Use Synesthesia to Reinforce Store Image

Synesthesia is the cross-sensory phenomenon where certain sounds produce in the shopper’s brain perceptions of colors, each sound bringing forth a particular hue. Or how the sounds of music can arouse sensations of taste.
     Synesthesia can be used to reinforce the image you’d like your store to project. In university laboratories and retail field settings, researchers at Freie Universität Berlin and Technische Universität Berlin exposed consumers to different feelings of surface hardness or to different temperatures. The results of the studies indicate that greater amounts of hardness make consumers somewhat more likely to think of a retail business as rugged. Higher temperatures—as long as they’re not too high to be pleasant—make consumers more likely to think of a retail business as having a warm personality.
     Sophisticated brain mapping technologies allow for an explanation of synesthesia in terms of adjacent and overlapping anatomical pathways. Other explanations concern the associations among tastes, smells, textures, sights, and sounds which we’ve learned over our lifetimes as consumers. Taste can be stimulated by verbal descriptions, not just by the sensory experiences themselves. Consumer researchers also refer to this as “affective ventriloquism.” And the more of these senses that are pleasantly stimulated, the more likely the shopper’s movement toward the sale.
     The quality of background music in a restaurant influences gustatory experiences when eating and thereby, the image the diner carries away as the restaurant image. Specifically, research from Oxford University finds:

• Sweet tastes and sour tastes are accentuated by higher-pitched music 
• Bitter, smoky, and woody tastes come through better with lower-pitched music 
• Piano or woodwind strengthens fruity flavors 

     Referring to multiple senses might add to affective ventriloquism. University of Michigan researchers presented one of two chewing gum ads to consumers. The first version read “Stimulate your senses.” The other ad mentioned only taste, reading “Long-lasting flavor.” All the study participants then sampled the gum.
     Those people reading the multiple-sensory version before the sampling gave higher ratings to the flavor of the gum. The researchers repeated the multiple-sensory versus taste-only advertising/sampling with potato chips and with popcorn. The results were fundamentally the same.
     Use descriptions that appeal to the full range of sensations in your ads, promotional materials, signage, and packaging text or menu text. Then provide in-store sensory experiences to reinforce your business’s image. You’ll gain an edge at the time the consumer samples your store and the items you sell.

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

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Trade On Trader Joe’s Staff Advantages

It all began as a brotherly quarrel between retailers about selling cigarettes in their stores. Theo Albrecht thought it would be a highly profitable idea. Karl Albrecht was concerned that carrying cigarettes would cause high losses from theft. The disagreement became sufficiently disagreeable for the two to decide to go their separate ways when it came to opening up new stores. Theo went for Continental Europe, while Karl took the UK, Australia, and the U.S.
     You might recognize Albrecht as the name behind the highly successful Aldi chain. As it turned out, in 1979, Theo also became the name behind the much smaller California grocery chain Trader Joe’s. The brother who’d favored selling cigarettes grew a business customers associate with health.
     Now a survey of 6,600 consumers by Market Force Information finds that customers also associate Trader Joe’s with cleanliness, courtesy, accurate pricing, and fast checkout. Of the grocery stores assessed, it was at the top for “atmosphere.”
     A major reason is how retailers like Trader Joe’s treasure their talented staff. Pay for instance. At Trader Joe’s, full-time employees start at $40,000 or more per year. Sales per labor hour are more than 40% above that at an average grocery store, where starting salaries are about half as much.
     Benefits for instance. Another grocery chain, WinCo Foods, contributes 20% of an employee’s total yearly pay into a pension plan, according to an Idaho Statesman article. There are product clerks and cashiers who have retirement accounts in excess of $1,000,000. Full medical benefits are available to employees who average at least 24 hours per week. WinCo—a name suggested by the employees as a short version of Winning Company—is growing and popular.
     Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology bemoan the profitability opportunities retailers miss when they shortchange staff on income, employee benefits, availability of full-time hours, predictable work schedules, in-service training, and opportunities for promotion. Among the retailers they studied, for every $1 bump up in payroll, monthly sales rose between $4 and $28.
     The MIT researchers spotted a particular danger with retailers who set expenditures for employees as a percentage of sales. When sales drop, staff are paid less and there are fewer work hours for the next time period. The rear-view-mirror fallacy is that the retailer is assuming sales won’t increase in the months ahead if there are staff working who are dedicated to the store’s profitability.

