Fourteen Lectures on Consumer Psychology

Chapter 2 Understanding Psychological Activities in Sales (1)
Sales is actually a psychological interaction between two people exchanging economic goods. It is a psychological war.If you want to sell your products successfully, you must gain insights into the hearts of consumers and match them with what they like.Salesmen who can't guess the hearts of consumers often end in failure.Therefore, an excellent salesman must understand some psychology.

An excellent salesman must have some knowledge of psychology

Sales is actually a psychological interaction between two people exchanging economic goods. This interaction not only includes a series of changes in the mental activities of the salesman, but also changes in the psychological activities of consumers.Under the guidance of their sales psychology, salesmen will make certain specific behaviors to arouse consumers' psychological and action responses.

The salesman's sales behavior can be in the following forms: merchandise display, verbal description, picture, or a friendly offer of a cigarette.Likewise, consumers can respond in many ways: walk into a store and buy a bag of candy that's in the window, take money out of their pocket, ask for a catalog, or just buy what's on their shopping list.

From these different behaviors, we can recognize some selling method, such as advertising, window display, sales flyer, or unique style of personal selling.Although these different sales methods have their own different methods and problems, the goal is the same: to make consumers decide to buy products.Any salesman who wants to be successful must study the thoughts of consumers and learn to think from a psychological point of view.

Mental activity is like a flowing stream

When discussing consumer psychology, a metaphor can be borrowed, that is, the consumer's psychological process is like a gurgling stream.This stream flowing in everyone's heart is composed of knowledge, perception, feeling, will and action.Mental activity has two characteristics:
1. Mental activities are constantly changing and will never be in a static state.A constant stream of new ideas can overwhelm old ones that came up a second before.The mental activity of a consumer when shopping is the result of the joint action of perception, feeling and will. From the beginning to the end of shopping, his entire mental activity process is like a flowing stream, constantly changing.

2. Mental activities are complex.It is not a simple object that can be dealt with casually, but a unique life form full of power.It is the task of this book to describe this living body.Spread it out and place it under the microscope of psychology, and carefully dissect and understand every part of it.We will analyze it from both vertical and horizontal dimensions.First, we divide mental activities into many stages, and then analyze each one individually, and then conduct a horizontal interpretation analysis on the important viewpoints of each stage.

Psychological activities in different stages of sales

When the shopping behavior occurs, the psychological activity process of consumers can be divided into 6 stages:
1. Pay attention to the target
2. to arouse interest
3. A desire to buy
4. Trust
5. Decide to buy
6. Satisfy
The changes in the psychological activities of consumers in shopping do not have to go through the above six stages strictly every time.For example, trust can sometimes arise before the desire to buy, or even before interest.Arousing interest can sometimes occur simultaneously with paying attention to a target.

In general, the order of changes in consumers' shopping mental activities given above occurs in almost every reality, especially when consumers buy an item for the first time.

We also found that each phase lasted for a different length of time.The initial attentional goal phase may last only a short while before being quickly swallowed up or replaced by the arousal phase.Next, an interest phase may last for an hour.In addition, the duration of each stage is different in different situations.In different situations, the duration of the stage of arousing interest may be 1 minute, an hour, a day or even a year.

Cross-sectional analysis of consumer psychology

Although we compare mental activity to a babbling, never-ending stream, sometimes we have to imagine moments of stagnation.At certain important stages of mental activity, it is necessary to artificially slow down the flow of this stream, because only then can it be observed carefully in cross section.

Strictly speaking, we cannot stop the stream of mental activity or draw a detailed diagram of it.Nevertheless, we use such assumptions because they make our explanations clearer and easier to understand and accept.

Although this book is devoted to thinking about problems from a psychological perspective, it does not mean that problems related to sales are psychological problems.Because, ethical issues and economic issues also have a great impact on sales.Therefore, before starting to analyze sales with psychology, we must first clarify the relationship between the above problems and sales.

When thinking about sales from an ethical perspective, we focus on the ethical behavior of the participants in the exchange of economic goods.We ask the question: Is the price justified?Is this item worth the money?In the sales process, have we taken into account the legal rights of other competitors to conduct fair sales?These ethical issues in sales are very important when considering issues of social welfare.It has been gratifying to see a rise in business ethics worldwide in recent years, and the evidence for this judgment will be presented in later chapters of this book.

When looking at sales issues from an economic perspective, we may ask other questions: Which purchase channels can be considered?Which agencies exist between consumers and producers?What factors influence price setting?Every businessman thinks about many of these problems every day. For businessmen, they may ignore other problems, but it is almost their instinct to think about their own business from an economic point of view.

Although both perspectives are important in sales, they are not the focus of this book.Here, we assume that each reader will not make unethical transactions.In addition, professional economists will handle all possible economic issues that may arise during the sales process.So this book will concentrate on addressing the psychology of sales.

