why customers put off
the sale
Psychologists and behavioral economists are getting a picture of why it is we tend “to put off until tomorrow what could be enjoyed today,” reports John Tierney in the New York Times.
It’s not about delaying what’s unpleasant. It’s about “the strength to cash in your gift certificates, drink that special bottle of wine, redeem your frequent flyer miles and take that vacation you always promised yourself.”
This explains why locals typically see fewer landmarks in their first year in a new city than tourists see during a two-week stay.’
Huh? and Wow! My sales and marketing antennae are all up and pointy to make this knowledge relevant to my particulars…
What we’re talking about here is a principle economists call “pleasure procrastination” and that marketers apply to “save billions of dollars annually from gift certificates that expire unredeemed.”
The issue is largely this: If we don’t have an immediate deadline, we assume we’ll have more time to enjoy ourselves more, later. Of course, we’re just as busy later. Wharton marketing professor Gal Zauberman calls this “resource slack,” or our attempt “to do a cost-benefit analysis of the time lost versus the pleasure or money to be gained.” Most of us are not very good at this. Compounding matters, once we start down this path of “procrastinating pleasure, it can become a self-perpetuating process if you fixate on some imagined nirvana.”
We’ll never open that special bottle of wine because the moment is never sufficiently special. We’ll hang onto frequent-flier miles for so long that they expire before we ever get to take that big trip. The solution is obvious and simple: If you have miles, use them and if you have a special bottle, open it. Because as Maya told Miles in Sideways: “The day you open a ‘61 Cheval Blanc, that’s the special occasion.”
Don’t know about you, but I’m having some counterintuitive ideas already about how to get customers to make TODAY their special occasion.
