Feeling Important in Marketing
Part Five of Comfort Psychology
Part Five of Comfort Psychology
Comfort marketing is King. People are often ignored or treated as though they are unimportant everywhere they go. If they go into a retail store, sometimes it may be difficult to get a clerk to help them.
Sometimes when you call a company, you get answer Tree and talk to artificial intelligence for a period of several questions. You may or may not, at that point, be important enough to talk to another human being.
Most larger companies are trying very hard to mechanize their labor-intensive customer relations. This type of website does not have to be paid an hourly rate, and can usually send the customer in the correct direction for whatever they need.
It is a relief finally to talk to a human being. But as we get more accustomed to working with answer trees, we become less expecting to be talking to another person. We often become less expecting to reach our desired outcome as well.
We realize that our demands and the sheer number of us, the customers, tend to overwhelm vendors and companies from whom we desire services. So, in essence, it’s our own fault.
The opposite is also true.
As we become more accustomed to receiving services from technology and quasi-computers, we become increasingly impressed at actual hands-on human services. Human services become much more appreciated as they become rarer.
Computer-generated dialogue makes us uncomfortable most of the time. The trade-off for companies is the expanse of labor versus the expanse of electronics. In some cases, one could also argue the electronic side may give marginally more accurate results than humans do, even though it is much more frustrating to the human to experience.
Order online
The pinnacle of non-human customer service is the internet website. From them, now we can do business, and our commerce is totally hands-off.
Our satisfaction depends on the ease of ordering, the accuracy of order, the accuracy of billing, and the efficiency of delivery. Now all phases of this purchase can be non-human and hands-off. There is still some satisfaction in an order for goods and services delivered accurately and in a timely manner, even it’s a process without human intervention.
It has become now, one yardstick to judge how easy the process is for any given company or website, and another yardstick for how easy it is to reach a human operator for help. Sadly, human help operators have often been replaced by electronic chat-Bots.
The ultimate comfort, of course, is to walk into a store, be greeted by humans who then can provide us with the article for which we are shopping. Sadly, that service may be becoming too expensive a service for many businesses to offer.
Everything is comfort-driven
As our ability to engineer transactions so that they don’t have to include a human is beginning to reach much farther than sales. It is reaching into government and large retail areas more than ever.
Basic economics tells us that we, as human being employees, are in danger of pricing ourselves out of the market when we expect more and more salary and wages. Either a company’s profit margin dwindles, or prices have to be increased. Then we, as consumers, find our money does not go as far as it did before.
A sharp division now rises between the sale of necessary items and services and the sale of items end services that are either marginally necessary or those for which we could shop around.
Essential items and services are sold by order takers or computers and can be delivered without much competition, and even without the necessity of human interaction.
Other items that we could possibly live without are better sold where there can be human interaction. Sometimes the interaction is personality-driven or in fact, comfort-driven.
Someone can purchase milk and eggs from a website or a speaker. Although people can now buy automobiles from a website, people still generally prefer to interact and seek a comfort level prior to such an important purchase.
It is those larger purchases and those non-essential purchases that concern us at this point. Comfort level is still not a throwaway. It has not yet been engineered into a drive-up window.
Problem-solving sales
Non-essential sales, more so than ever, require comfort marketing. Sales courses previously taught sales personnel that people bought things that solved problems for them. The work of the salesperson was to help the prospect identify the fact that there exists a problem and the fact that there exists a solution to that problem.
This is very good motivation for a lot of sales, but not the best.
The trouble is the salesperson is required to find the prospects, gather them up, make them realize they have a problem, and make them realize they, the salesperson has the solution.
It is easier to work with a prospective buyer from the angle of things that they are uncomfortable with than from the angle of things that are a problem for them. There are many more things that make them ill at ease than there are things that prevent them from having success.
People today are more likely to purchase a television with wonderful remote control options than just worrying about having a television at all. You can solve their “having no TV problem” with a 9-inch black and white model. Unfortunately, today’s shopper is a bit more sophisticated and is probably searching for a lot more than just a television. They are searching for ease and comfort in their entertainment.
Thank you for reading this series, examining comfort marketing.
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