French Kiss Nutrition Notices Goodbye

In providing you advice based on consumer behavior research, I'm attentive to the cultural orientation of the study samples. Asian cultures have different takes on luck and liability than do Western cultures, for instance.
     Researchers from Baruch College, University of California-Berkeley, and San Francisco State University surprised people with promotional gifts. Americans enjoyed their gifts more than did those from Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, or Vietnam. Because the reward appeared to be unearned, the East Asian recipients seemed to feel it produced a menacing imbalance.
     And according to studies at Chinese University of Hong Kong and Lingnan University in Hong Kong, compared with those who identify with predominant North American cultures, your customers who identify with an Asian culture are more likely to forgive flawed service outcomes if they have been granted courtesy and attentiveness.
     Even among Western cultures, consumers show differences significant for your retailing practices. Researchers at University of Minnesota and NEOMA Business School aroused national pride in a group of American and French consumers by showing them cultural symbols—the Statue of Liberty and bald eagle for the Americans, the Eiffel Tower and Gallic rooster for the French.
     All the study participants were then told about a fresh fruit mix and a piece of chocolate cake and asked to predict how much they’d enjoy each. For some of the participants from each culture, what they were told about both items included detailed nutritional information. The question was in what ways, if any, the nutritional information influenced the anticipated enjoyment of the items.
     As in the traditional French kiss, the tongue played a major role. The French consumers, with a heavy heritage of relishing the taste of food, were put off by being asked to process mundane details like health benefits or lack thereof. The predictions of enjoyment for both the fruit and the cake were significantly lower than among the French consumers not given the nutrition information. With the Americans, no real differences were seen between the two groups in predicted enjoyment.
     Then there's the quote attributed to Mark Twain, “The secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.” It appears to me that Mr. Twain, a quintessential American writer whose bibliography includes The Innocents Abroad, in this case came down on the side of the French slant.

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

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Round Out Prices for Feel-Good Buys

When does a price of $10.00 look more appealing to a shopper than a price of $9.99? According to studies at INSEAD-Singapore and Nanyang Technological University, that happens when the purchase will make the shopper feel good. HDTVs, vacation packages, clothing, handbags, and other hedonic items feel more right when the price is rounded.
     The findings are consistent with past research showing how indulgences should be priced at whole-dollar amounts. Consider these as exceptions to the well-documented traditional rule that $3.99 looks significantly better than $4.00 to the shopper, and $499 looks much better than $500.
     Does the traditional rule always hold for mundane products like toothpaste and washing machines? No, not always, say the INSEAD/Nanyang researchers. If the salesperson successfully positions the item as giving pleasure rather than as only utilitarian, a rounded price will project attractiveness.
     The researchers presented consumers with a description of a camera and a sample of photos taken with the camera. For one group, the price of the camera was stated as $101.53, and for the others as $100.00. Then half of the number of participants in each group were asked to consider purchasing the camera for a class project—a mundane use. The other half were asked to consider purchasing the camera for a family vacation—a hedonic use.
     Sure enough, those considering the class project use rated the quality of the sample pictures higher when the camera price was $101.53, while those considering the family vacation use rated the picture quality higher if the price was $100.
     The preference for round prices was also produced when shoppers felt under stress when making selections. Here, the feeling good was the relief which came from completing the task.
     Feeling right from the round and regular applies to package shapes, too. Researchers at University of Georgia and University of Pennsylvania asked consumers to evaluate packages designed to look incomplete. The result of this was a belief among the consumers that the package held a lower quantity compared to packages of equivalent size and weight, but without blanks in the design. It’s as if the missing portion generated feelings in the consumer that part of the contents had leaked out, leaving less behind.
     A byproduct of this perception was how people in the study desired a larger quantity of the contents from an incomplete package than from a complete package. The gap stimulated demand.

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

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Split Your Pants for Hedonic Shoppers

Should a retailer who sells shirts and pants display all available pants in one area and all available shirts in another area, or should the pants be split into groups, with each group having an accompanying assortment of complementary shirts? Should a grocery store stock all yogurt choices in one area and things people might like to have with their yogurt in another area? Or should the yogurts be shelved in groups interspersed with fitting accompaniments?

