Heat Up Sales Revenues

A Harvard University inquiry came up with examples of how an induced sensation of heat could affect what people end up buying at your store:

• Higher temperatures when shopping—as long as they’re not too high to be pleasant—lead to consumers being more likely to purchase what others in the vicinity are buying. 
• Because the fragrance of cinnamon suggests warmth, pairing that fragrance with the offering of a heating pad will lead to more positive evaluations of the heating pad’s effectiveness. 
• Olay Regenerist facial products are formulated to generate heat when applied as a cue to users that the product is working, thereby increasing the odds of repurchase. 

     These findings support what is referred to by consumer psychologists as “embedded cognition”—how bodily sensations influence purchasing behavior below the level of conscious awareness.
     Use heat to the advantage of your business. Still, stay aware that heat doesn’t always help. “Dog days,” the hottest time of the year wherever in the world, get their name from the rising of Sirius, the Dog Star, just before dawn during summer months in the Northern Hemisphere. As to how Sirius got the name “Dog Star,” that’s a whole different story, since most dogs I know are far from serious in disposition once they get to know you.
     The name “dog days” also refers to a time of sluggish activity and lazy thinking. Shoppers during hot summer months prefer mental shortcuts to detailed analysis in making purchase decisions.

• When the weather is temperate, people would prefer to get their necessary shopping done with so they can move on to leisure activities. 
• Pleasant heat after a time of less pleasant cold raises people’s spirits, and happier people get more interested in shopping. 
• Prolonged high heat wearies shoppers’ muscles, thereby making them less alert and less resistant to spotting weak reasons for buying or not buying. 

     During the dog days, present succinct arguments for buying.
     A University of California-San Diego researcher explored contrasts in heat as he analyzed the enrollment decisions of 1,284 college prospects at a campus known for its academic strengths and recreational gaps. If the day of the college prospect’s exploratory visit to the campus was especially cloudy, the odds that the prospect would choose to apply to that campus increased markedly. It seems that when the dog days are missing and perhaps missed, consumers are more interested in getting serious.

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

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Use Synesthesia to Reinforce Store Image
Dog Decision Rigor During Dog Days
Cool Summertime Shoppers

Know How Shopper Fungibility Functions

Most salespeople have experienced situations where a shopper seems anxious to switch purchase categories. After making a selection of one sort, they resist entreaties to buy an add-on or another item in that category, but are interested in purchases from another department of the store.
     Research at University of Notre Dame indicates that in such situations, purchase categories include not only the nature of the item, but also the nature of the reason for making the purchase. It has to do with fungibility, and knowing how fungibility works helps you open the shopper’s mind to continued buying.
     “Fungibility” means substitutability. At the extreme, “shopper fungibility” means the person maintains one overall budget for expenditures. Your shopper believes that the more money she spends on clothes, the less she’ll have available to spend on entertainment, for instance. A dollar spent on one item could have brought equal pleasure being spent on another item.
     It might seem that shoppers fully feeling fungibility would buy less than shoppers who have different categories of expenditures. When there are different categories, a shopper can dip into each one without it interfering with the others, you might think. However, research at University of Chicago found that when shoppers compartmentalize their expenditures, they become more like tightwads. They end up consuming less than they wish they had.
     The Notre Dame studies reveal a way around. If you can show the shopper a different type of reason for buying another item in the same item category, the shopper becomes much more willing to accept. Here’s my version of the four types of reasons identified by the researchers:

• Sustaining. “What you have now meets your current needs, and by purchasing this other item, you’ll be providing for the future.” 
• Economizing. “By purchasing this item at the sale price, you’ll be economizing.” 
• Rewarding. “Here’s an item you might want to purchase to reward yourself.” 
• Treating. “Now that you’ve found one that fits your needs so well, consider purchasing this adjacent item to give as a gift.” 

     After a customer purchases an item because of economizing, for example, they become a little less likely to purchase another item for economizing compared to an interest in purchasing it for one of the other three reasons. It’s as if there are four different buckets through which disposable income is drawn and what happens to the money in each bucket is somewhat independent.

