Describe Distinctive Attributes to Experts

Guide the choices your shoppers make by discussing product attributes important to them. The number and the nature of attributes can make a difference.
     Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and University of Southern California found that with packaged food items with which the shopper is familiar, shoppers pay the most attention to the attributes of taste and brand name, more than they do the size of the package. Researchers at University of Pennsylvania and University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign found that across all product categories and levels of shopper familiarity with products, the attributes of color and shape have special importance.
     Researchers at University of Iowa, Northwestern University, and INSEAD-Singapore recommend describing fewer attributes to experts than to novices and emphasizing the uniqueness of attributes. In their studies with electronic products, the researchers found that consumers with limited knowledge of a product category would make choices in a store using fairly standard, easy-to-comprehend characteristics on which the various alternatives could be readily compared.
     In contrast, the expert consumers were more interested in whether any of the alternatives had fairly sophisticated features which distinguished that alternative from the other choices. They’re less likely than the novices to count up the number of features. Other research finds that if a number of alternatives receive a high quality rating on a certain attribute, the experts don’t pay as much attention to that attribute in winnowing down the choices.
     Discussion of attributes also plays a role in the categories a shopper uses, and the category in which a shopper places a product determines the comparisons they’ll make in deciding what to buy from you. If you’re selling apples, donuts, and oranges, health-oriented customers will be comparing the prices, the freshness, and other attributes of the apples with the oranges. But the convenience-first customers will be doing an apple-donut comparison.
     If you’re selling flowerpots, statuary, and seed flats, a dedicated gardener looks for the flowerpots and seed flats to be in the same shopping area. The dedicated outdoor decorator wants to compare the aesthetic attributes of the flowerpots with the statuary.
     We can guide the choices of our shoppers by the ways in which we arrange the merchandise and describe the alternatives we give the shoppers for spending their money. But it can work even better to present the alternatives in terms of the number and nature of the attributes we discover our shoppers using already.

Click below for more: 
Discuss Attributes to Guide Choices 
Be Aware How Shoppers Compare Products