As a store manager, your day is filled with decision-making.  You need to decide what tasks to tackle first, how soon to approach a customer, what merchandise to buy, how best to display each item, and on and on. Your customers are also faced with decisions — the most important being whether or not to buy each item that you offer in the shop.

But what do we really know about how decisions are made?  Jonah Lehrer has made a study of this question from the neuroscientific viewpoint in his book How We Decide (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009).  It may be a bit heavy on the functions of different parts of the brain for many amateur readers,  yet it has insights to offer that you may find improve your ability to decide — and to influence the decisions of your customers.

I found it reassuring as a buyer that he says that most decisions are made up of a combination of reason and emotion, and that we should trust the emotional component.  In fact, he states that “reason without emotion is impotent.”  Many of us do much of our ordering based on a feeling that the products we choose will sell well, but we can’t necessarily justify that hunch based only on sales data and other facts. 

My shop is celebrating its 35th anniversary this week, and I’m happy to say that the longer you are in retailing, the more reliable your hunches turn out to be. That’s because your mind can combine past experience and current emotion almost seamlessly as you make a decision.  Happily this takes only a second, since the buying process requires making hundreds of rapid choices.

It is interesting to note that Lehrer has learned that the most effective way to get better at something — including buying, I’m sure — is to focus on your mistakes.  If you review why something didn’t sell, and what pattern you can detect from that, you will be better at making good decisions. 

When it comes to encouraging shoppers to decide to buy, Lehrer points out that we need to overcome the part of the brain (the insula, in case you’re interested) that produces adverse feelings related to spending money.  He points out that increasing the pleasurable feelings (NAccs) generated in the prefrontal cortex can outweigh these negative feelings.  “A good deal…and the thrill of getting something new” are both ways to counteract “the sting of spending money.” 

“Retail stores manipulate this cortical setup.  They are designed to get us to open our wallets; the frivolous details of the shopping experience are really subtle acts of psychological manipulation.  The store is tweaking our brains, trying to sooth the insulas and stoke the NAccs.”  The pleasure centers are stimulated, and the insula inhibited, by words such as guaranteed, low price, bargain and good deal (an effort that is aided by the use of credit cards instead of hard cash).

We may not like to think of ourselves as manipulating our customers, but ideally buying something in a specialty shop creates a pleasurable sensation — which I like to think means it was a good decision to shop there.

Happy Retailing,

Carol “Orange” Schroeder