Analyzing the origin of consumers' actions from a psychological perspective, we mainly focus on consumer behavior changes triggered by cognition, perception, and sensation, and explore the reasons for such behavior changes.In some respects this approach coincides with the definition of psychology: "Psychology is the science concerned with describing and explaining the behavior of living organisms." Describe and explain behaviors in detail, and discuss how to guide and change these behaviors.

Psychology as a "Real" Science
Before applying the concepts of psychology, several commonly held views must be clarified.Many people think that psychology is mysterious and profound, sometimes even magical.They believe that psychology is a kind of insight that can deeply probe the inner activities of human beings, or a hypnotic agent, or even a spell of unknown meaning.A salesman who understands psychology can force consumers to buy products by reading their psychology.

These strange and superstitious ideas about psychology run deep, and their origins can be traced back centuries, even to the time of Aristotle.Aristotle defined psychology as "the science of the soul" in his first psychology textbook.He believes that the soul is the part of the human body in charge of thinking, feeling and will, so he keeps exploring where the soul comes from and where it goes after death.

Aristotle's definition of psychology influenced many generations until it was overthrown in the 17th century.It was also around this time that Locke, Hume, and others argued that despite centuries of understanding the origin and nature of the soul, we still don't know anything.So let's set aside those soul-related issues.Then, discuss some of the things that the individual will encounter in his life.In other words, let's consider those psychological issues that affect human behavior.

This opinion was accepted by most people, so psychology was redefined as "psychological science" or "consciousness".This definition has been used until now.But ordinary people's understanding of psychology is still influenced by Aristotle's mysterious views.

Another definition of psychology has become popular since the mid-19th century.During this period, physics and chemistry in the natural sciences developed rapidly, and biology, botany, zoology and physiology also began to emerge.Under the influence of these advances in the discipline, psychology also became more rigorous and began to focus on research methods.There are two main changes in psychology: first, the view that physical conditions affect mental activities is gradually recognized, and second, research methods from other disciplines are quickly transplanted into psychological research.These methods have been used mostly successfully in psychology, especially those used to study animal behavior.Therefore, psychology was once defined as "the science that studies consciousness and behavior" (some extreme researchers removed the "consciousness" in this definition, and directly defined psychology as "the science that studies behavior"). Definitions are still not acceptable to all psychologists.Still, it speaks to some not-so-pleasant connotations of the discipline.Finally, on the basis of synthesizing the above opinions, we propose our definition: "Psychology is the science devoted to describing and explaining the behavior of living things."

Through this brief historical review, readers can probably understand why some modern people still think that psychology is a representative of mystery, abstraction and ethereal.In fact, the development of this discipline has nothing to do with mystery.From today's perspective, psychology is a "real" and even somewhat "sophisticated" discipline, similar to physics, geography, and astronomy.The reader will see more clearly the affinities of psychology to these disciplines from the following discussion of methods in psychology.Because the research methods of psychology, in essence, are almost no different from the general natural sciences.

Scientific Research Method - Empirical Method
To describe and explain consumer behavior, psychology uses a method widely used in any discipline—the empirical method.The research process of positive method can generally be described as follows:
1. Describe the experimental phenomenon under specific conditions.In order to observe more systematically, avoid intermittent and accidental factors from affecting the experimental results, and ensure rigorous scientificity, our experimental observations must be carried out under completely controllable conditions.Experiments are generally carried out in the laboratory, because of the relatively noisy daily life, in the laboratory, we can control certain influencing factors. "Control" here means designing the conditions of an experiment so that observations can be repeated in the future (in order to draw scientific conclusions, we cannot rely on just one observation).In the experiments, we only explored the effect of one factor on the experimental results at a time; in addition, we also changed the experimental situation according to the plan, and observed the effect of this change on the experimental results.Simply put, an experiment is "a distinct and repeatable set of observations whose outcome can be changed by changing the environment".

2. Record the factors that were changed in each experiment.Be careful when doing this.Keeping detailed records of every change in an experiment ensures that other experimenters will get the same results under the same conditions when they repeat the same experiment.In order to record the experimental results clearly, we try to use mathematical expressions.Under the guidance of this idea, the expression form of experimental results is often numbers.

3. In the next step, the obtained data will be arranged according to a certain order, and put into a chart for analysis and comparison.In this way, the laws between them are easier to observe.

4. Draw conclusions based on data and graphs.

I would like to better illustrate the research steps of this method by describing an experiment conducted in a psychological laboratory.

a psychology experiment
Turn to page 17 of the book, and hold the book up about 20 feet away from your eyes.Although the two straight lines drawn on the book are the same length (both are 10 centimeters, or 4 inches), it feels like the horizontal line looks shorter than the vertical line.Such a conclusion has a lot to do with psychological factors: the length of a straight line is largely related to its position.This conclusion can be easily observed in reality.But if one wants to describe it scientifically, one must say how much the line shortens or lengthens as it changes position from vertical to horizontal.It is also necessary to measure the influence of the position on the length, and finally use a mathematical expression to express this elongation and shortening phenomenon.

(End of this chapter)