The Most Powerful Consumer Behaviour Trait in the World

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Studies show that people who had just been given an item – so they had no sentimental attachment to it – valued it far more highly than people who hadn’t; recipients of a university mug thought that it was worth twice as much as people who hadn’t been given one.

In another experiment students were divided into two groups of fifty: one group was told to imagine they had a ticket for an important college basketball game and asked what the minimum they would take for it would be; and the others that they had the chance to buy one. The average selling price was TEN TIMES the average buying price!

The opportunity for leveraging this aspect of consumer behaviour lies in the social interaction of consumers.  Let me put that another way: people like to talk. 

If people simply felt this way and kept it to themselves their over-valuing would be an irrelevance: all that would happen is fewer things would get sold than might otherwise be the case because people considering selling them would over-estimate their value and ask for too much.

Of course people don’t keep their purchases to themselves and if they enthuse about their purchases other people will want to purchase too.

One of the reasons such conversations can be so effective is that people like to be friends with people like them.  So by definition your customer’s friends are likely to be your target market too.

Another reason is that people often seek reassurance that their friends ARE like them and that they have made a good decision, by encouraging their friend to make the same one.  There really is emotional safety and reassurance in numbers.

So the most powerful consumer behaviour trait available to you is the enthusiastic endorsement of one customer to someone else they know.  If you can create an aspect or dimension to your product that your consumers WANT to share with their friends, particularly when they’ve first receive it and novelty value is at a maximum, you will dramatically increase your sales.

As always, asking people when they've been influenced in this way will be fruitless - the impact is largely at the unconscious level.  However, think back to the products that you've recommended enthusiastically to people you know: can you replicate the element that felt so compelling to communicate?

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For more details of the research cited in this article see:
Kahneman, D. Knetsch, J. Thaler, R. Experimental Tests of the Endowment Effect and Coase Theorem, The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 98, No. 6, (Dec 1990), 1325-1348
Carmon, Z. and Ariely, D. Focusing on the Forgone: Why Value Can Appear So Different to Buyers and Sellers, Journal of Consumer Research 27 (Dec 2000) 360-370 cited in Hogan, K. The Science of Influence (2005)

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