Produce Aha Experiences for Shoppers

Can you guess what the following sentence means?
     “The haystack was important because the cloth would rip.”
     Researchers at State University of New York-Stony Brook, University of Minnesota, and Vanderbilt University asked people to remember sentences like that, which at first hearing seem to be nonsense.
     It’s the sort of thing your customer might experience when they ask you a question and you assume they have knowledge they don’t have. You’d be requiring your customer to make a guess, to fill in the blanks. The customer might do this for you or might say, “I don’t understand what you mean. Please tell me more.” But there’s also a good chance they’ll turn around and walk away from the sale you’d like to make.
     Sometimes it is only one word that makes all the difference. In my guessing game, I’ll make a guess. I think that if I say to you the word “parachute,” the sentence “The haystack was important because the cloth would rip” not only makes sense, but also produces a memorable mental image.
     This is the sort of phenomenon we’d like to produce when answering a customer’s question. An aha experience in which what you’ve said to the customer brings things together for them.
     Want another example from the research study? The sentence is “The notes were sour because the seam was split.”
     Again, one word can make all the difference, turning nonsense into perfect sense. In your retailing, it often will take more than one word to produce the aha experience as you explain an answer you’ve given to a customer. But in this case, the word “bagpipe” should do it.
     Am I recommending that you give encyclopedic answers to each question a customer asks? No, actually I’m recommending the opposite. If you assess that the customer is an expert, you might actually hold back on a comprehensive answer to signal respect for the person’s knowledge. With all customers, keep each answer brief and to the point. Finish it off with the item of information that brings it all together. The punch line.
     That’s how the best stories produce the aha experience. An example? With credit to Reader’s Digest and emailsanta.com, here’s what seven-year-old Bri wrote to the big guy: “I’m sorry for putting all that Ex-lax in your milk last year, but I wasn’t sure if you were real. My dad was really mad.”

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Give a Vocabulary for Richer Shopping
Respect Customers Who Claim Expertise
Offer Aspirational Shoppers Subtle Signals
Joke Around to Facilitate the Sale
Use Humor in Unexpected Ways

Attend to Genetic Influences in Selling

When selling to a family shopping together, do you have a sense the family’s preferences are so strong they’re attributable more to genes than experience? Researchers at Stanford University and University of Florida-Gainesville say you’re on to something.
     The reason? Adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. AGCT are the four bases in each strand of DNA, our genetics, and some consumer tendencies have a strong genetic component. If you find that tendency in one family member shopping with you, expect to find it in others:

• Whether to select a compromise option or go for the choices further out. Given the choice among the $10, $20, and $30 sizes, some people will select the $20. If the choice is presented as among $20, $30, and $40, they will tend to choose the $30. When having the $30 version would serve the needs of the consumer well, present the alternatives to favor that selection.
• Whether the shopper is prevention-focused or promotion-focused. Prevention-focused shoppers put top priority on purchases which help them avoid losing what they have now. Promotion-focused shoppers put top priority on items which help them gain more than they have now. Because this tendency is genetic, a person is usually either protection-focused or promotion-focused over the course of their lifetime as a shopper. And if one member of the family is prevention-focused, other members of the family are likely to be, too.
• Whether the shopper is a satisficer or a maximizer. When considering a purchase, people will gather information until they reach a point where the effort to gather more information isn’t worth it to them because of the weight of evidence they’ve already gathered. For satisficers, this balance point is substantially lower than it is for maximizers. When you’re selling to a family of maximizers, be ready to keep feeding more information and then anticipate a series of visits to the store or website.

     The researchers also found that likings for specific products have a genetic component, such that if one member of the family likes it, there’s a good chance others in the family will, too. This can be helpful in guiding gift selections. Those product categories include chocolate, mustard, hybrid cars, science fiction movies, and jazz.
     On the other hand, there was no evidence for a genetic component in liking tattoos. Even if Caitlin is itching to get some ink, it could be tough to sell Mom on the idea.

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

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Identify Influencers in Family Decision Making
Move the Customer to Accept Higher Prices
Sell Either Protection or Promotion

Give Your Sales Pitches Changeups

One of the more surprising consumer research findings of the past couple of years was reported in an article titled, “Enhancing the Television Viewing Experience through Commercial Interruptions.” The University of California-San Diego, New York University, and Carnegie Mellon University researchers discovered that people give higher average ratings of TV programs when the programs include advertising breaks than when the programs don’t.
     Skeptical?

• Some consumer behavior researchers’ conclusions won’t make sense to you because they are actually error-filled nonsense. But before dismissing these findings about commercial breaks improving viewer enjoyment, ask yourself if you might have overlooked factors the researchers discovered.
• People are often bad at predicting their behavior when asked directly. Consumers say they’d enjoy programs more without ads. They pay for devices to eliminate ads and to see commercial-free programming. But this does not, in itself, mean that those people would rate programming with commercials as less enjoyable.
• Being a retailer, you’re probably more interested in how much people liked the commercials than how much they liked the TV programs. It’s the commercials that do the selling for you. How would liking the programming help bring in the money?

     Well, those who had the ads were willing to pay about 30% more for a DVD compilation of programs by the same director. Participants who watched a nature documentary with commercial breaks were willing to donate more to a nature charity after viewing. The enjoyment of the programming did translate into greater financial returns.
     The explanation: Interruptions increase enjoyment. It’s an example of what psychologists call habituation. Consider the massage therapy category of services retailing. Massage therapists report that the client generally likes the massage more when they’re rubbed for a while, pounded for a while, kneaded for a while, and then rubbed again than if there’s no change.
     The nature of habituation is related to age. The researchers found that commercial breaks improved the enjoyment more for younger than for older people.
     If you’re producing infomercials, deliver the pitch in brief segments with changeups, especially for younger audiences. The in-store version of the infomercial follows the same rules. When you do all the talking nonstop, you’ll lose the prospect’s attention, whether that prospect is a customer in your store or one of your employees you’re wanting to sell on a better way of increasing your business profitability.

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Sell More by Adding Variety

Redirect with Evil Envy

For any retailer who thinks about dollar bills, green is great. So how about getting green with envy? Make some money from jealousy! Research findings from Tilburg University in the Netherlands indicate that when a consumer shopping for a product envies someone who owns that product, they’re willing to spend more money on their purchase.
     In some cases, it’s more money on the product owned by the other person. In other cases, it’s more money on a competing product. Understanding how this works gives you one more tool to redirect shoppers toward products that best serve both their needs and your profitability.
     When a shopper believes the other person earned the right to the advantages of owning the product, that shopper is willing to pay a premium for owning the product themselves. The extra money is like a tribute to the respected person. In the research, people who had this benign envy of someone owning an iPhone, for instance, were willing to pay an average of €80 extra for their own iPhone.
     What about the shopper who believes the other person doesn’t deserve the good fortune? There is then a desire to show that what the other person has isn’t so great, after all. In the research study, people with this malicious envy were also willing to spend more money, but on a competing product, like a BlackBerry instead of an iPhone.
     Consumer psychologists talk about aspirational groups, to which a shopper wants to belong, and dissociative groups, from which a shopper wants to distance themselves. Direct your shoppers toward the right choices with references that stimulate aspirational envy, and redirect them from other choices by referring to celebrity endorsers or others whose names will activate evil envy.

• Stay aware of how a repeat shopper’s aspirational group might change over time. Newly minted MBAs may aspire to become part of a business professionals’ culture. Hispanic youth attending a U.S. university might aspire to view themselves as mainstream American college kids, but only for the first year. Similarly, changes occur regarding dissociative groups.
• Whether a product endorser arouses respect or evil envy also can change over time. Marketing agency Zeta Interactive found that positive buzz on the Internet about bicyclist Lance Armstrong dropped dramatically from early July into early August 2010. Zeta Interactive attributed the drop to suspicions Mr. Armstrong used performance-enhancing drugs during races.

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Notice Customers’ Cultural Aspirations
Select Celebrity Endorsers Who Have Credibility
Make Your Sales Staff Celebrity Endorsers

Anchor Frequency Estimates to Individuals

When selling a product to a prospect, don’t make them think they’ll be using the product often, since that can kill off their interest in buying it.
     This strange conclusion is one way to interpret findings from research at University of Maryland-College Park and Georgetown University. And, as you’d expect, the conclusion is only partially right. But the part that is correct provides useful guidance for handling usage frequency estimates with shoppers.
     The experimental study began with asking university students to say how often they played video games. One set was asked the question in the form, “Please tell us how often, using a scale that ranges from ‘Less than once a week’ to ‘More than once a day.’” Among themselves, the researchers referred to this as the “high frequency scale.” The rest of the students were presented what the researchers called the low frequency scale: “… using a scale that ranges from ‘Less than once a year’ to ‘More than once a week.’”
     The students using the high frequency scale reported playing video games more often than did the students using the low frequency scale. Consumer psychologists call this an anchoring effect. When shoppers are given higher numbers as anchor points, they’ll give higher numbers as answers.
     The next part of the study is where things got really strange. Compared to the students who had previously been presented the low frequency scale, students who had previously been presented with the high frequency scale were less interested in trying out a new video game. When we put the two parts together, the college students who had said they play video games more frequently expressed less interest in new video games. The high-frequency-scale group was only half as likely to accept the offer of a free trial of a video game.
     Why? The researchers are convinced it’s because the high frequency scale made students think other students played video games very often, while a low frequency scale made students think other students didn’t play video games so often. When the anchor was set high, the students felt their frequency of use was relatively low, so they labeled themselves as not that interested in video games.
     The advice for retailers: When discussing predicted frequency of use with shoppers, talk about each shopper as an individual. Avoid comparisons to others. Especially with competitive consumers like university students.

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

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Set Price Anchors with Price Adjacencies
Move the Customer to Accept Higher Prices
Know the “Don’t Know” Answer Frequency

Discuss Attributes to Guide Choices

By discussing with customers the product attributes important to them, you can guide both their choices and your own choices to greater profitability.
     Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and University of Southern California find that with packaged food items with which the shopper is familiar, shoppers pay the most attention to the attributes of taste and brand name, more than they do the size of the package. Researchers at University of Pennsylvania and University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign find that across all product categories and levels of shopper familiarity with products, the attributes of color and shape have special importance.

• Consult online reviews for products you carry. Encourage people to post product reviews. Look at the online reviews maintained by other retailers who sell the same products you sell. Read impartial reviews, such as in Consumer Reports, for the products. In all of this, notice what attributes are being mentioned. Is it color? Speed? Reliability? Guarantees? Support services? Country of origin? Researchers at New York University and University of Florida find that when a shopper sees an attribute discussed in a review, the shopper significantly increases their use of that attribute in product assessments and significantly decreases their use of other attributes. Know what your shoppers are thinking.
• Discuss benefits in terms of attributes. Every consumer from about age 7 pays closer attention when you say what the product can do for them, not just what attributes the product has. But the consumer will be better able to compare benefits of a set of products when you present them in terms of attributes. “Because this can is square and squat, you’ll be able to stack more inside the locker when you take your boat out.”
• Use attribute information to prune down inventory. Remember that I said the attribute information could guide your own choices more profitably? Those Carnegie Mellon/USC researchers found that when a major grocery retailer trimmed back stock-keeping units (SKUs) to omit product and category attributes relatively unimportant to customers, sales did not decrease. They increased 11%. The researchers say this was due to decisions being made easier for shoppers.

     You can guide the choices of your shoppers by the ways in which you arrange the merchandise. But it often works even better to present the alternatives in terms of what attributes you discover your shoppers using already.

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Encourage Balanced Customer Reviews
Cultivate Kids as Future Customers
Feature Country-of-Origin Advantages

Limn Words Shoppers Won’t Understand

On September 7, 2010, a front-page article in the Baltimore Sun carried the headline “Opposing votes limn difference in race.” Well, at least a few of the newspaper’s readers that day reacted as if they’d like to rip the editors limn from limn. Whoops, I mean limb from limb, which is pronounced the same way.
     As to the definition, limn shares its word root with illuminate and means to give clear, sharp detail. The headline meant that a set of opposing votes portrayed differences between the current electoral candidates in clear, sharp detail.
     But those upset readers of the headline didn’t know what “limn” meant. They were irritated at the Baltimore Sun for creating an unnecessary difficulty. One reader opined, “To put a word like ‘limn’ in the headline for the lead article on the front page of this newspaper seems to me to be unbelievably arrogant and patronizing. Could the headline writer not have fashioned a head around the word ‘illuminate,’ ‘delineate’ or ‘depict’? Perhaps then more readers would not only understand what the article is about but actually might want to read it.”
     Wrong on two counts. First, the Sun’s headline writer said he chose the word not to impress with his vocabulary, but because he needed a shorter word for “show” in a one-column space. Second, classic research by psychologist Edward Wheeler Scripture found that a bit of puzzlement in a headline—whether for a newspaper article or newspaper ad—increases interest in reading what follows. In an 1895 book, Dr. Scripture used his studies’ findings to even suggest putting commercial notices upside down in order to attract attention.
     Using a fancy word also can subtly add to your impression of distinctiveness or exclusivity in a positive way. A two-store California retailer calls themselves Limn to fit their merchandising of sharply designed high-end home furniture, lighting, and accessories.
     Now that you know what limn means, I can recommend to you that you limn for your special attention any words that your target audiences are likely not to understand correctly at first viewing or first hearing. Give each of those words clear, sharp detail as you create your marketing copy and selling scripts. Then decide for each of the words if it will arouse useful interest in your intended message or only create a distracting kerfuffle. Whoops, maybe I should say, instead, create a distracting fuss.

Click below for more:
Offer Aspirational Shopper Subtle Signals
Use Humor in Unexpected Ways
Joke Around to Facilitate the Sale

Disclose Product Cautions

Laws, standards of professional practice, business insurance underwriters, and commitment to retailing ethics might all require you to provide customers warning about the risks in using certain products you sell. But what about volunteering negative product information when you’re not required to do so?

• Researchers at European University Viadrina find that when a salesperson volunteers negative information about a product that’s being considered by the shopper, the shopper becomes more likely to trust everything the salesperson says. This argues for the salesperson starting by presenting a good choice, but one other than what the salesperson thinks is the best choice for both the shopper and the store’s profitability. After presenting a downside of that choice, the salesperson can move to presenting the best choice. But keep the words and logic simple. The researchers also find that if there’s too much complexity, the shopper won’t hook the talk of negative information to the salesperson’s credibility.
• When comparing choices for the customer, accentuate the positive. A positive frame is of the form “The other alternative is good, but the one I’m recommending is even better.” A negative frame is of the form “The other alternative is bad, and the one I’m recommending is good.” Researchers at New York University and Vanderbilt University find that negatively framed comparatives draw out more counterarguments from the shopper than do positive comparatives. But further research says that if you want the shopper to spend more time thinking about the product selection, use of a negative frame can help.
• When a shopper is in a positive mood, their decision making is more flexible than when they’re in a negative mood, and they’re more likely to persevere in the shopping process. Decide on your recommended purchase alternative and talk about how the positives outweigh the negatives. But when the shopper is in a negative mood, quickly decide on your recommended purchase and then talk about how it is the least bad alternative. Be ready to answer questions about the negatives of each alternative. Then once the customer makes the selection, talk about positives to reassure the customer.
• Consider offering a liberal money-back guarantee that’s known about and trusted by the shopper. Research findings from University of California-Berkeley and Hebrew University of Jerusalem indicate that if your store does this, disclosing product cautions becomes less important to making the sale.

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Encourage Balanced Customer Reviews
Combine Positive with Negative Comparatives
Attend to Negatives When High Time Pressure
Selectively Keep Information from Customers

Refine Your Psychographics

When retailers talk about psychographics, they’re referring to personal values and the shopper habits affected by those values. Demographics (age, gender, income level) and psychographics are often two ways of looking at the same thing. For instance, women generally have different personal values and shopping habits than do men. But the psychographic approach gives the retailer more focused hints for making sales.
     Except when the analysis is insufficiently refined, that is. A recent Bloomberg Businessweek article describes how Toyota dealers suffered from this happening: Figuring that Toyota is America’s largest producer of cars, the company—along with a number of influential industry analysts—expected Toyota to swipe sales of large pickup trucks from GM, Ford, and Chrysler as the market for pickups picked up.
     But the psychographics of buyers of large trucks are different from the psychographics of car buyers. A more refined analysis using data from Nielsen Claritas indicated that compared to Toyota large truck prospects, the GM and Ford prospects are more likely to dine at Cracker Barrel restaurants, have dial-up Internet, and use the paper Yellow Pages. The Toyota prospects were more likely to dine at steakhouses, shop online, own golf clubs, and subscribe to Runner's World.
     This sort of focus gives specifics to be used in merchandising, marketing, and selling. Psychographic analysis for the PowerBar sports nutrition line produced a recommendation that the products be displayed alongside personal grooming items. The focus from refinement also protects against you being buried in trivial findings, while staying open to being surprised. A collaboration of researchers at Columbia University, Advertising Age, and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune found that people most interested in buying fishing equipment also enjoy listening to Christian rock music and reading Southern Living.
     Whether contracting with a market research firm to provide you psychographic information or gathering and analyzing your own data, always be angling for further refinement.
     At the same time, recognize there will be individual exceptions to the overall refined findings. A comment posted to the online version of the Bloomberg Businessweek article reads, “I've built several computers, use an htpc to watch the internet on my plasma, use voip instead of telco, never owned a gun, but have several bikes. I own 3 F150's and no toytas [sic].”

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Recalibrate for Shopper Gender Trends
Help Customers Show Off New Products

Clarify Item Advantages via Pricing

Present item costs as benefits that the product or service brings in units important to the shopper. This helps move your shoppers beyond a fixation on the item price so they can more accurately assess the value of the alternatives and more often consider purchasing items that bring you a higher profit.
     Researchers at London Business School and European School of Management and Technology gathered some examples of this tactic:

• Embrex (now Pfizer Poultry Health) offered poultry breeders inoculations by the egg.
• General Electric priced airline engines by the power delivered per hour.
• Goodyear dealers priced tires according to how many miles they were expected to last.
• Explosives supplier Orica charged customers according to the fragmentation of the rocks extracted.

     Here are the steps to clarifying advantages via pricing for items you sell:

1. Ask your customers and prospective customers about the benefits they find in using the product or service for which pricing has become an issue. Questionnaires, focus groups, interviews, and customer diaries are the chief methodologies for gathering this information. Be sure to ask customers about their beliefs, their emotions, and their intentions when it comes to the product type you’re investigating. To help ensure accurate results, don’t limit yourself to one or two of these three.
2. Analyze what you’ve gathered. The most revealing, and therefore most valuable, discoveries will come from statistical techniques like conjoint analysis, factor analysis, and cluster analysis. However, since these techniques require use of an outside consultant, you might choose to employ less sophisticated looks at the data.
3. Word each main benefit in terms of units the shopper would use or process: fertile eggs, engine power, road miles, rock fragments, and so on. The units might be different for different target populations or for different roles the shopper takes on. In the role of household accountant, the consumer might be assessing cost per serving, while in the role of parent, the consumer might be assessing cost per set of daily nutritional requirements. If you’ve used the statistical analysis techniques, they’ll help you in this segmentation.
4. Set pricing in terms of the units.
5. Announce both pricing and benefits using the units.
6. Over time, regularly analyze how well this pricing structure is meeting your profit objectives, and make any necessary adjustments.

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

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Ease Customer Pain About Item Prices
Move the Customer to Accept Higher Prices
Know Your Potential Customers' Intentions
Use Cluster Analysis on Customer Data
Keep Customers Happy About Data Collection
Analyze What Your Shoppers Say and Do

Give Shoppers Permission to Spend More

Suppose I ask your shoppers to think about the slogan “Save money. Live better,” and then the slogan, “The good life at a great price.” My question for you: Does thinking about those slogans make a shopper likely to spend more money or less money, or does it have no measurable effect on spending habits?
     You might recognize that the first of those slogans has been used by Walmart, and the second one by Sears. Both store names are associated with thriftiness. But I’m asking your shoppers to think about the slogans, not the store names.
     The answer to my question of you comes from research at University of Miami, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and University of California-Berkeley. A set of studies found that thinking about either of those slogans increases the amount of money people are willing to spend during a shopping trip. In fact, the amount was twice as much after thinking about the slogan than after thinking about the store name. With the store name, the average amount study participants were willing to spend was $94. With the slogan, it was $184.
     What’s going on? In my opinion, a good explanation for the findings is that the slogan gave shoppers permission to spend money by shifting their thinking toward a longer-term perspective. “Live Better” and “The good life” was enough to lift shoppers’ eyes from their day-to-day expenses.
     Researchers from Princeton, University of Chicago, and Digitas-Boston surveyed people entering a grocery store. One set were asked, among other things, questions about the contents of their wallets. This nudged their thoughts towards the money they had to spend in the short term. Another set of shoppers were asked instead about the different types of financial accounts they had in their investment portfolio, such as checking and savings accounts. This got those shoppers thinking long-range.
     What difference did it make? Well, the second group spent 36% more than the first group while shopping.
     In advertising and selling, regularly remind your shoppers about living the good life. State large prices not just as the total, but also as the cost per month over the expected useful life of the product. Offer extended payment terms. Have shoppers gaze over the horizon so they’ll subconsciously give themselves permission to spend more.

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Give Customers Long-Range Perspectives
Influence Subconsciously, Not Subliminally

Craft Fear Appeals

In certain circumstances, we can make a sale more likely by arousing in the customer a sense of fear—fear about the consequences of not making the purchase or buying into the course of action we’re proposing. But unless the fear appeal is crafted well, it could end up doing damage to your business.
     Here are some tips on crafting fear appeals:

• Research at Universidad Pùblica de Navarra in Pamplona, Spain concludes that for certain shoppers in the world, fear sells, but for others, it’s a turnoff. How to tell which is which? Monitor the extent to which your shoppers use fear words themselves.
• Raise enough fear of a real danger to win the customer’s attention and motivate action, but only to the degree that you’ve a guaranteed way to substantially reduce the risk. Don’t oversell. Researchers at Auburn University find that if the fear becomes too intense or if they don’t see a way out, shoppers become defensive and start thinking about why they don’t need the item you’re wanting to sell them. Or if they do end up making the purchase, chances are they’ll associate negative feelings with your store, making it less likely they’ll come back again.
• Pair the fear with regret (“I can understand why you’re sorry you didn’t make a purchase like this before the accident”), guilt (“I’m sure you want to do all you can to protect your family”), and/or challenge (“I realize the price is high”). Research at Tulane University and Salisbury University regarding health behaviors like using sunscreen and eating high fiber foods concluded that regret, guilt, and challenge increase the rate at which the consumer buys into compliance.
• Don’t hesitate to use legitimate fear appeals with older consumers. Seniors respond better to fear-laden sales messages than to purely rational sales messages, especially if the fear appeal is combined with appeals to positive emotions, like comfort, contentment, and relief. This is what’s suggested by research at University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, and University of California-Irvine. Emotional appeals also help elderly shoppers remember details about sources of sales messages more accurately. All emotions—positive and negative—arouse interest among older consumers, and as people age, they get better at turning the negative into the positive (comfort from achieving control over fear).

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

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Know How Much Emotion to Deliver
Scare Customers into Buying
Emphasize Emotions with Older Consumers
Sell Self-Esteem After Times of Fear
Use Terror Management Theory for Status Items

Time Your Statements of Benefits

Knowing when to do what is essential to maximizing retailing profitability. Offering cold weather merchandise when your target consumers start thinking about cold weather preferences. Ordering the heavy sweaters and recruiting the tire chain jockeys enough in advance of when they’ll be needed.
     Tony Curtis, who died last week at age 85 after having appeared in more than 140 movies, is quoted as having said, “…(M)y longevity is due to my good timing.” I don’t know who first advised, “Timing is everything,” but Albert Einstein associated time with everything when saying, “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.”
     Prof. Einstein’s insight applies to the best ways for you to present product and service benefits to your retail shoppers:

• Researchers at University of Connecticut and University of Virginia found that women shoppers vary between thinking, “It’s time for me” and “It’s time for others.” Analyze how your shoppers cycle between these two, then adjust your merchandise mix to fit. Retail store consultants at Envirosell performed an even more sophisticated analysis of timing, resulting in them advising a shopping mall bookstore to use cylindrical fixtures to rotate out different sorts of books for different times of the day. These approaches help you not only to sell more merchandise, but also to even out the flow of customers over the hours your store is open.
• In advertising, describe the range of alternatives you have available to each customer. If your in-store or warehouse range is, in reality, limited, you could expand it by offering special-order services. But once the shopper arrives at your store or ecommerce site, have the products presented in easily understood categories. Researchers at University of Texas-Austin describe how having a broad assortment of products available draws shoppers, but once the shoppers arrive, they seek ease of product evaluation.
• Before the sale, emphasize the number of functions the product can serve and have technical specifications easily available. Once the sale has been completed, state benefits in terms of making it easy to use the functions and reassuring the customer they’ve made the right choice. Researchers at University of Maryland-College Park found that consumers tend to choose the most feature-filled models, but then after purchase, tend to get frustrated with the complexity of what they chose.

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Merchandise to Fit Purchasing Cycles
Acknowledge the Power of Cycles
Use Signage to Categorize Items
Pitch the Synergy of Multifunction Products
Offer Fundamental Indulgences
Sell Ease of Use to Last-Minute Shoppers

Pitch the Synergy of Multifunction Items

Why would your shopper want a toothpaste that only cleans their teeth when they could buy a paste which also freshens their breath? Why did Samsung Electronics gear up to get into the standalone camera business when combination camera/phone/GPS/gaming devices are available in abundance?
     Well, there’s a variety of reasons. But one answer from researchers at Northwestern University is that although shoppers are attracted to multi-solution products, a number of those shoppers believe such products are inferior in each of the capabilities when compared to single-solution products. The product which promises to be a jack of all trades risks being seen as a master of none.
     Carrying multifunction products has an advantage for you. You can reduce the total of different items you need to have in stock. If you’re out of the toothpaste that just cleans, you could point the shopper toward the one that cleans plus more. But this works out only if the shopper accepts the quality of the combination offering.
     The Northwestern University researchers found that one way to overcome the inferred inferiority is to set a premium price on the multifunction product. The extra cost helps convince shoppers that the product can indeed do more.
     But in a retailing environment where consumers are highly price sensitive, you might choose to take a different approach. Research findings from Singapore Management University and Korea’s Kyung Hee University suggest a technique: Describe to the potential purchaser how well the various functions work together. Instead of focusing on the different capabilities, focus on the added benefits that comes from the synergy.
     The Singapore/Kyung Hee research indicates that this is especially useful with items the shopper considers to have a high level of technological performance. It is more important with smart phones than with toothpaste. In fact, the researchers concluded that at low levels of technological performance, people overwhelmingly preferred the combination products.
     Because cultures vary in the thresholds consumers set for high technology, the value and effectiveness of pitching the synergy differs by culture. Assess what works with your customer base.

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

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Set Healthy Margins on Multi-Solution Products
Notice Customers’ Cultural Aspirations

Recalibrate for Shopper Gender Trends

In the U.S. at least, it’s likely that husbands will be doing more of the shopping than in the past, and when a wife does do the shopping, she’s more likely than in the past to bring along family and/or friends. Neither of these trends is monumental in magnitude. However, it’s your attention to marginal, but persistent, differences that can give you a retailer’s edge in profitability.
     The chain of logic behind the changes is reflected in an analysis conducted at University of New Hampshire of survey data: During the U.S. economic downturn, husbands were more likely to lose their jobs than were wives, and now, husbands are encountering more difficulty than wives in finding employment.
     As a result, a higher percentage of wives than in the past are finding it necessary, in order to pay the bills, to enter the labor force or to expand their work hours. They’d prefer to be home more with family, but that’s not feasible. One likely consequence of this is that more household responsibilities, including shopping, are being handled by the husbands.
     There are broad individual differences among male shoppers and among female shoppers, but a solid body of research finds that, overall, men tend to think about shopping and conduct themselves as shoppers differently than do women. For instance, researchers at Stanford University asked samples of men and women to contemplate the task of shopping for a new wardrobe. Later, each participant was assigned to plot the route for a cross-country road trip.
     The women in the study were much more likely than the men to plot out a scenic route rather than a direct route. Male shoppers are more purpose-driven. Women are more possibilities-driven.
     Along with this, women are more likely to find emotional comfort from shopping than are men. Put this together with the fact that the wives going to work will long for time with family and friends. When the wife does do the shopping, she’ll want to bring along family and/or friends.
     Recalibrate your merchandising and patterns of salesperson-shopper interactions to turn these shopper gender trends to the advantage of both you and your customers.

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Encourage Group Shopping
Identify Influencers in Family Decision Making
Help Customers Show Off New Products
Design Store Operations for Ecommerce Brains

Apply Systematic Desensitization to Fears

People often fail to do what they want to do. Sometimes what’s standing in the way are fears they themselves know are unjustified. Prospective customers for the local gym might join if they weren’t afraid others there would laugh at the shape they’re in—even though they realize people at the gym have much better things to do than ridicule others. Prospective purchasers of an unusual food might hold off because of fears associated with the name of the food—even though the prospective purchasers know the food is recommended by many others in the world.
     Systematic desensitization is a well-researched technique which has been successfully used by psychotherapists treating clients who have fears the clients know are unjustified. The technique consists of teaching the client to relax and then having them progressively approach what they fear. The fundamentals of systematic desensitization can be applied to helping fearful consumers. Here’s a laboratory illustration:
     Researchers at University of Chicago and University of Arizona showed study participants a can of food, then asked them to sample the food. The label on the can announced that the contents consisted of curried grasshopper, a delicacy which most of the participants had fears about eating.
     Before the sampling, each participant was assigned to one of three groups:

• People in Group 1 were simply asked to eat the curried grasshopper and then report on their evaluation of it.
• Those in Group 2 were asked to imagine themselves avoiding the can, and afterwards instructed to eat the curried grasshopper and report their evaluation.
• Group 3 participants were asked to imagine themselves approaching the can, and afterwards instructed to eat the curried grasshopper and report their evaluation.

     The Group 3 participants gave the most positive evaluations of the curried grasshopper. Imagining approach to a feared product or engaging in a feared action eased the fear and gave a more positive evaluation of the experience to the consumer.
     The key points to keep in mind when you use systematic desensitization:

• Check that the customer considers their fear to be unjustified.
• Have the customer relax, without high pressure to make a consumption decision.
• Make the sale in steps rather than deciding it all has to happen at once.
• Genuinely praise the customer for overcoming their irrational fear.

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Make the Sale a Slice at a Time
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Cultivate Customers’ Hedonic Objectives

Consumers make decisions for a mix of utilitarian and hedonic reasons. The utilitarian is to get a job done. The hedonic is to feel pleasure. When buying a power saw, the utilitarian is to have a way to cut things and the hedonic is to experience pride in the clean cuts.
     Even though there’s always a mix of the two, either the utilitarian or the hedonic often predominates. With the power saw, the utilitarian is probably more important to the shopper. With a ticket to a concert, it’s probably the hedonic.
     Purchasing the same item might be mostly hedonic or mostly utilitarian based on the nature of the purchase. For example, researchers at Université de Nantes in France, Louisiana Tech University, and University of Southern Mississippi concluded that shopping for gifts does provide hedonic gains, but has a much stronger utilitarian drive.
     When you cultivate customers’ hedonic over utilitarian objectives, that can increase your profitability. Here’s why:

• Consumers seek more variety in their purchases when there are hedonic than when there are utilitarian objectives. Researchers at University of Pennsylvania used the term “hedonic treadmill” to refer to the ways in which people get bored with hedonic purchases. They buy more.
• Researchers at University of Maryland-College Park, Rice University, and Carnegie Mellon University find that after completing a purchase to meet hedonic objectives, the purchaser is more likely to want to add on an extended service contract than if the purchase was to meet utilitarian objectives. ESCs are a high margin item for retailers.
• Researchers at London Business School and University of Chicago report that when people are shopping for hedonic purposes, they are more likely to follow the retailer’s suggestions of what to purchase. Shoppers love to have choices available to them, but with hedonic items, the choice they’re more likely to make is to let you choose for them. This gives you the opportunity to sell items that meet both the customer’s desires and your bottom-line objectives.

     Want to cultivate hedonic objectives? Ask the customer how they plan to use their purchase and then emphasize the hedonic in responding to them. The shopper says, “I’m buying this power saw because I’m doing a room addition to the house.” You might respond, “The firm feel of this saw will give you the kinds of results you’ll be proud of.”

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Preoccupy Shoppers for Indulgent Choices
Sell More by Adding Variety
Make Extended Service Contracts Worthwhile

Beware Flawed Predictions from Animations

“Keep your eye on the ball” is advice often given to baseball batters to prevent them from getting ahead of themselves. Those same words might be good advice for people watching the game at home, and for the same reason. Researchers at Northwestern University and University of Minnesota point out how when people see a baseball hit with great force, they often have a momentary feeling of certainty the ball will go out of the park. Maybe a misleading feeling of certainty.
     Advancing computer technologies combined with increasingly sophisticated consumer expectations have led retailers of all sorts to use an abundance of animation in demonstrating the benefits of products and services on websites and in personal selling. The Northwestern/Minnesota researchers urge people to show special caution with these animations. It’s too easy for your shoppers to be misled when mentally projecting what will happen next.
     People readily project ahead from animations which show trajectories, such as animated charts of weight loss or completion of construction. We’re all overloaded with information, so we welcome tools that help us get to the point. Also, many consumers place extra trust in a computer-generated animation largely because the animation is using a more sophisticated technology than still pictures. “What’s newer must be better,” they say.
     And because animations are more lifelike than text descriptions or still pictures, consumers remember with enhanced certainty any mistaken conclusions. A few days later, what was actually false is recalled as true.
     Putting this all together, you protect your business and your consumers by being aware of the dangers of flawed predictions from animated demonstrations.

• Give disclaimers within the animation. Phrasing in the spirit of “Past performance is no guarantee of future results” is good. But it’s not enough. Animate the disclaimer by showing a flashing question mark at the end of the animated trajectory. Or show a variety of possible directions the trend might go.
• For items where a misinterpretation might lead to a lawsuit, regulatory inquiry, or loss of good will from an essential customer, present still images along with the animation. When the Northwestern/Minnesota researchers replaced the animation with still images the study participants could flip through at their own pace, mistaken predictions faded away.
• Be careful to interpret correctly when shown animations by a vendor. The researchers specifically warn businesspeople to watch out when interpreting animated sales projections.

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Skim the Data to Spot Leading Trends
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Repeat the Truth in Different Ways

Repetition is a powerful persuasion technique for retailers. Repeat the benefits of a product to a shopper often enough and the shopper becomes convinced what you are saying is true. The effect is so well-established by decades of research that consumer psychologists use the term “truth effect” to refer to it.
     But repetition works best if you repeat the product benefits, selling points, or usage instructions in different ways.

• When you deliver an identical message again and again and again, the shopper might come to believe it, but at some point, they also start disliking you and the product. Consumer psychologists have a name for this one, too: wear out. Wear out is more likely when the shopper is carefully evaluating what you’re saying. That’s why many TV ads can get away with rote repetition: Nobody’s listening that carefully.
• When people shop together, their memories for what a salesperson tells them tends to be inferior to what they remember when they’re shopping as individuals. So repeat the information more often when selling to a group. You don't want to offend your shoppers, though, and repeating the same information word-for-word could offend—or at least bore—any shoppers in the group who did understand you the first time and remember what you said. With some product information, you can repeat the message in different ways. Tell the group of shoppers verbally. Then show them written material that repeats the information. Next, demonstrate your points by showing the shoppers what you mean. And check for understanding by asking the shoppers their opinions about what you've said. Multi-channel teaching always helps improve learning.
• Research at Baruch College has refined some assumptions about what gives the best payback for a retailer’s advertising dollars when running a series of text ads: Each ad should show movement forward from the prior ad. This is more effective than a campaign that repeats all the same content in each ad. However, in each ad, use some of the same elements that relate to the theme of the campaign. Although the ads show progress, repetition drills the messages into consumers’ long-term memories. Pictures can be effective devices for this.

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Use Both Repetition and Progression in Ads
Repeat Information When Selling to a Group

Avoid Satire in Comparatives

To influence your shoppers, compare what you offer to what others offer. And compare benefits or features of the various alternatives you offer. But avoid satire in your comparisons.
     For an example of the risks of satirical comparisons, consider the “What Happens in Blank” TV spot created by R&R Partners and used last year by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. The original “What happens here, stays here” campaign designed by R&R nicely projected the naughtiness which is a prime marketing point for Las Vegas. Once hitting public exposure, the tag line morphed into “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” and that, in turn, inspired the 2008 20th Century Fox flick, “What Happens in Vegas.”
     Much better success in retailing location marketing than, let’s say, New Hampshire’s “You’re going to love it here” or New Jersey’s “Come see for yourself.”
     The “What Happens in Blank” spot features a satirical edge, apparently aiming to point out how inserting your own town’s name into the slogan will only highlight how your own town falls far short of Las Vegas by comparison. My analysis is that the ad could produce some hearty chuckles in viewers, but leaves a bitter aftertaste for many of these consumers.

• Satire is ridicule packaged in humor. The problem is that what some people consider to be funny, others don’t. If the humor falls flat, all that’s left is the ridicule. If you use satirical comparisons, you risk being seen by the consumer as mean-spirited, and that can interfere with your selling appeal. Researchers at University of Massachusetts-Amherst demonstrated how humor differs even between the U.S. and the U.K., both of them individualistic cultures. Other research has shown how collectivist cultures—like in Japan—and family-oriented cultures—like in Mexico—come to dislike retailers that seem to depend on ridicule to make a point.
• Researchers at Northwestern University and Ohio State University find that humor in selling functions as a source of distraction. The laughter keeps the shopper from thinking about counterarguments. The problem with satire in comparatives is in order to get the joke, the audience has to be thinking too closely about arguments and counterarguments. The “What Happens in Blank” ad makes fun of the elderly, the handicapped, the overweight, and even county fairs, all within a span of thirty seconds.

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Compare Unknown Brands to Best-Known Brands
Be Aware How Shoppers Compare Products
Joke Around to Facilitate the Sale