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

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Loosen Up Tightwads’ Wallets 
Add Shopper Fun with Fungibility 
Add Variety to Shoppers’ Thinking
Slacken Consumers’ Undervaluing of Time

Steer Shoppers Away from Settling

When consumers learn that an item you carry is in scarce supply, they get emotionally aroused. Researchers at American University and University of Arizona found that one result of this is that the difference in preference between a sought item and the other alternatives grows. Therefore, the degree of disappointment if the item ends up out-of-stock (OOS) is more keen.
     You don’t want disappointment generating irritation directed at your store. To head this off, take personal responsibility for the OOS. University of Bologna research indicates that outrage about the outage will be less if the salesperson says, “I didn’t adequately anticipate….,” rather than, “We didn’t adequately anticipate….”
     Then be ready to steer the shopper toward a wholly different product category than the one they came in for. It should be a product category addressed to meeting the same need, such as bringing joy to the recipient of an intended gift. But because the news of scarcity had led to the second-best being devalued, don’t encourage the consumer to settle for that one. There’s more likely to be buyer’s regret.
      The American University / Arizona researchers explain their results using an example, which I’ll adapt here: A shopper comes into your store looking for an expensive pen to give as a gift to a friend. After evaluating the available alternatives, the shopper narrows the choices to two, both of which have an extra-fine felt tip. The only difference between the two is the ink color, which the shopper says is not that important.
     But when the shopper decides on the pen with the blue ink, he’s told it is temporarily out of stock. He’s asked if he’d like to place an order, and he’ll be notified when the pen arrives. He replies that he can’t wait that long. The salesperson—knowing the value of selling substitutability—offers the shopper the extra-fine felt tip pen with the black ink.
     However, like a majority of the participants in the American University / Arizona study, the shopper goes off in a different direction, such as purchasing a fancy ballpoint pen with blue ink. Because of the out-of-stock, the blue ink color becomes more important than the felt tip.

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

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Control Out-of-Stock Irritation
Take Personal Responsibility for OOSs
Offer Late Alphabet Customers Head Starts

Ease Purchasers’ Worry About Explaining

Why is it that a shopper will select an item from your store that both they and you know is not the best one for them? In answering that question, we’ll want to exercise some humility. We may think we know what’s best for the customer when, in fact, we don’t. We may think that the shopper agrees with us as to what’s the superior item when, in fact, they don’t.
     There are instances in which consumers buy a unsuitable item in order to push back against what they perceive as excessive sales pressure. It’s called reactance. But there are many other instances in which reactance isn’t the motivating force.
     Researchers at University of Cologne and Jacobs University found that one of those motivations is a need to have something to talk about. Participants in their studies sometimes preferred an objectively inferior alternative because the purchase enabled them to form an opinion, with both positives and negatives. The near-perfect alternative didn’t allow for as much conversation. We’re social animals, so we’re more comfortable when we can discuss our choices with others.
     We also worry about social risk. People will hesitate buying a product or service when they fear what others will think of them if the purchase becomes known. They’ll be called on to explain themselves.
     Ease the concerns by giving purchasers easily remembered explanations for why the choice is best.
     Not that those explanations will always be accurate even when coming from experts. Researchers at University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign, New York University, and University of British Columbia found that product and service experts don’t stay sufficiently familiar with details of their logic. They’re accustomed to giving advice from habit rather than tracing out the details each time. If pinned down by requests for those details, experts often make up reasons for their conclusions.
     What’s worse is that the experts tend to consider the false reasons as genuine. They’ll create memories on the spot and then accept those memories as real. They don’t know they’re lying.
     Staff members identified as experts are proud of the designation and feel accountable for advice they give. When they can’t recall details in their reasoning, they assume it must have slipped from mind. They dig deeper to fill in the gaps, not realizing the deep digging leads their brains to subconsciously create phony recollections.
     The alibi for purchase could be interesting to talk about with others, but phony.