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Balance Online Text & Graphics Strategically

What should be the balance between text and graphics in your email ads? Researchers at Emory University, Indiana University, and University of British Columbia say the answer depends on what you want the consumer to do and whether it’s a new or previous customer.

• If you’re aiming for the email to link to an online purchase, include more text than pictures. This is true with both prospective and previous customers. 
• If you want to open a correspondence in which you’ll encourage a new customer to visit your bricks-and-mortar store, use more pictures than text in the email ad. 
• To open that correspondence with a previous customer, the text-heavy and the picture-heavy emails did equally well. 

     The data for the study were responses to email ads from a fashion retailer which sells clothing and accessories for special events. Your results might vary if you retail other types of merchandise.
     With website ads, it is the informative text shoppers will focus on, and viewers want to easily read and interact with that text to get more information. Easy interaction means making it unambiguous what can be clicked and what the click will give you, for instance.
     Eye tracking research found that about 52% of viewers looked at an ad containing solely text. When the text was superimposed on a graphic or image, the viewership percentage dropped to 35%, and with animation, viewership was only 29%.
     In the studies, the average time spent looking at a web ad was about one-third of a second. Other researchers find this is enough time for the ad to have a subconscious effect on shoppers. When consumer psychologists talk about priming a shopper, we’re usually referring to planting an idea in such a way that the customer doesn’t recognize it’s being done. Research finds that delivering the prompt below the level of awareness makes the prompt more influential over a shopper’s behavior. When a shopper is aware of the priming, he’s more likely to feel manipulated and fight back. Subconscious primes result in fewer counterarguments.
     All this is enough for building intentions to visit your store or purchase what you offer, with the consumer to act on those intentions in the future. But if you want more immediate results, you’ll want to get the website visitor involved beyond a fraction of a second. The right picture accompanied by the right text can prolong the consumer’s attention.

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Effect Advantages of Network Effects

Carry top-quality products in your store only if there’s a profitability advantage. The advantage could come because shoppers pay a higher profit margin to you for those items. Or it could come, even if shoppers don’t buy the top-quality items, because their presence attracts shoppers.
     For certain categories of products, shoppers’ willingness to pay more for higher quality depends on the stage of the product life cycle. During those stages when quality counts for less, your profitability’s likely to be better when you aim for and advertise about other purchase benefits. You can then pay suppliers for merchandise which is of adequate, but not superior, quality and split the cost savings with the consumer.
     With product categories which derive benefits from communications among users—such as video games, sporting equipment, and hobby collectibles—one purchase motivation is what consumer psychologists call the “network effects.”

• Being able to use or exchange the product with others 
• The ability to learn from others about features and usage of the product 
• The availability of ancillary items—such as instructional aids and methods of customizing—because of the size of the market 
• Interest in forming specialized user groups, again more likely because of the number of overall users. 

     Researchers at Bradley University and University of Oklahoma find that with these sorts of items, network effects become more important than product quality during what are called the Growth and the Maturity stages of the product life cycle.
     Marketing researchers describe a total of four stages in a product’s life cycle:

• Introduction. When the product category first appears in the marketplace, the high quality of the offering in your store will be a distinctive advantage. Go for quality. 
• Growth. As the new category is accepted by consumers, profits for the first supplier increase when sales blossom. Competitors appear, giving you the opportunity to consider alternatives which are not of superior quality, but are of lower cost. 
• Maturity. Over the course of this stage, sales of the product category will slow and variations of the basic models proliferate. Knockoffs of inferior quality appear. Avoid these versions while continuing to describe the network effect benefits of what you do stock. 
• Decline. The product category dies. Not every category goes through the decline—or any of the other three stages, for that matter. And those that do might emerge in the future with nostalgia as well as network effect appeal. 

