I deliberated long and hard before deciding to write this article.

For the most part the areas of consumer behaviour that interest me are those relating to how the consumer mind works. I judge that telling you about these insights from neuroscience and social psychology are no different from giving you a map or photographs of points you’ll need to pass on a journey: I hope I make your job easier and help you to do it better, by giving you more understanding of the consumer mind.

So, for example, in my EBook, The Secret of Selling: How to Sell to Your Customer’s Unconscious Mind, I reveal the studies that have triggered different mental associations in consumers’ minds, and caused them to spend more.

In one case, people spent up to three times as much on a product, just because of the type of music that was playing.

Is this manipulating people?

In one sense it is; on the other hand since the unconscious mind is constantly working by association, it would be translating environment ‘clues’ and acting on them anyway.

The fact that it encounters some that make it want to spend more, where more means buying something better, doesn’t mean it’s doing something it doesn’t want to do.

I’ll admit, it’s a fine line, but I try and find it.

This article reveals a study that shows something completely different. This reveals a way in which you can dramatically increase the likelihood that someone will buy from you when, all things being equal, they probably wouldn’t want to.

So why am I sharing it here?

Well, firstly, because we’re all consumers and knowing about this will help you avoid it personally. Secondly, it provides an explanation for why people buy, and understanding it may well help you understand why your competitors make sales that, on the basis of what they have to sell, you think they shouldn’t.

Most of the people I know, myself included, believe they would never succumb to the high pressure sales techniques that are synonymous with time-share and double-glazing salespeople.

You know the kind of thing, they come to your house, talk to you for hours (literally), confuse you with options and then tell you the price they offer you is special and extraordinarily time limited.

The special nature of the price is usually related to how inflated it still is, and it’s time-limited in the sense that, the longer you leave it, the more likely you are to realise that it’s extortionately high.

But, whilst our aversion to such extreme pushiness might give us a resistance to it, a study released this week reveals that, in more subtle scenarios, the same mechanisms may cause us to spend more.

Researchers in the US have found that exercising self-control wears us out.  The more we use energy to mentally resist something, the more likely we are to cave-in later and spend more than we otherwise would on something else.

Extraordinarily, it doesn’t matter whether this is:

• Exercising self-control for a time on the product concerned but not getting away from the purchase (such as with pushy sales-people in your own home).
• Exercising self-control in a different area of your life: if you’re doing really well with your diet, the chances are you’ll indulge yourself in other ways, having used up your willpower keeping your weight down.
• Exercising self-control by imagining someone else’s battle of willpower: just thinking about being restrained has the same effect.

In one study participants were asked to imagine a waiter surrounded by delicious food that he wasn’t allowed to eat.

In a subsequent exercise the people who had imagined themselves in the waiter’s position were willing to spend far more on luxury items, such as cars and televisions.  These people also performed less well on word game and memory tests.

As is so often the case, this research emphasises the fact that what really makes a customer buy is a complex balance of unconscious factors.

When it comes to a consumer deciding to buy it’s all about the unconscious mind.

Many unconscious associations are independent of the occasion and built up over a life-time; there’s nothing much you can do about these. For example, if someone has always hated a particularly colour, they won’t like your product if it uses that colour (although they’ll probably justify it some other way).

Sometimes the unconscious can be reached and influenced by triggering associations in the consumer environment (the focus of my recent EBook).

But sometimes the unconscious mind can be manipulated by the unscrupulous. Either they will ignore the weariness of customers and turn it to their advantage, or else they will go out of their way to target people who find it hard to say “no”.

Of course, if you can offer customers a whole range of very tempting products, and keep them interested in what you have to offer for long enough, no one could accuse you of anything underhand. You will simply find that, eventually, people’s power to resist your compelling products melts away and they buy something from you.

Source:  Ackerman et al. You Wear Me Out: The Vicarious Depletion of Self-Control. Psychological Science, 2009; 20 (3): 326 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02290.x

Image courtesy: Gerard Stolk