Retire Impatience with Seniors’ Price Decisions

Advanced age brings deterioration in hearing, agility, and other sensory and motor abilities. Your senior consumers proceed less briskly than do your younger customers and clients. Still, University of Potsdam researchers find that when it comes to comparing retail prices, the slowdown is not just because of deficits in abilities. It also is due to seniors’ preferences for reducing risk by taking their time. As a result, older adults are generally more accurate than are younger adults in evaluating complicated price-quality balances among purchase alternatives. Serve those older adults well by relaxing any impatience you have with their deliberative decision making.
     The degree to which various sorts of risk are avoided by seniors also can be distinctive. Consumer psychologists describe six types of risk:

• Financial. “Am I paying too much money?”
• Functional. “Will the product or service solve my problem or meet my needs effectively and efficiently?”
• Time. “If I make this purchase, does it mean investing too much time for what I gain?”
• Physical. “Is my health or safety or that of those I love in danger if I use this product or service?”
• Social. “If the people I admire know I’m using this product or service, am I in danger of falling out of favor with them?”
• Psychological. “Does using this product or service conflict with the image I want to maintain of myself?”

     Even with the reduced risk tolerance among seniors, this population of consumers can be misled at retail. Emotional arousal interferes with critical thinking skills. It happens in adults of all ages, but the effects grow worse as we age.
     Older consumers respond to emotion-laden sales messages (“The aroma of our coffee brings waves of contentment”) more strongly than to purely rational ones (“Award-winning taste at a lower price”). Emotional appeals also result in seniors better remembering details about sources of sales messages. This helps correct for the generally inferior memory in the aged of where they learned particular items. Seniors are especially receptive to positive emotions. In a fraudulent sales pitch, they’ll pay more attention to the touted benefits than to signs of danger and will remember those benefits more clearly.
     The upshot of all this is we can help elderly customers by encouraging them to enter the consumer situation calmly, maintain calmness during the transactions, and insist on enough time to calmly consider all the trade-offs prior to finalizing a purchase decision.

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

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