Ascertain Certainty to Assess Offer Variety

The ways in which you best present purchase alternatives to a shopper are determined in part by the degree of confidence the shopper has in choosing among those alternatives. This conclusion from a team of Northeastern University, University of Pennsylvania, and Arizona State University researchers follows their study of item reviews from almost 100,000 consumers spanning nearly 30 years. Product categories used in the studies included wines, beers, and cosmetics.
     Based on their findings, the researchers suggest that for shoppers who express notable uncertainty, frame your subsequent purchase suggestions as quite different from what they just tried, such as by highlighting distinguishing item characteristics. Correspondingly, if you’ve evidence that the shopper has high confidence, frame your next best offer as similar to what the shopper just selected.
     A challenge with taking this advice is correctly detecting the shopper’s degree of confidence. If you’ve access to a history of item reviews from the shopper, use the same method the researchers did: Analyze recent reviews with attention to tones of certainty and doubt. You could also do the same sort of thing by conversing with the shopper. For the researchers, phrasing such as “Beyond any doubt” indicated high confidence and “I really don’t know” indicated low confidence.
     The researchers’ findings highlight the value of an additional tool: Consider the degree of experience of the particular shopper with the particular item category. This can work because, in general, as a consumer gains more experience, their confidence regarding decisions for that item category will initially decrease as the consumer becomes acutely aware there’s much more to learn than they initially assumed. But as the consumer masters this learning and accumulates their own direct experience, confidence rebounds and grows.
     I’ll add my thought that if you can observe the shopper, maybe you should also notice how tightly they’re crossing their fingers while making the choice, signaling degree of hope good luck shines down to supplement low confidence.
     Research at University of Cincinnati, University of Florida, and University of Mississippi provides another perspective on the interplay of expertise with novelty. When the researchers offered choices of music samples to study participants, those who considered themselves music novices accepted a few new songs in a multitude of genres. The experts accepted a greater number of songs solely from one or a limited number of genres in which they considered themselves to have expertise. Certainty builds selectivity.

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