Stephen Fry once quipped, “It’s a cliché that most clichés are true, but then like most clichés that cliché is untrue.”

I read that quote four times and it still makes my head spin.

I don’t like clichés. For the most part they’re said without much thought; copied because they sound  compelling, or simply because they’ve been said so many times people think they must be true.  I see them as a kind of linguistic flatulence.

As someone who listens intently to song lyrics I can also be completely alienated by an otherwise decent tune when the writer lets a little lyrical gas go. He or she finishes a verse, or even worse a chorus that I’ll have to hear repeatedly, with a phrase so predictable that I could sense it coming from a mile away, even though I’ve never heard the song before.

You know the kind of thing, they rhyme “take my hand” with “understand” or “girl” with “world”. For a particularly painful example take a look at the lyrics to Des’ree’s Life;  barring the surreal choice of “I’d rather have a piece of toast” to rhyme with “ghost” and “most” (no I’m not kidding) I’ll wager there isn’t a non-clichéd couplet in the entire song.

Then again, don’t look. I just did to remind myself of why I dislike it so much and now it’s annoying me again.

All of which brings me to “Retail is detail”.

I’ve heard this phrase a lot, usually accompanied by raised eye-brows and a condescending head nod, intended to convey that someone really should have realised that the bad thing that has happened could have been averted if people had paid a bit more attention to things.

I’d like to say that I’m writing this article to disprove this particular cliché. That a group of diligent social psychologists had conducted a huge study and found that slap-dash retailing is the only way to go if you want to make money from a store.   That they’d found that customers appreciate retail sloppiness, it reminds them of their own imperfections, and causes them to buy in a wave of empathy.

But I can’t.

I know from my own research that customers perceive products that are in neat, orderly environments as better. It’s not just that they think the shop is a nicer place to be, they believe that the products are higher quality and that the service will be better.

This isn’t irrational. It’s simply an example of the unconscious mind making positive associations with a well-ordered and well-cared-for environment.

It feels safe in much the same way a tidy cave would be an indication to our caveman ancestors that a bear or wolf wasn’t about to return from a weekend away and eat you for borrowing his house.

Recently researchers have quantified the extent to which retail is detail, at least with regard to the information customers have available when considering a purchase.

In a number of experiments they asked people to make choices between different health clubs, wireless service providers and laptop computers, and varied the information that was available. In some cases participants had information on three variables known to be important (such as speed, battery life and memory for laptops); in others one of these was left blank.

When the information was complete just 4% of people chose the “no choice” option.

When there was information missing a staggering 31% opted not to choose: loss aversion being what it is, many people would prefer to make no choice than worry that the one they’ve chosen might turn out to be a bad one, even when they know it’s just an experiment (although they don’t know what the focus of that experiment is).

So it seems the cliché is well founded: retail is detail. When it comes to product information it is worth making sure that customers have access to key information for each product.

Often the temptation, particularly with new products, is to put them out for sale before all the specification is available, but this approach may well back-fire. Rather than giving customers the chance to buy the latest thing you may well cause them to walk away.

Similarly, when one product makes a point of highlighting a standard feature that isn’t referenced on competing products, rather than differentiate it, it may simply cause customers to walk away because the machine they are drawn towards doesn’t say whether it has this feature or not.

Source: Kunter Gunasti and William T. Ross, Jr. How Inferences about Missing Attributes Decrease the Tendency to Defer Choice and Increase Purchase Probability. Journal of Consumer Research, February 2009

Image courtesey: Christopher Chan