Explain Delivery Time As Quality/Talent

University of Michigan researchers showed people artistic creations and asked each to judge the quality of each work. Before being asked for the quality rating, though, the participant was told the amount of time the artist had taken to complete the work: “The artist took one year to do this.” “This piece was completed by the artist within one week.” The times given were not the actual times, of course. You know how psychologists love to lie to people.
     The purpose of lying like this was to see if a potential purchaser of artwork would infer quality from the length of production time. And indeed, there was a relationship. Even though the “completion times” had been randomly assigned to the works, the longer the completion time, the higher the average rating of the work. If it took longer to do, it must be higher quality.
     But wait, there’s more. Next, the study design was turned sideways. Participants were asked to judge the talent of the artist based on how long a creation had taken to complete. So, retailer, what’s your guess about how this will turn out? If an artist takes longer, is the artist judged to be more or less talented, or does it not matter?
     The answer is that participants judged the quicker artists to be more talented.
     Put these two findings together and we have the strange conclusion that the most talented artists—the quick ones—produced the lowest quality pieces—the quickly completed ones.
     This is another example of the importance of presenting information to the consumer properly. To highlight the quality of the product or service, talk about thorough attention to detail. To highlight the skills of the manufacturer, talk about how each person and each process was so refined that no time was wasted.

For your profitability: Sell Well: What Really Moves Your Shoppers