Sensitize Customers to Degree of Certainty

Why is that a critical claim about your store which is obviously false won’t be instantly spotted as bogus by everybody who knows anything about your business?
     Researchers at Stanford University, Northwestern University, and HEC-Paris say it happens because the degree of certainty associated with the claim is forgotten much more quickly than is the content of the claim. The recommended remedy: Sensitize your ongoing customers to the degree of certainty in what’s said about your store and the items you sell.

• When making a claim to a shopper, state the certainty with which you’re making the claim.
• When customers bring claims to you, ask about the degree of certainty the customer gives to it.
• Use puffery with caution. Puffery consists of lavish, often exaggerated, claims about a store or about products carried by the store. If you’ve quality products to offer and maintain a staff with acknowledged expertise, expose shoppers to your puffery. Let the puffery demonstrate the abundant enthusiasm you and your staff have for what you’re offering in your store. However, if shoppers in your store tell you about puffery from elsewhere which you consider to be misleading the consumer, expose the puffery.

     In one stomach-churning study, the researchers began a rumor that a particular restaurant was using worm meat in preparing the hamburgers. Highly unbelievable, you’d think, and sure enough, those people first exposed to the rumor tended to consider it as fanciful.
     However, also sure enough, as the transmission of the rumor was tracked, the attention to uncertainty faded. In my opinion, there are two reasons this tends to happen. First, putting doubts and qualifications aside makes it much more fun telling a friend there’s actually worm meat on the menu of a restaurant you both know about. Second, any story that is retold goes through processes called sharpening and leveling. The most interesting details are given sharper focus while the surrounding details fade from memory. Our brains can’t remember everything.
     So forgotten uncertainty turned a rumor into a plausible report. The researchers found it can work the other way around, too. In another experiment, a highly positive substantiated claim about a business was confidently generated. As the claim traveled, the degree of certainty associated with the report faded. The result was that consumers further along in the chain had more doubts about the accuracy. A fact moved toward being labeled as a rumor.

Click below for more:
Sell More by Being Less Certain
Expose Puffery for All It’s Worth
Avoid “Not” in Influencing Shoppers