchasing mouth-watering foods could fill a cotton roll to overflowing. The effects can spread to anything associated with the mouth-watering foods. I admit it sidesteps the dignity of your customers to consider them as experimental animals like Pavlov’s dog. You do remember Ivan Pavlov and how when he paired the sound of a bell with feeding a dog, pretty soon the bell caused the dog to salivate? It’s called classical conditioning. Your shoppers make many purchase decisions without much thought, and in these low-involvement decisions, they are influenced by principles of classical conditioning.
A mouth-watering sports car is operating on the brain in the same sort of way as the mouth-watering food. The Northwestern University research finds that the effect is greatest when customers feel they have relatively low psychological power. This brings us back to the retailing negotiations. When a customer perceives they’re in a weaker position, the repeated swallowing could mean they’re unconsciously expecting the purchase to give them more influence.
Click below for more:
Condition Your Customers
Bow Down Before the Shopper’s Power
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