CUSTOMER PERCEPTIONS
Perceptions Sell and
Perceptions UNsell!
What you perceive is what you believe… and what you believe is FACT, even when it’s not!
It makes a big difference how you, for example, define a traffic jam depending on your frame of reference. If you’re from LA, the Bronx, the DC Beltway, or Gumboro in Southern Delaware, the New Jersey Pine Barrens, or Rangeley in NW Maine, what you perceive can vary from endless seas of hornblowing standstill cars, to a pickup truck and two motorcycles waiting for a freight train.
Perception is selective and varies every minute of every day. You walk into a party and immediately scope the gathering to find a hot-looking member of the opposite sex who’s serving up inviting looking eyes because you are single and on the hunt. The next party-goer enters and immediately seeks the bar, looking to unwind with a free drink. The artist who comes in the door looks past all the people, and the bar, to find the wall where her painting is hung. And so it goes.
Selective perception is also what customers exercise when they are sizing up a product, service, showroom, salesperson, commercial, ad, brochure, warranty, or website. You are using selective perception right this minute by having read this far into this blog post.
So a good part of the challenge for your marketing is to capture prospects’ perceptions and imaginations by properly setting the stage. This — as with any stage — is accomplished with colors, props, backdrops, lighting, spatial arrangements, sounds, and often smells and touch… activating the five senses.
And isn’t channeling selective perception what the bombardment of opinion forms, attitude surveys, customer questionnaires, R&D studies, media ratings, and focus groups are all about? In order to make a sale, we need to understand what makes our customers tick.
This is accomplished most thoroughly and most rapidly by first finding out and figuring out what makes each of us, as business owners and managers, and entrepreneurs, tick! Once you have a better idea of what turns on your attention, your desires, your interests, and prompts you to action, you’ll have a better idea of how to ignite your customers.
Why does that matter?
Because perceptions sell, and perceptions UNsell!
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Hal@Businessworks.US 302.933.0116
Open Minds Open Doors
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