Jeweller - April 2020

Retail Strategy
You don’t have a judge to proclaim your
innocence, so you must instead use
credibility cues – for example, testimonials
and online product reviews from previous
customers – to build your reputation.
Finally, you can change the context of your
customer’s decision-making.
There is a popular anecdote describing a
meeting between a chief financial officer
(CFO) and a chief executive officer (CEO) as
they decide how much to spend on training
their employees.
The CFO says, “What if we train people and
they leave?” The CEO responds, “What if
we don’t, and they stay?”
In other words, changing the context of
the decision-making can be helpful in
encouraging your customer to re-think the
position not to buy.
What if they purchase your product as a
gift, and the recipient doesn’t like it?
On the other hand, what if they don’t buy
it and the recipient is disappointed they
received nothing at all?
All about the angles
One of my hobbies is stone carving: taking
a hammer and chisel to a block of hard
rock to see what emerges.
A mistake in stone carving is to assume
that all stone is the same. In fact, each
piece has its own weaknesses and
strengths.
At first, I must make a few tentative strikes
to allow the stone to reveal something to
me. Once the desired outcome forms in my
mind, I can work towards it.
This is how retailers can approach
behaviour change.
Rather than jumping in with fixed
assumptions, we first need to spend
some time ‘noodling around’ to
understand the person or people we are
trying to influence.
For this task, I use an empathy map
broken into categories, including what
they think and feel, say and do, see and
hear, and their goals.
This tool assists in clarifying the mindset
of the target market or individual
customer, and focuses on the specific
context in which their behaviour is
occurring.
A slab of stone is inert, immovable.
Your customer may seem that way too
– whatever you try, they are not going to
budge.
If you attempt to tackle a slab of stone by
pummelling the centre, it will do one of
two things: resist until you are defeated, or
resist until a fissure forms that destroys it.
In either case, a blunt, frontal assault is
ineffective.
Instead you must use angles, chipping
away at the edges, towards your objective.
The same principle applies to behaviour
change. If you are too blunt or forceful,
your attempts will be resisted.
This is known as reactance, and has
been found to reduce the effectiveness of
advertisements such as Nike’s famous
‘Just Do It’ campaign.
Telling someone they have to do
something, that it will be ‘good for’
them, or even providing a litany of facts
and figures to justify it, is unlikely to be
persuasive.
Instead, the behavioural science-based
approach is to anticipate reasons for
their resistance and devise angles for
addressing each barrier.
There are three reasons people resist:
• Apathy or laziness – they can’t be
bothered to go through the process of
purchasing
• Decision paralysis – they might be
interested but are confused as to what they
need do
• Anxiety and fear – they might be
interested but are worried about
proceeding
Reasons for
resistance
Apathy or
laziness
Process of
purchasing
is too slow or
convoluted
Decision
paralysis
Too many
choices; hard
to compare
options directly
Anxiety
and fear
Overthinking
the decision;
afraid of
making the
‘wrong’ choice
While it takes a certain amount of force
to chip into rock, it’s more about being
precise and consistent, working with the
stone rather than attempting to have it
yield to your will.
With behaviour change, it’s not about how
much money you spend or how loudly you
communicate your message – it’s about
small, well-considered ‘nudges’.
A clear call-to-action button on a website
can impact conversion rates more than a
TV ad – just as opting out being the default
on a form can change an entire country’s
rate of organ donation.
Moving fruit to within arms’ reach in an
office block cafe can change how the entire
workforce eats.
American writer, philosopher and artist
Elbert Hubbard once said, “The sculptor
produces the beautiful statue by chipping
away such parts of the marble block as are
not needed – it is a process of elimination.”
Influencing another person’s behaviour
can seem very complicated, and a natural
tendency is to try to add more information
or interactions.
But as with stone carving, behaviour
change can be more effective through
elimination: eliminating superfluous
information, eliminating unnecessary
choices, and eliminating ‘noise’ that
distracts from the objective.
By focusing your efforts on the three
science-based reasons for resistance
– apathy, paralysis and anxiety – you
can eliminate indecision efficiently
and effectively.
And by reframing your product and your
sales approach, you can change your
customer-jurors’ minds.
BRI WILLIAMS is founder of People
Patterns, a specialist consultancy that
applies behavioural economics to customer
purchasing patterns. briwilliams.com.au
April 2020 | 43