An article on UPI.com’s Health News reports that researchers at the University of Alabama and the University of Louisville have been studying the affect of consumer attitude when in buying situations.
Basically the research suggests that it is becoming clearer that a shopper’s level of happiness or positive feelings could be more important to selling than sales prices, sales people and the pitches they make.

A Shift In The Psychology of Consumerism

I’ve been talking about this major shift in the psychology of consumerism for some time now, and it is becoming more and more apparent to me that unless salespeople and customer service assistants are consciously aware of what they need to be doing to create positive buying experiences for their prospective, current and repeat customers, they will be unintentionally creating buyer apathy.

Buyer apathy is created because of the sameness syndrome – that is, in the global and competitive markets that most businesses operate in today, consumers have more choice about where they go to buy their products or services. If the salespeople, customer service assistants, the prices and even the ‘pitches’ all sound the same, it creates buyer apathy.

Where buyer apathy is created, the usual dominant deciding value of the consumer, whether business to business or business to consumer will become an economic buying decision. In other words, buyer apathy focuses the consumer on the cheapest price they can find.

Stepping Up and Into Value

To step up and into their value, salespeople and customer service assistants need to work hard at creating buying experiences before, during and after any customer purchase that sends loud and clear messages to their clients that they are valued.

This is the reciprocal nature of successful businesses. The more clients feel valued, the more valuable they become to the business from which they choose to buy, and in return the more valuable those businesses become to the clients.

Click Here To read the full UPI.com article discussing the research