Fourteen Lectures on Consumer Psychology

Chapter 10 Focusing on the Pleasure of Consumption
The customer is God, and making the "God" feel happy is the ultimate goal of sales, because the feeling of pleasure can make consumers relax and make it easier to make a decision to buy goods.Salesmen who lack humor are often rejected, and salesmen who are humorous are more likely to arouse consumers' pleasure.

It feels like a "double-edged sword"

The first thing to know is that a perfect sale will delight the customer all the way, whether it's in the beginning, middle, or end of the sale.In fact, every mental state is accompanied by emotional fluctuations, and few people only face the world with an absolutely cold and negative attitude.A person's feelings can be expressed in thousands of words with nuanced meanings, such as sadness, happiness, embarrassment, respect, and so on.While there are so many different associated nouns, sensations can only be divided into two categories—pleasant and unpleasant.

The basic point of view expressed in this lecture is that during the whole sales process, salesmen should make consumers feel happy, and this principle should be adhered to under any circumstances.This lecture also emphasizes that pleasure is closely related to the stage of arousing interest, and its role will be repeated in the next lecture, especially its connection with satisfaction.Salesmen should realize that a sale is not over until the consumers are not completely satisfied.At the same time, to explain why consumers need to be kept happy at all stages, it is necessary to turn to psychology to explain what pleasure is and how this feeling affects human behavior.

Feelings of Pleasure Cause Physical Changes
Pleasant sensations can simplify sales because a person's sensory state affects whole-body activity.This wide-ranging activity is called "relaxation."It is associated with the activity of large muscles, such as the leg muscles, arm muscles, lower back muscles, and neck muscles.Others are involved in the movement of finer muscles, such as the eye and facial muscles, and some internal organ tissues.

Some psychologists believe that physical activity associated with pleasurable sensations means increased physical strength, while unpleasant sensations have a negative impact on physical activity.For example, scientists studying the knee jerk reflex in different stimuli found that the range of motion of the human knee jerk reflex was expanded when pleasant music was played.Although there is not enough evidence to support this conclusion, readers are convinced of the relationship between pleasure and the momentary increase in physical strength, but in any case, this theory shows a magical possibility that pleasure can affect consumer purchasing behavior.

Another theory seems to be more credible. Trust and pleasure in an object tend to make creatures move closer, while unpleasantness makes creatures move away from that object quickly.This phenomenon can be clearly observed when experiments are performed on single-celled amoebas.When you put some kind of object around it, it will swim towards that object; when you put another kind of object around it, it will swim away from it.A similar phenomenon also occurs in babies. Babies will stretch out their small hands to the dangling shiny balls hanging in front of their eyes, and will quickly dodge and leave when they see sharp thumbtacks.

Adults may also have similar positive and negative reactions to pleasant and unpleasant things.Sometimes his forward and backward movements were clearly discernible; other times their behavioral responses were so subtle that they were difficult to detect without the aid of special measuring instruments.Civilization and social customs have taught people how to hide their emotions, but it is difficult to hide their internal reactions.These reactions are not controlled by the will and constitute most of the signals of unpleasure.

These reactions are inherent, and their existence can be illustrated by examples.It is well known that the expansion and contraction of the sweat and salivary glands is influenced by strong emotions.The activities of other glands, though not as well known as these, are also affected by emotions, such as thyroid, pituitary, pineal and adrenal activity.Changes in activity caused by emotions also occur in the circulatory system, such as changes in the rate at which the heart beats, dilation of arteries, and vertical alignment of blood vessels.Electrical disturbances in the body also occur from time to time. In this case, people are like a battery, and the chemical reactions of physical strength will also accelerate. Isn't that what "grey hair overnight" refers to?

Sometimes the functioning of the body is disrupted, and a surgeon once told the story of a patient who was awake at night because of anxiety.In the morning, when the food in the patient's stomach was transferred out by the gastric lavage device, the patient knew that her dinner yesterday had not been digested by the digestive system at all.Knowing that the numerous cells of the stomach and diseased organs expand in response to pleasure and contract in response to unhappiness, it can be concluded that the cells of the digestive system refuse to work under the dual action of stress and unpleasant emotion.

I don't know whether this theory of expansion and contraction is only superficially consistent with the law of body movement, but describing the relationship between sensation and body can clearly explain this phenomenon.Pleasure will make consumers relax their whole body, which means the complete release of nervous energy.In this case, consumers are already physically and mentally ready to accept various sales techniques of the salesman, and when they are in a happy mood, consumers are prone to buy goods.

Humor in Sales Can Arouse Consumer Pleasure

In order to arouse the pleasure of consumers, a salesman will generally start his sales with an interesting story.They believe that being pleasant is being funny, so they present themselves as court jesters, racking their brains to amuse consumers.

Some advertising practitioners also hold the same idea.They try to insert stories, pictures or slogans in the advertisements, trying to add humor to the advertisements.Whether such a design is useful is a very questionable thing.When looking for examples of the use of humor in advertisements, we found that only a small number of advertisements used humor as an element of stimulation and pleasure, which also shows that many advertisers do not think that humor in advertisements will promote sales.

Apparently, the low use of humor in advertising is not because humor fails to drive sales or consumers hate humor.In fact, humor in many commercials is successful and impressive.For example, the reaction of a puppy hearing the "Master's Voice" brand record (a pun, "His Master's Voice" in English, which is not only a record brand name, but also "the master's order"), consumers see the powerful laundry powder (the Gold Dust Twins, also a pun, it is not only a brand of washing powder, but also refers to the players in a football game working together to spare no effort to win), and the beaming chef who appeared in the wheat porridge box advertisement Emoticons, etc., are all very successful examples of using humor. The reason why humor in some advertisements fails is probably because the humor in those advertisements that they think is humorous is actually not funny at all.

Humor in advertising needs to be genuinely humorous.An ad man may be a first-rate writer of "straight copy," but he is not a great humorist.Advertising copywriters have come to realize this, so when they write their copy, they turn to professional humorists, such as cartoonists, to help them design funny scenes and jokes that capture the public's interest.Since the time of appearance is too short, it is impossible to make a judgment on whether these commercialized humor really work.Perhaps the test of time will reveal that the original ad that failed at humor was not simply due to the competence of the ad copywriter.

Other stimuli that produce pleasure
Humor is not the only factor that can make consumers feel good, and loud laughter is not the only expression of good mood.Pleasure can also be produced by aesthetics. For example, the wonderful mix of colors and the perfect combination of lines may make the viewer feel happy.The subtle sense of awareness evoked by the repeated repetition of certain sales information (see Lecture 3) can also trigger a sense of pleasure. This slight sense of pleasure is the same as that mentioned in the previous lecture because of nostalgia for old things and turning interest in new things emotions are very similar.

Pleasure can also be a feeling that goes along with desire.Just as the old pleasant experience is given to the new object, people will have certain behaviors on this object in the future (see Lecture 8).Desires may involve many pleasures (in which case they are often called emotions), and the human responses to such desires will be discussed in Lecture 14.

The highest form of pleasure is satisfaction. Making customers feel happy is the ultimate goal of sales, and it is also what salesmen need to keep in mind at all times.In fact, they are the basis for consumers to generate purchases.If the salesman keeps the points of this lecture in mind at all times and takes measures to make consumers feel happy, consumers will definitely relax their nerves and then buy products.

(End of this chapter)