The relaxed shopper

Whenever I encounter an extraordinarily persuasive sales person, I sometimes surrender to buy and sometimes, I do not. But always, I become more convinced that these salespeople are also psychologists par excellence. They could make you think about their product or service as the most valuable thing you will ever own and that no other chance will come your way again. The film Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) that stars Al Pacino and Jack Lemon is one of the finest distillations of this observation in art form. Jack Lemon’s character in that film could sell you property as if you were buying the only remaining habitable piece of earth. There are indeed salespeople who could make you buy a sauna even if you lived in the Sahara.

Now, the marketing enterprise has moved from not just having a fleet of salespeople who could make you look at their products and embed that desire and motivation to buy; they have also designed their shops and malls to move you to buy, or at least set you on that path. A paper that will be coming out soon in the Journal of Marketing Research finds that relaxed shoppers value products about 10 percent higher than those in an “unrelaxed state.” The study was done by a group of researchers from Columbia Business School, the National University of Singapore and the University of Hong Kong. The study involved six experiments and 670 participants. They used two pretested ways of relaxation (music and video) and several products to offer to the subjects. In all those experiments, the relaxed participants gave higher bids for exactly the same products — a digital camera, a cruise, bungee jumping sessions or ice cream sundae, among other things — than those who were not relaxed.

The unrelaxed participants were neither stressed nor felt unpleasant. They were just not “relaxed.” The scientists say that when shoppers are relaxed, they tend to think of the products in an abstract way — i.e., all the possibilities surrounding a product with regard to their lives — where they can use it, how much they can take, where they can take it, etc. However, with “unrelaxed” shoppers, the subjects think in terms of the here and now such as the camera resolution or perhaps if there were a bag or free memory card that comes with it.

The implication of this study is that it would seem that if you were a shopper in a mall that induced a relaxed state, you unknowingly surrender to at least a 10 percent higher valuation of the products being sold in that mall. Conversely, I think this also explains why in a flea market which is not exactly known to foster a relaxed mood, the shopper seems to be on a path toward the opposite — in thinking that the products in the bazaar are really worth less than the prices they indicate.

So maybe the next time to you enter a mall, you should be aware of how relaxed you are so you can double check if you are blindly surrendering to higher prices just because you feel calm. That relaxed state may be worth 10 percent more than it should be.

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