• Researchers at University of Southern California, University of Pittsburgh, and Wageningen University say it depends on whether shoppers are seeking practical utility or hedonic pleasure. Complement-based store arrangements—each set of pants with a fitting set of shirts, for instance—appeal to hedonic shoppers. Substitute-based store arrangements—all the pants in one area and all the shirts close by, but not intermixed with the pants—appeal to utilitarian shoppers. 
• Study results from University of Washington, University of Iowa, and University of Technology-Sydney indicate that the perceived relative quality of the items matters. With items seen as having only adequate, but not luxury, quality, shoppers are drawn by substantial variety to select from. It’s better to have all available alternatives of a particular item category displayed together. However, with the luxury yogurt brands in the study, the shoppers demanded less variety. Profitability per square foot of shelf space is likely to be greater when promising add-on items are positioned with a limited selection of yogurts. 
• Both these findings hold when the shopper’s concentrating on item selection. With routine or habitual purchases, a shopper often wants an assortment in which items have different brand personalities from each other. An exciting pick after a sincere pick. A rugged one after a sophisticated one. It would fulfill both customers’ and your objectives to have the personality of each category stand out from the personalities of the adjacent ones. Surround the sincere, competent brand with exciting, sophisticated brands say researchers at University of North Carolina, University of Pennsylvania, and Duke University. 
• Still another consideration concerns discounts on bundled purchases. If you set your promotional pricing such that an increased quantity sale of each will produce a greater profit, then feature the discounts on the two categories during the same time period. Otherwise, offer a discount on one of the categories and keep the other at full price, then at a later period, do it the other way around. 

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

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Turn It Around for the Sale

Having an undecided customer hold a pleasure-oriented product makes the customer much more likely to complete the purchase. Not only that, but the customer becomes willing to pay a higher price for the product.
     But there are challenges in you depending on touch as a selling tactic:

• Some products are unpleasant for the customer to touch. 
• Adults vary considerably in the degree of pleasure they derive from touching. 
• A shopper might be offended by a salesperson asking them to hold products before making a purchase. 
• Customers have little interest in an item on a rack or shelf when they’re thinking about who else has touched it. They feel disgusted at the idea the product could have been contaminated by other shoppers. 
• Ecommerce allows few opportunities for the shopper to actually touch the product before purchase. 

     Regarding the last of these, researchers at Texas Tech University assessed two techniques while the online consumer was viewing the item: Zoom in on the image of the item. Rotate the image of the item.
     Of the two, the rotation produced more anticipation of the rewards of owning the product.
     These findings could be generalized to in-store sales as well. There are those times you’ll choose to delay the shopper touching the item. In these cases, gently rotate the item while showing it to the shopper. Or with a large item, have the shopper walk around it for a little while before making contact.
     This is a form of what researchers at University of Oxford and University of Milano call “affective ventriloquism.” Inquiries by those researchers discovered that a salesperson also can achieve the advantages of actual touch by emphasizing touch words—like soft, warm, or fluffy—and by the salesperson running their hands over products as they demonstrate them. Vision and hearing were evoking sensations of feeling the product.
     When you head off the customer touching the item immediately, it doesn’t necessarily mean avoiding head on presentations, however. Consumers who seek power products such as red meat and sport utility vehicles like head-on portrayals.
     Cornell University and University of Michigan researchers showed some consumers pictures of SUVs facing directly toward the viewer, while others were shown side views of the vehicles. The consumers seeing the head-on perspective gave higher average ratings of the SUV on words like “dominant” and “powerful.” With pictures of family sedans, there were no differences.

