last word
The last WORD
Feeling is believing! Retailers must emotionally engage with customers.
By Mark Dickens
Customer behaviour specialist, Mark Dickens explains why the influences behind consumers’ purchases are more complex than many realise and why an emotions are an increasingly powerful selling factor.
Mark Dickens is a customer behaviour specialist and director of Wanda Communications. He will be speaking at AQUA 2010, 6th October, Telford.
T
he concept of ‘customer relationship’ for many consumers feels more like that of a one-night-stand - once the retailer has them in the door it just rolls over and goes to sleep! ‘Relationship’ implies a two-way commitment between the customer and retailer, but sadly the most common relationship between customer and retailer is a feeling of ambivalence. Very few hardware and garden brands can claim their relationship has genuine customer ‘engagement’ and even fewer have fans on Facebook. What’s important to realise is
“B&Q discovered that the typical decision maker in home improvement was usually a woman. She started out by choosing the colour of the cushions and didn’t give a monkey’s about how it was made! Not good news for a brand built upon practicality.”
that it’s not all about customer service levels or what you do for your customers. Building true customer engagement is about how you make your customers ‘feel’ about themselves when they shop, and not how they feel about your brand. Most brands know, (or assume they know), why customers buy their products on a functional level. Much less is known about the ‘emotional’ experience a customer goes through and how retailers can overcome ‘emotional’ barriers to purchase. When customers have a change
50 Garden & Hardware News
of heart about buying at the last minute, it is usually due to the retailer’s own ineptitude. Hesitation, doubt and a lack of reassurance are the most common reasons for a crisis of customer confidence and ‘bailing out’ of buying. Just go and sit outside the fitting rooms at Next on a Saturday afternoon. You will hear endless variations of the “does my bum look big in this?” question, followed by an uncertain look and an abandoned purchase. As customers we like familiarity
and routine, but the paradox is we also hate it. We’re excited by change and like to live in a dynamic world where we can experience new things, but we’re also wary of change. Customer behaviour exists in a constant state of flux between these two mindsets; it’s what makes us hard to please and easy to irritate all at the same time. The tricky question for retailers is how to keep us happy, at least for long enough to buy something. The simple answer is to make it easy for us to choose, tell us what we should buy, why we should buy it and most importantly reassure us to feel good about our decision. Historically, the garden,
hardware and pet retail sector has not been in the vanguard of customer savvy. Often businesses tend to focus on the challenges of ‘buying’ rather than the dark arts of selling, and there is little time or money to invest in understanding customers. Hardware stores and
garden centres have become a collection of brand ‘fortresses’ rather than logical categories, leaving the poor old customer to do all the hard work. Faced with the risk of buying the wrong product or paying the wrong price, doubt takes over and the customer abandons the purchase. But even the larger retailers in this sector can get assumptions about customers wrong. B&Q’s big ‘penny-dropping’ moment was when they discovered that the typical decision maker in home improvement wasn’t a functional ‘You can do it!’ man. It was usually an emotional ‘I can choose it’ woman. She started out by choosing the colour of the cushions and didn’t give a monkey’s about how it was made! Not good news for a brand built upon practicality and function to be suddenly confronted with a future selling propositions rather than plasterboard. Unsurprisingly ‘You can do it!’ is no longer the line of the slightly softer, cushion selling B&Q. Brands usually have insight into how well their consumers understand their products, but not how they feel about buying them. The reality is that any brand is just one of many fishing for the hapless customer in a world full of messages. Considering the ‘emotional process’ of shopping rather than just the functional might stop some would-be customers slipping off the hook. ■
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