Research that Will "Up" Your Sales
by Kevin Hogan
Page 2
How Do You Utilize This Information?
Your clients or future clients fall into one of the these categories. If they aren't taking advantage of enough of your services, i.e. they are below normal....and you make it known in some logical way, they are going to give you more business.
If your clients or future clients are giving you far more business than the average, you may not want to tell them that, unless it is EVIDENT that the rest of the world, or his customer or competitors or whoever he needs to feel good before, sees what he has done. In other words, if it's just you and your client, shut up or you'll lose business. If you can give them an award, recognition that is seen by others, lauded at the meeting....then by all means do so, and you will reinforce the continuance of business.
The same is true of course, in getting business in the first place.
Remember, most people want to be normal.
So, when we are given information that underscores our deviancy, the natural impulse is to get ourselves as quickly as we can back toward the center.
How Do Marketers Use This Info?
Marketers know about this impulse, and a lot of marketing makes use of social norms. This is especially true of campaigns targeting some kind of public good: reducing smoking or binge drinking, for example, or encouraging recycling.
The problem with these campaigns is that they often do not work. Indeed, they sometimes appear to have the opposite of their intended effect.
Why would this be? Psychologist Wesley Schultz of California State University, San Marcos believes that despite the fact that we want to be normal, most people are very bad at estimating what normal human behavior really looks like.
For example, many people probably think it's typical to spew 11 tons of carbon into the world every year, while others might think that a couple tons is probably closer to the mark. But, when Al Gore tells us that the national average is in fact 7.5 tons, he likely is sparking two very different reactions: Some feel guilty for being so gluttonous. But others probably react: whew, did something right for a change.
Some may adjust their thermostats out of guilt, but those feeling self-righteous are not going to do that. It would not make any sense.
Indeed, Schultz and his colleagues suspect that people who are already performing better than the norm may also adjust--but in a socially undesirable way. That is, they also move toward the center, seeking out the average, but in their case by increasing their energy use. This boomerang effect could in theory offset any greening of behavior and account for the overall ineffectiveness of such marketing strategies.
Schultz decided to test this idea in the real world.
How did the experiment work?
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Kevin Hogan
Network 3000 Publishing
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Eagan, MN 55123
(612) 616-0732