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

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React When Faced with Reactance
Ease Social Risk by Accommodating Shyness
Articulate the Reasoning Experts Use
Appeal to the Heart

Sweeten Treat Sales by Being a Sweet Thing

When consumers feel a retailer has been sweet to them, they’re more likely to buy sweets from the retailer.
     Participants in the University of Washington study were assessed for the emotions of general happiness, pride, and gratitude. All the participants were then offered regular salted pretzels and sweet chocolate-covered pretzels. As predicted, those who felt grateful were substantially more likely to eat the sweets than those who were proud or generally happy.
     The researcher’s explanation is that when salespeople treat consumers sweetly, the consumers say to themselves, “That happened because I’m deserving of sweetness,” and the internal talk relaxes resistances to indulgences.
     It’s not only sweet treatment by salespeople which has this effect in a store. When shoppers perceive sweet closeness with the people around them, they also are more likely to succumb to sweet treats. Gratitude draws us closer to others, and the closeness influences us.
     Researchers at Erasmus University-Rotterdam, Aston University, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven report that when a consumer pulls their arm toward themselves, the consumer becomes more likely to desire short-term pleasure, such as purchasing candy, over longer-term benefits, such as weight control. From infancy on, we subconsciously associate pulling our arms toward ourselves with acquiring pleasurable objects.
     This works the other way around, too. Pushing an object away from ourselves, such as when navigating a large shopping cart through an aisle, subconsciously potentiates the brain traces of rejecting items which are not immediately pleasurable. This pushing effect is nowhere near as strong as the pulling effect. Sugar has a substantial power of attraction. Still, the Erasmus /Loughborough / KI Leuven researchers hypothesize that requiring a customer to shove open a door to enter a business lowers the likelihood of the purchase of pleasure oriented items.
     Although bringing sensual pleasure, you selling sugary sweets probably isn’t in the best health interests of your customers. So it’s nice to know that the University of Washington researchers concluded that dried fruit with no added sugar could satisfy the urge.
     The greater the extent to which customers say they’re grateful to the retailer for helping to solve a problem or satisfy a need, the more likely the customers are to praise the retailer to others and say they intended to shop with that retailer again. Treat your shoppers in ways which elicit their gratitude. Then be sure you have for sale a selection of treats, including healthy sweet things.

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

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Go for Customer Gratitude and Guilt 
Infect Your Store with Enthusiasm
Stop the Nagging Among Shoppers
Push Shopping Baskets’ Pull for Sweet Items

Abandon Abundance After Attracting

In running your retail business, you expect decisive advice. If I throw you too many “On the one hand…, but on the other hand….” tactics, you’ll get irritated. That’s why I’ve been clear in the past in advising you that presenting an abundance of choices to the shopper who is ready to buy can sabotage the sale. The shopper gets confused.
     But the truth is that behind the curtain, I’ve encountered over the years a number of research studies saying that the more choices you give the shopper, the better the selling probability. Now a report in Journal of Consumer Psychology says that those studies’ conclusions were misleading.
     This report from Northwestern University and Compass Lexecon was a meta-analysis of almost 100 studies of possible choice overload involving a total of more than 7,200 consumers. The evidence is clear that choice overload does happen. Moreover, the new report uses the abundance of study data to say when the phenomenon is most likely:

• The shopper lacks clear decision criteria 
• There’s high time pressure 
• Comparing the items requires mental effort 
• The shopper wants the choice to be easy 

     You might consider this list of four as no more than glorified common sense—another danger I must avoid in giving you advice. But together, those four support advice from other researchers: Studies at Yale University, University of New South Wales, and Peking University indicate that you can avoid choice overload by encouraging the shopper to think in more abstract ways, such as about features the items have in common rather than considering each item in the choice as unique.
     Similarly, researchers at University of Delaware and University of Pennsylvania discovered that a way to keep shoppers engaged is to encourage them to focus on product features rather than item alternatives. With the features in mind, the person can start rating each alternative until coming to a decision.
     Large product assortments attract shoppers to a store, but once there, many of the shoppers avoid making a purchase because they’re not sure what’s best. Nagged by indecision, they might leave the store.
     In your marketing, point out how you offer a large number of choices. When a browser starts the shopping with you, display categories within categories to highlight the abundance of alternatives.
     Then stay alert to evidence of choice overload. If you spot the evidence, abandon the appeal of abundance.

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

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Take Occam’s Razor to Your Shoppers
Abstract Shoppers to Avoid Choice Overload
Ease Maximizing by Using Choice Overload
Dissolve Decision Paralysis