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Look Out for Ugly Shoppers!

It might be difficult for you and your staff to look directly at someone is who physically quite unattractive. But when serving an ugly shopper, check yourself as to whether you’re doing a proper job of carefully looking after the sales potential.
     A good body of consumer behavior research confirms that good bodies draw special attention in the store. The physically attractive get served more quickly than those of average appearance, and they are more likely to have special requests honored. Whereas onlookers may stigmatize customers using small-denomination discount coupons, those who are highly attractive don’t get stigmatized, according to research at University of Alberta and University of Manitoba.
     Consumers who have a minor imperfection in appearance, such as mismatched ear lengths, often develop enhanced leadership skills. Those are the customers who will negotiate well, make good decisions, and, if served properly, recommend your store to others.
     But being physically unattractive brings worse than neutral or lackadaisical attention to the shopper. Research findings from Michigan State University and University of Notre Dame indicate that these shoppers will be the targets of rudeness and exploitation. The cause-and-effect are not clear. It’s possible, for example, that a long history of being shunned or ridiculed has generated from physical ugliness an interpersonal ugliness which brings out the worst in salespeople. Also please keep in mind that the study conclusions refer to tendencies, not what’s true in every case.
     Still, the contribution of the research is in reminding us of the strength and the subconscious quality of the tendency. The best response? I’ll name it “The Phantom of the Opera Method.” In the Andrew Lloyd Weber production, when Christine Daaé looks through and beyond her repulsion at the appearance of Phantom, she expresses tenderness.
     I wouldn’t advise that you or your sales staff hug any shopper you don’t know well, regardless of the shopper’s degree of physical appeal. However, a virtual hug could work fine.

• Shake hands, bump fists, place a hand on the arm—whatever is culturally and socially appropriate 
• Reach out toward customers with palms facing upward, or whatever else in the customer’s culture projects a welcoming attitude 
• Maintain the style of culturally appropriate eye contact to stay psychologically in touch 

     Moving through and beyond the subconscious impulse to look away empowers us to honor the value of each individual who enters our stores. That’s surely helpful for a good living.

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

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Sow Trade-Ins with Social Responsibility

Encouraging trade-ins is a fine way to build your sales. Adding a socially responsible angle enhances temptation in the shopper.
     The Boeing Company is going at it big scale if you consider the very large economy size of the item. Bloomberg Businessweek says Boeing is buying up old 747 models from major airlines in order to create demand for the new 747-8. The social responsibility benefit: Superior fuel economy.
     A few years ago, The Home Depot ran a campaign inviting customers to bring in old power drills, broken or not, to get 15% off on a cordless lithium-ion power drill, advertised as better for the environment. Later, they invited people to bring in their old Christmas lights for a discount on an energy-efficient LED set. Around the same time, Toys”R”Us urged consumers to trade in old cribs, car seats, and other baby items for a 20% credit toward items which had been stocked since past product recalls.
     If you use this type of tactic:

• Decide how you will dispose of the trade-ins. During the 2009 U.S. “Cash for Clunkers” promotion, auto dealers were compensated by the federal government for scrapping the vehicles. Boeing plans to sell the old 747’s to smaller airlines. But what would you do with a bunch of old broken drills? 
• Tell shoppers how even a single trade-in makes a difference. So in advertising, store signage, and personal selling, say things like how many extra hours of HDTV watching customers get with the energy they’ll save using the new Christmas lights. 
• If you’re featuring the trade-in program as a promotion instead of an ongoing business practice, set a time limit and give it a distinctive name. The “Power Drill Trade In, Trade Up,” “Eco Options Christmas Light Trade In,” and “Toys“R”Us Great Trade-In” were each given a two-week to four-week span. The time limit and the distinctive name protect against long-term consumer devaluation of product types purchased with the discount. Time limits also stimulate participation. 
• The general consumer psychology rule for trade-ins of items where depreciation is slow is to pay amply for the trade-in contingent on the shopper paying a relatively high price for the replacement item. However, when selling based on social responsibility, you need not pay as dearly for the trade-in. 

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