The buyer you never meet
To proceed with a purchase, we need to help our customers do two things.
- Justify it to themselves, and
- Justify it to others.
We usually just think about the first one. Helping our buyer convince themselves.
We forget that they usually have to tell someone else about their decision.
That could be a spouse or their boss.
So when you are talking about reasons to buy, try to give them soundbites to use with others.
For consumers, that could be letting them know they got a great deal....
Helping customers justify their decision to others
In a recent article I wrote about research into self-justification which found consumers are much more likely to avoid unpleasant or confronting information (like calories on a menu) if they are given “cover”.
In other words, they’ll skip the café with calories on the menu if they can hang their decision on an unrelated reason, like the reviews that café received for its service.
We’re masters at finding reasons to justify to ourselves what we want to do....
How customers justify avoiding you
People avoid information more when they are given a reason to let themselves off the hook.
That’s the key takeaway from some fresh research from Woolley and Risen (2021) called “Hiding from the truth: When and How Cover Enables Information Avoidance”.
There are key implications from both a business and personal perspective resulting from this finding.
Let’s talk business first.
How you talk to a customer about product features is either going to help them justify their...
