January 16, 2008
Spotting the Impulse Buyer
By Tom Ryan
A study from the University of New Hampshire revealed that shoppers who exhibit distinct cognitive skills are more apt to be impulse buyers, and suggests that salespeople can be trained to spot these tendencies in shoppers to maximize sales.
Observable Cognitive Function in the Purchasing Process: A Study of Quickly Identifying Impulse Buying Behaviors in Consumers was conducted by students in adjunct professor Chuck Martin’s class at the Whittemore School of Business and Economics.
The students found that shoppers who exhibit either high levels of flexibility or low levels of self-restraint are most likely to make an impulse buy.
Highly flexible customers browse extensively, tend to walk around the store,
and are not loyal to any one brand. They are open to suggestions from sales
associates and easily persuaded to purchase the generic, less-costly version
of the item or even to trade up. If the customers can’t find the product they
want to purchase, they tend to purchase another similar product.
Consumers with
low-self restraint randomly look at products; walk through the aisles grabbing
different items, and often backtrack to get an item to purchase. Sales are
very attractive to these consumers, whether or not they planned to purchase
the item. These consumers often exhibit the “oohh” factor, literally making
such an exclamation when they find a good sale.
On the other hand, those showing signs that they are highly self-restrained are probably not worth the bother for sales people. They may browse extensively and comparison shop, but will leave the store empty handed if they don’t find exactly what they want. They can be openly difficult and stubborn. These customers are “on a mission” – they know what they want and walk directly to the department of the store with the item. If it’s not available, they will turn around and walk out.
Fifty students divided into teams of 10 conducted their research at businesses throughout the New Hampshire Seacoast. Researchers observed shopping behavior, followed by short surveys to validate the cognitive functions of self-restraint or flexibility associated with the observed behavior. In 95 percent of the cases, the observed behavior was validated by the survey results.
The students theorized that salespeople could be trained to spot these cognitive skills in shoppers, thus improving their ability to help customers and increase the salesperson’s efficiency and effectiveness.
“The researchers found that these impulse and non-impulse behaviors in shoppers can be identified in less than a minute, which could instantly indicate to a salesperson who is most likely to listen to their sales advice and who is not,” said Prof. Martin in a statement.
Discussion Questions: Should sales associates be encouraged and trained to recognize cognitive signs of shopper behavior? What else would you like to learn from studies of this kind?
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Salesmanship has become such a lost art in corporate retail that a study like this can be thought of as illuminating. On the other hand, walk into Nordstrom and observe their salespeople observing, and working with their customers. Salesmanship lives.
Or walk into any local small or independent retailer, and watch the owner and his/her team work with customers. In these stores, salesmanship hasn’t been found because it was never lost.
Salespeople can be trained to do a lot of things, including barking for their dinner, but the idea of teaching them to recognize cognitive behavior in shoppers seems like stuffing ten pounds of training into a five-pound bag. The way to do this is to offer the training to those who are interested. Those will be your best salespeople.
This question is really a no brainer. If a chain wants sales to increase and transactions to increase and the basket to increase then there is no choice but to train the sales associate in spotting and capitalizing on shopper behavior. Body language and comments from customers are the key to providing outstanding service which will translate into sales.
Anyone working on commission will tell you that knowing your customer is critical. I say that this applies to anyone who works with customers and sells more than one SKU. This ‘training’ should take place from day one as part of a comprehensive customer interaction program.
In my thousand or so years of retail experience I have come to the conclusion that the type of sales person who can recognize and latch onto this type of customer psychology is born, not taught. Courtesy, and many other useful techniques and sales skills can be taught but not this, so don’t bother even trying.
I would venture that there is a lot more work to do in this area that gets deeper into categories before a marketer will embrace and apply this type of learning, but I do agree that pattern recognition could be very useful in sales training. Best Buy has done a good job of this in training associates how to quickly recognize and interface with its core shopper segmentation model, with good results.
Training sales people to spot ‘impulse buyers’ may be a great move, but on the flip side, it entails training costs and increases retailer dependency on personnel efficiency and skill.
On the other hand, investing in technology that makes it easier for Sales Associates to spot the best customers entering the stores can be invaluable. Instead of just using loyalty cards to drive incentives at the checkout counter (reactive targeting), maybe retailers could leverage advances technology like RFID to proactively differentiate ‘impulse’ buyers from ‘mission’ shoppers using historical information and prompt sales associates to target them more effectively.
Of course there may be legal and privacy concerns that may not make such a strategy viable, but it is an interesting use for RFID, I think.
Great salespeople have been sizing people up for 5,000 years. The University of New Hampshire research outlines a scientific way to find susceptible shoppers. Great salespeople do this instinctively. This type of research may help accelerate sales training.
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Salesmanship has become such a lost art in corporate retail that a study like this can be thought of as illuminating. On the other hand, walk into Nordstrom and observe their salespeople observing, and working with their customers. Salesmanship lives.
Or walk into any local small or independent retailer, and watch the owner and his/her team work with customers. In these stores, salesmanship hasn’t been found because it was never lost.
Salespeople can be trained to do a lot of things, including barking for their dinner, but the idea of teaching them to recognize cognitive behavior in shoppers seems like stuffing ten pounds of training into a five-pound bag. The way to do this is to offer the training to those who are interested. Those will be your best salespeople.
This question is really a no brainer. If a chain wants sales to increase and transactions to increase and the basket to increase then there is no choice but to train the sales associate in spotting and capitalizing on shopper behavior. Body language and comments from customers are the key to providing outstanding service which will translate into sales.
Anyone working on commission will tell you that knowing your customer is critical. I say that this applies to anyone who works with customers and sells more than one SKU. This ‘training’ should take place from day one as part of a comprehensive customer interaction program.
In my thousand or so years of retail experience I have come to the conclusion that the type of sales person who can recognize and latch onto this type of customer psychology is born, not taught. Courtesy, and many other useful techniques and sales skills can be taught but not this, so don’t bother even trying.
I would venture that there is a lot more work to do in this area that gets deeper into categories before a marketer will embrace and apply this type of learning, but I do agree that pattern recognition could be very useful in sales training. Best Buy has done a good job of this in training associates how to quickly recognize and interface with its core shopper segmentation model, with good results.
Training sales people to spot ‘impulse buyers’ may be a great move, but on the flip side, it entails training costs and increases retailer dependency on personnel efficiency and skill.
On the other hand, investing in technology that makes it easier for Sales Associates to spot the best customers entering the stores can be invaluable. Instead of just using loyalty cards to drive incentives at the checkout counter (reactive targeting), maybe retailers could leverage advances technology like RFID to proactively differentiate ‘impulse’ buyers from ‘mission’ shoppers using historical information and prompt sales associates to target them more effectively.
Of course there may be legal and privacy concerns that may not make such a strategy viable, but it is an interesting use for RFID, I think.
Great salespeople have been sizing people up for 5,000 years. The University of New Hampshire research outlines a scientific way to find susceptible shoppers. Great salespeople do this instinctively. This type of research may help accelerate sales training.