Elevate Expected Prices with Hot Cues

As a rule, when the weather is warm, people become more comfortable paying higher prices for products and services. Yet what’s true in general is not always true for specific cases. If the product is a snow shovel and the service is repair of the furnace, a willingness to pay more is likely to come into action during the cold months instead of during hot ones. And studies at Clicksuasion Labs in North Carolina, University of Auckland, and Western Sydney University find that the effect of warm temperature reports on price anchors operates most clearly when consumers are making their purchase decisions without complete amounts of information.
     Notice that those studies talked about reports of warm temperatures, not just warm temperatures. Participants in one of the studies who were asked to think about their activities during an 85º day subsequently estimated higher costs for a service than did participants asked to think about their activities during a 35º day. By prompting your shoppers to consider their experiences in warmer weather, you increase their comfort at paying more in circumstances where they’ll be making purchase decisions based on limited amounts of information.
     Enhancing this effect is that higher temperatures stimulate impulsivity. Shoppers during hot summer months prefer mental shortcuts to detailed analysis in making purchase decisions.

• Pleasant heat after a time of less pleasant cold raises people’s spirits, and happier people get more interested in shopping. 
• In temperate weather, people prefer to get their necessary shopping done with so they can move on to leisure activities. 
• Prolonged high heat wearies shoppers, making them less alert to spotting and less resistant to discounting weak reasons for buying or not buying. 
• Higher temperatures when shopping—as long as they’re not too high to be pleasant—lead to consumers being more likely to purchase what others in the vicinity are buying. 

     Correspondingly, colder weather leads to more deliberative decisions. University of Pennsylvania researchers analyzed the enrollment decisions of 1,284 college prospects at a campus known both for its academic strengths and its limited recreational offerings.
     If the day of the college prospect’s exploratory visit to the campus was especially cloudy, the odds that the prospect would choose to apply to that campus increased markedly.
     What made the most difference was change. Pleasant heat after a time of cold stimulated impulsiveness. Cloudiness higher than average led to more deliberative decision making.

For your success: Retailer’s Edge: Boost Profits Using Shopper Psychology

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