Imagine What Will Work

Tweets are all atwitter about a Carnegie Mellon University finding that thinking about eating M&M candies leads to actually eating fewer M&Ms afterwards. One trouble with tweets, though, is as old as the Rumor Game—that party pastime where one person whispers some information to the person next to them, who then whispers to the next person what they understood, and so on. By the time the information makes it around the circle, it comes out quite different. A chain of tweets leads to distortions.
     With the Carnegie Mellon study, even the prestigious National Public Radio didn’t get it right when titling their report “Just Thinking Harder May Help You Lose Weight.” The researchers claim only to have found that thinking about eating lots of M&Ms temporarily reduces the urge to eat lots more M&Ms. There was no evidence it significantly reduced the urge to eat cheddar cheese cubes or completely eliminated a desire for M&Ms.
     One lesson from all this for retailers is to exercise caution when taking advice based on research findings. Evaluate the trustworthiness of the person or organization interpreting the research findings for you. And evaluate if the advice makes sense to you as a retailer.
     If you’re a services retailer running a weight loss clinic, are you ready to introduce the Carnegie Mellon Diet, as a headline from CBS News suggests? Probably not, after knowing what the research really says and what makes sense to you as a weight loss expert.
     Based on the research findings, would you take a more careful look at the power of imagination? That’s what I’d advise.

• Ask prospective purchasers to imagine experiencing the benefits of the product or service you’re selling. In a study involving a premium cable TV service, researchers at New Mexico State University, Arizona State University, and Claremont Graduate School found that this technique more than doubled the percentage of purchasers, from 20% without the imagination request to 47% with it.
• To better prepare your staff to respond to customers and suppliers in ways that will lead to greater profitability, develop scripts and then ask each staff member to customize the script by imagining how they’d want to handle the situation.

     Here, imagining an event makes it more likely. In the Carnegie Mellon research, imagining made subsequent similar behavior less likely. That’s a sign the finding might be an exception.
     Imagine that!

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Help Shoppers Use Their Imagination
Ask Shoppers to Imagine Usage Benefits