Tell Me A Story About Me

Marketers know that a story is a good way to engage prospects. But too often the marketer wants to tell a self-serving story about the company instead of about how the company helps the prospect or customer.

Chest-thumping puffery does not sell. Tell me about how you can make me more money, save me some time, provide me work/life balance and I’m listening and more likely to ring the register. Otherwise, save your time and money because I just tuned out.

Do you know why people buy your product? I often do customer interview projects for clients to help them uncover the reasons people buy from them. This is the best way that I have found. But Author Geoff Ayling’s book Rapid Response Advertising provides an excellent list of 51 reasons why people buy. Let’s review a few and maybe you’ll see some that resonate with you:

1. To make more money
2. To save money – this is the most important reason to 14% of the population
3. To attract praise
4. To increase enjoyment
5. To possess things of beauty
6. To avoid criticism
7. To make their work easier
8. To speed up their work
9. To keep up with the Joneses
10. To feel opulent
11. To look younger
12. To become more efficient
13. To buy friendship
14. To avoid effort
15. To escape or avoid pain
16. To communicate better
17. To be in style
18. To avoid trouble
19. To protect their family
20. To express love

Outside The Box

Understanding psychology and human behavior can come in handy for the marketer, particularly those who operate at the retail level. There are a few tricks retailers use that play on your unconscious to relax you, or change your in-store behavior.

Think about babies for a moment. Are you relaxed now? Some stores add baby powder scent to their air conditioning to make people think about newborns. This is supposed to relax them. What do you call a relaxed shopper? A buyer.

Retailers often use other canned smells to make you a more active shopper. Some supermarkets pump the smell of baking bread into their air conditioning all day long. This gives the impression that they are always baking something.

Men present a unique problem to retailers. They tend to walk directly to the item they want, pick it up and walk back the way they came to the register. The “Boomerang Effect”, as it is called, is not good shopping behavior. To maximize shopper and product contact time, retailers place their major items and brands in the middle of aisles to make sure you have to walk the furthest to reach them. Or, often retailers locate men’s items upstairs to keep them in the store longer. This is an idea that was stolen from groceries, which long ago learned to place bread, milk and eggs at the back to make you walk through everything else to get your staples.

In the aisles with more expensive items, groceries often place smaller tiles on the floor. When the shopping cart passes over the smaller tiles the wheels click faster. So, it seems like you are going really fast and you will slow down and spend more time in that aisle. Also, department stores use the transition between carpet and tile to steer customers where they want them to go.

Vanity thy name is shopper. Stores use mirrors to slow you down because you can’t pass one without checking yourself out.

The color purple, not the Oprah movie, the real color is most likely to make you feel like spending money. Restaurants use red to make you excitable, causing you eat and drink more and faster.

Have you ever noticed how few windows usually can be seen from inside a store? This is to remove the shopper from contact with outside stimuli. If it is going dark outside, retailers don’t want you to hurry home to beat the night.

Are there ways to use psychology in your business to affect consumer behavior? Here’s a resource with more information on consumer psychology.