Sunday, February 10, 2008

Change rooms as performance predictors

Over the weekend, my wife and I had two interesting experiences with change rooms in ladies clothing stores.

The first one involved no change room at all! My wife was interested in trying on a dress, but was astonished to find that the store had no change rooms. Change rooms allow prospective customers to fast-forward themselves into the future to 'experience' the product or service and use the wisdom gained to make an astute purchase decision in the present. Shoppers 'experience' the product by trying it on and trialing how it feels, fits, smells and looks. Clearly the provision of change rooms is an important performance predictor for shoppers.

The second experience involved a change room which doubled as a staff lunch room, and tripled as a storage room. The paint was peeling off the walls, the carpet was dirty and there was stuff everywhere. A negative performance predictor in deed.

The more confidence you can instill, and credibility you can display, the more sales will result. In both 'change room instances' my wife bought less product as a result of the none existent and negative performance predictors, respectively.

No comments: