Grin In Your Face

When you get in the shopper’s face, have a grin on your face.
     Forceful sales techniques—such as urging the consumer to take action—can make the sale. An advertising campaign designed by The Richards Group for The Scotts Company, manufacturer of yard care products, includes a TV ad which tells consumers to stop lollygagging and ends with the words, “Feed your lawn. FEED IT.” This in-your-face approach works, research suggests, because the verbal harassment is delivered by a whimsical character named Scott who has a whimsical Scottish accent.
     An online campaign designed by DDB Chicago and the Ad Council lets the consumer select the quality of the sales pitch by moving a slider among thirteen videos. The target audience consists of people without a high school diploma. The objective is to convince them to enroll in General Equivalency Degree (GED) classes. The in-your-face argument is made by comedian Jerry Stiller. Other videos include the milder “Convincing” by “The Sopranos” actress Jamie-Lynn Sigler and the “Fierce” by professional wrestler The Miz. The gentler of the thirteen videos feature straight talk, while the more forceful arguments come across with a grin. Each of the thirteen videos ends with the call to action, “Enter your ZIP Code above to find GED classes in your area.”
     The online campaign assumes that a consumer will select the video which is aggressive enough to persuade. The humor injected into the higher-octane versions makes this more likely.
     The grin must have an undertone of caring. We’re laughing with the shopper, not at the shopper. When Scott urges us to feed the lawn, he comes across as wanting us to have nice, happy grass. When the thirteen celebrities make the case for getting a GED, it’s with a tone of “We want what’s best for you.”
     In fact, if the seller’s caring and the buyer’s commitment are both sufficient, the grin might be inadvisable. Consider the athletic coach who’s motivating his team members to perform at their maximum. Getting in their faces with humorless yelling works because the athletes view this as helping them achieve the win. A grinning sales pitch wouldn’t carry the same influence. What would be viewed as harassment in other situations works here because it’s clear to all that the coach cares about the team, the team cares about prevailing, and in-your-face coaching is the social norm from Little League on up.

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Humor Your Customers
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Switch Thinking About Switching Costs

We’d like to minimize costs to shoppers who want to switch from another store to shopping with you. We’d like to maximize costs to shoppers who want to switch from your store to another.
     That second one is more difficult to achieve with your customers who shop at your online store than with those who shop only at your bricks-and-mortar (B&M) store. Researchers at Yonsei University in Korea and Shri Shankaracarya Institute of Technology and Management in India note the ease of comparison shopping on the internet. If your customer finds a better online deal at another merchant, he might drag his B&M business to that merchant, too. The ecommerce brain homes in on information filtering shortcuts, and a nice shortcut is to deal with fewer merchants.
     Yes, there are individual differences in ecommerce brains. Some differences are related to age. Younger consumers’ brains are more likely than older consumers’ to enjoy multitasking and so are more likely to stay with your B&M operations even if changing their online supplier.
     For all your customers, and especially for those of older ages, recognize questions related to switching costs:

• “How difficult will it be for me to master skills necessary to carry out the new behavior?”
• “If I’m to shop at another store instead of yours, what time will I spend deciding how to fit that into my schedule?”
• “What social costs would I need to pay? If the other store doesn’t carry the prestige of your shopping place, will I want to hide from my friends what I‘m doing?”

     The Korea/India research findings about switching costs support something called “status quo bias theory,” which says that there are many levers to motivate people to say with their current behavior. Here are some relevant to store patronage:

• Risk avoidance. Staying with the familiar carries known disadvantages. Switching to something different chances unknown disadvantages.
• Responsibility for change. If making the change impacts others, the consumer might be held accountable when anything goes wrong. Blame is less likely if staying with the status quo causes problems, as long as there’s been a history of good outcomes.
• Saving mental energy. There are many important choices to be made every day. Devote thinking to those choices and put off thoughts of changing retailers for now.

     Switch your shoppers’ thinking, and your own thinking, about switching costs in order to achieve what is best all around.

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Minimize Switching Costs
Design Store Operations for Ecommerce Brains

Label Freebies as Samples

Used properly, free samples build future sales of a product. Here are four shopper psychology tips based on academic research and in-store experiences:

• Sampling is especially useful when the product is a new way of satisfying a routine need and the experience of using the product is difficult to describe or demonstrate. An example is Pretzel Crisps, a flat pretzel cracker.
• Make the sampling itself a special event. Put the sampling station in a well-lit, interesting area of your store where a number of people can gather at the same time. We want shoppers to be attracted by seeing others sampling and then not feel crowded when doing the sampling. We want the shoppers to hang around long enough to get their questions answered by friendly staff who are handing out the samples.
• Make it easy to buy the product by having the merchandise for purchase adjacent to the sampling station.
• Sampling a satisfying product at no cost builds the sort of gratitude which can result in the consumer buying not only more of the sampled product at the full price, but also other products from the merchant.

     At the same time, other research findings underline the importance of presenting the free product clearly as a sample. In consumer behavior studies conducted at University of California-Berkeley, University of Southern California, Stony Book University, and Indiana University, researchers found that if a product is offered for free, the shopper becomes less likely to buy the product at full price afterwards. What happens is that when getting it at no charge, consumers conclude consciously or subconsciously that the product must be low quality. This is a terrible first impression to leave with the consumer about a new product. It also makes you look bad for giving what appears to be a low-quality gift.
     The way to avoid this problem, some of the researchers discovered, was to tell the shopper in signage, advertising, and salesperson-customer conversation that the free item is being offered as a sample because you believe the shopper will enjoy the product and want to buy it in the future.
     The free product should be prominently labeled as a sample, and it's best if the free item is in a size smaller than any of the standard sizes offered for sale.

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

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Give Free Samples of New Products
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Slice Off Consumers’ Small-Penis Syndrome

What does penis size have to do with successful retailing?
     I’ll start with the research findings from Royal Hallemshire Hospital, Sheffield, and St James’s Hospital, Leeds, that about 45% of men risk “small-penis syndrome” (SPS). They wish for a more generous endowment. Yes, 45%. Perhaps a long-term opportunity for retailers wanting to stretch their service offerings.
     But I digress.
     How do men handle this concern? For an extended time now, consumer researchers with a psychoanalytic bent have said straight on that the men buy big gas-guzzler cars and large-screen televisions.
     Except they’re buying smaller and smaller computerized devices. What gives?
     Researchers at HEC-Paris and Northwestern University have pulled out the answer: When the large size of a product or package implies power, consumers craving more power go for the large. A set of study participants were offered a choice of different-sized bagel pieces. Those participants who felt powerless chose bigger pieces.
     With men, it might have to do with SPS. But the findings were pretty much the same across genders.
     Since they’d worked with bagels, the HEC/Northwestern researchers applied their findings to addressing the ways in which Americans are supersizing their meals and themselves. But in a recent MediaPost article, one of the researchers, Derek D. Rucker, says that the principles apply to a broad array of products. And that brings us to the puzzle of the computerized devices: When small size implies status, consumers who want more status will forgo the large.
     In another study, participants were offered four sizes of hor d’oeuvres. Some of the people were told that the largest ones had recently been served at a White House event. Others were told that the White House event featured the small hor d’oeuvres.
     The status of being a White House appetizer outflanked the importance of size.
(The research article I cite here was subsequently retracted following the discovery of a set of statistical errors which cannot be explained, since the authors no longer have the data. I’m leaving my reference to this article in place with this notice so that my blog readers coming here via a hyperlink won’t get a search error message.)

     In all this, there are other factors, to be sure. With most product lines, the larger alternative costs more. That gas-guzzler commands a premium for the initial purchase and to keep the tank topped off. People who get the large vehicle project power because of their willingness to spend big. And smaller items which do the job are generally more desired because of convenience, even if the items don’t convey status.
     The relevance of the research findings to successful retailing is in questioning the notion that consumers universally select larger items in order to compensate for insecurity. Often they don’t.