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

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Buttress Trust with Clarity

“Show me the money” has been part of our cultural lexicon for nearly two decades. Popularized by the 1996 sports film “Jerry Maguire,” the phrase became shorthand for an attitude of, “I’m not depending on trust in our business relationship.”
     Studies at Copenhagen Business School find that this attitude characterizes consumers now in their business relationships with financial institutions. The power of trust is significantly less these days than it was prior to the start of the 2008 financial crisis. People have come to believe their trust in their banks and investment advisors was misplaced before and have come to feel betrayed.
     Research at Athens University of Economics and Business in collaboration with National Bank of Greece indicates that a good way to reestablish the relationship between trust and customer loyalty is to use one of the oldest selling tactics in the world—the foot-in-the-door technique.
     FITD consists of starting out with such a small request that the shopper is very likely to say yes and then using this yes as a base for presenting a series of larger requests. Consumer psychologists have repeatedly found that getting a yes to a small request makes the person much more likely to agree to a larger request if clear payoffs follow that yes to the small request. FITD is a natural when it comes to building trust: Prove you deserve a little trust and the customer is willing to extend you some more rope.
     A difficulty with this, though, is that financial services can be what behavioral economists call “post-experience goods,” in which it’s hard for the consumer to evaluate the payoff until well after the purchase decision. It takes some time to show me the money.
     The solution is to buttress trust with clarity by following Gricean norms. Herbert Paul Grice, a philosopher of language who, in his later years taught at University of California-Berkeley, postulated four norms: Here’s my version for financial institutions and other retailers:

• Relevance. Give enough information to the shopper to allow the shopper to make smart purchase decisions. 
• Parsimony. Limit the amount and pace of information to fit the capabilities and the preferences of the consumer. 
• Truthfulness. Have sufficient evidence for the claims you make ready for presentation to the shopper in manageable chunks if the shopper asks for it. 
• Clarity. Use words, phrasing, and the sequencing of ideas which minimize ambiguity for the shopper. 

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

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Fashion Your Retail Personality

Fit your store’s personality to how your target market members want to see themselves. That relates to the values of your shoppers. What do they consider to be especially important in their lives? Power and strength? Safety and security? Trust? Perseverance? Playfulness? Craftiness? Friendships? Something else altogether? Weave messages about those values into your marketing and your salesperson-to-shopper contacts.
     Research findings from University of Arkansas and Iowa State University indicate that retailers of fashion items should cultivate personalities emphasizing three characteristics:

• Mystery. To what degree do you capture shopper interest by having stories that use the history of the business to project into shoppers' futures? 
• Sensuality. In what ways do you depend on sounds, sights, smells, touches, and/or tastes to leave memories with your shoppers? 
• Intimacy. How well do you arouse commitment to your business by showing empathy for shoppers? 

     These research findings are consistent with what’s called the “Lovemarks” model developed by Kevin Roberts, CEO of global advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi.
     Research at West Virginia University, University of Texas-Austin, and Korea University indicates that if it is the luxury fashion market you’re in, there are six other store personality dimensions on which you should assess yourself, and then project to your shoppers:

• Sincerity. Wholesome, cheerful 
• Excitement. Daring, spirited 
• Sophistication. Upper-class, exclusive 
• Professionalism. Business-like, polished 
• Attractiveness. Enticing, socially safe 
• Materialism. Acquisitive, free-spending 

     The first three of those six dimensions were also identified in earlier research at Stanford University as holding true for all sorts of retailers. The other two in the Stanford set:

• Competency. Reliable, intelligent, successful
• Ruggedness. Outdoorsy, tough 

     Although you’ll want to maintain a consistent personality image for your store, avoid matching too closely the personality of surrounding businesses. Researchers at Northwestern University and Emory University say that even when the stores adjoining yours are selling completely different product lines than you, if the personality of your store is a duplicate, people are more likely to wander off to another neighborhood to continue shopping.
     Another instance of going against the overall personality image is in making charitable contributions. Research findings from North Carolina State University and University of South Carolina indicate that you’ll do best to include charities which don’t fit the personality of the store operations. The reason is that this gives the consumers more of a sense of personal participation in helping the cause. They feel noble, and a sense of nobility increases purchase intentions.

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

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