Know the Tradeoffs in Being Sincere

Customers carry in their minds pictures of your store personality. Consumer psychologists have named two of the dimensions in that personality profile Sincere-Witty and Exciting-Predictable.

      Researchers at Stanford University and Dartmouth College created two online photo processing and album websites. One of the websites was designed with content, fonts, images, and colors that had previously been found to portray a sincere ecommerce personality. The other website was designed to portray an exciting personality.

      Participants were randomly assigned to one or the other website. Then the diabolical psychological manipulation: Two months after the start of the beta test, half of the participants using each of the websites were told a lie: “Your online photo album was accidentally erased.” An apology letter followed, and then three days later, the participants were told, “Your album has been fully restored.”

      Here’s what the researchers found out about those participants who experienced the album erasure:

• Participants dealing with the sincere website developed and maintained strong commitment and satisfaction until the point of the album loss. From then on, their commitment and satisfaction nosedived and did not recover, even with the album restoration news.
• Participants dealing with the exciting website started out with strong commitment and satisfaction, but this slowly faded until the album destruction and recovery, at which point the commitment and satisfaction grew markedly.

     Stores with a sincere personality are usually highly respected, but may have trouble keeping customers after a product recall or bad customer service. That’s because the target market members don’t like surprises when the surprises make it look like the retailer is inept. But with stores that project an exciting personality, customers are ready for a reaction like, “We make your shopping more fun with the unexpected,” and, “We’re always learning so we can get better and better.”