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Label as Small to Increase Trial
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Evaluate the Viability of Brand Extensions

TWICE reports online that Sears Holdings wants to license the Kenmore, Craftsman, and Diehard brand names to manufacturers as part of the company’s financial recovery plan. Flashlight and battery maker Dorcy has already signed on to use Diehard for some of their products.
     When deciding whether to include such brand names in your store’s limited shelf space, you’re walking into the well-worn consumer psychology research area of brand extensions. A general finding is that the extension should fit with the image of the brand personality. Nike probably would do better with treadmills than with cosmetics.
     It appears that Sears won’t place limits on how the brand names are used, so there might be instances of poor fit which you wouldn’t want to include. In their look at the issue of poor fit, researchers at Rutgers University, California State University-Long Beach, and Ohio State University uncovered the existence of Kodak pianos and Buick aspirin as misappropriated brand names.
     Findings from Georgetown University and Chile’s Universidad Adolfo Ibañez indicate you should look at how well-known the brand names of the competition are. They give the fictitious example of Sony binoculars. With this product line, the prototype brands are Tasco and Bushnell, but those two brand names are much less well-known than the Sony name. Therefore, Sony might succeed here. However, if Sony decided to introduce a line of scanners, they’d be going up against prototype brands like HP and Epson, which are very well-known. Sony’s potential for success would not be as good.
     With a questionable-fit brand extension, evaluate both the amount and the nature of advertising support.
     Researchers at Purdue University, Indiana University, and University of Connecticut find that comparative advertising is particularly powerful. But what comparison type is used makes a difference: With the disinfectant wipe product category as an example, for follow-on entrants, such as those from Lysol and Mr. Clean, the comparison should be made to the pioneer product—in this case, Clorox disinfectant wipes—rather than to the parent brand—Lysol cleanser, for instance.
     For a pioneer entrant, comparison advertising is still great, but at introduction, the comparison should be made not to other ways of accomplishing the same function—in this case, disinfecting surfaces—but rather to the existing products that carry that brand name—Clorox bleach, for instance. The objective with the pioneer entrant is to show a favorable comparison to parent brand items.

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Display Unfamiliar Brands with Prototype Brands
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Connect Shoppers to Their Future Selves

Since you plan to be in business well into the future, you’ve an interest in your shoppers appreciating the longer-term benefits of their purchases. The challenge, say researchers at Columbia University and University of Chicago, is that shoppers may have trouble connecting to their future selves.
     Researchers at University of South Carolina agree. They offered a movie pass to theatre patrons one summer. For about half the patrons, getting the movie pass required completing a survey, which took about seven minutes. So that the researchers could compare time with money, a matching set of patrons were offered the movie pass for $3—no survey completion required.
     About half the tickets in each group were marked for use later that summer. The others were marked for use the following fall.
     For those who spent the $3, the percentage of fall ticket usage was the same as that for the summer tickets. People put out the money, and they were going to get their money’s worth. But among the patrons who earned their ticket by spending seven minutes of time, the season of usage made a big difference. People were significantly more likely to end up using the ticket if marked for the summer than if marked for the fall.
     When it comes to time, benchmarks like a change in the season go into defining benefits and value. Money spent in the summer can be redeemed for a reward in the fall, but time spent in the summer tends to lose value as the calendar rolls over to the next season.
     The Columbia/Chicago research findings indicate that a shopper’s connection to a future self can be strengthened by a retailer. In one study, graduating seniors were assigned to read a narrative in either of two versions. The first version described a graduating senior whose identity had been quite fully formed by the college experience. The second version portrayed the senior in the narrative as likely to undergo major changes in identity as a result of graduating.
     Those reading the first version were more likely to choose high-value gift certificates good after one year than did those reading the second version, who were more likely to choose lower-value gift certificates usable immediately.
     Talk with your shoppers about how what they will be in the future is largely shaped by what they are now. This will help them connect with their future selves.

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Clock Customer Actions to Fit Time Metaphors
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