To Build Loyalty, Ask Advice, Not Expectations

Before soliciting shoppers for input about your business, decide on objectives. Do you want to build a business intimacy between your current way of doing business and your shoppers or do you want to gather ideas for improving the way you’re currently doing business?
     If it’s more important to build business intimacy, researchers at University of California-San Diego and Northwestern University suggest you ask for advice rather than opinions or expectations.

• Advice questions are of the form, “What items of advice do you have for our store?” 
• Opinion items are of the form, “What are your opinions about our store?” 
• Expectations questions are of the form, “What are your expectations of our store?” 

     Of the three types, advice questions were the most likely to lead to purchase intentions. In further analyses, the researchers discovered this was because asking for advice gives rise in the consumer to feelings of closeness to the store and a readiness to experience happiness if the store succeeds. In contrast, the expectations questions distanced the consumer from interest in the fortunes of the store except as a place to satisfy the consumer’s self-interested desires.
     These San Diego/Northwestern research findings also suggest that offering modest compensation for the advice is okay, but offering substantial compensation erases the feelings of closeness and therefore the heightened purchase intentions. It turns the surveying away from being a person-to-person call for assistance and toward this being an exclusively economic transaction devoid of intimacy.
     The broad spectrum of opinion items on surveys and the specifics obtained with expectations items can be useful if you’re probing for ways to improve how you’re currently doing business. A review of studies by business professors at Dartmouth College and University of California-Riverside found that when you’re seeking new business concepts rather than identifying new customer segments for the current model, it’s stimulating to seek survey respondents having certain characteristics:

• Show optimism and determination 
• Evidence more interest in the future than the past 
• Use blends of words, drawings, and demonstrations to describe fully-formed ideas 
• Discuss implementation details in terms of how things will end up more than in terms of where the business environment is now 
• Will spot and then give up on impractical details of their own ideas, even if the basic thrust of their ideas tends to stay the same as what they began with 
• Have no hesitation to take or adapt others’ ideas 

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