Give Shoppers Variety for Control

If a large shopping cart is the only carrying option greeting the customer when entering your store, that customer could become irritated. The person might intend to purchase only a few items and would prefer to use a shopping basket which is smaller and can be carried quickly by hand.      Give your shoppers choices so they feel in control and do not feel as if they’re being manipulated. For example, according to research findings from Israel’s University of Haifa, a selling message will be more effective if the shopper has first granted the salesperson permission to deliver the message.

      Offering variety to the shopper gives a sense of control. Researchers at Columbia University and University of British Columbia had study participants shop for candy in an area with either wide or narrow aisles. The people shopping in the narrow aisles chose a greater variety of candy bars and more unfamiliar brands than did shoppers in wide aisles. The same sorts of results were found among supermarket shoppers. The researchers explain the results by saying that when customers in Western cultures are shopping in tight quarters, they feel a loss of control, and that being able to select from a variety of items helps restore the balance.

      Another effective technique is to remind the customer of the variety of experiences they’ve had when shopping in your store. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, University of Minnesota, and New York University say the reason this works is that we often forget all of the variety we’ve actually had in our lives and instead focus on how repetitive our experiences have been. By reminding the customer of prior buying trips—or asking the customer if there have been prior buying trips—we generate a sense of variety and then feelings of being in control.