The Knowledge Trap
Do you know how to buy a door?
If you’ve been reading Moving Tribes for a while, you might remember this post on the way in which businesses sometimes allow their internal language to leak out into customer communications, causing confusion and, ultimately, costing sales.
This week, life as a consumer threw up an even more pernicious danger for consumer businesses - the danger of simply knowing too much about what they sell.
At Moving Tribes HQ we are in the market for a couple of ‘cheap as you like’ kitchen cabinets to put into a pantry. Logically, then, we ended up on the website of a retailer I’ll allow to remain anonymous but will describe as a ‘very big DIY brand’.
Finding the cabinets was easy - they have an entry level range, the website allowed me to filter by size and colour, job done. But then I realised they didn’t come with doors, and that’s where it all got a bit troubling.
This retailer has a ‘brand family’ for their entry level kitchen, to which our cabinets belonged. But search for ‘doors’ under that brand family and none come up. Search for kitchen doors more generally on the site, on the other hand, and thousands appear. But which of them will work on my cabinet? Which will match the pre-drilled holes, and which will be the right size? Oh, and apparently I need to buy hinges as well, which is an entirely separate search again.
By now you will have cottoned onto the fact that your author is not very DIY-literate. But that puts me exactly into the segment that this retailer probably regards as its core audience. So why has it never occurred to them to add a bit to the kitchen cabinet listing saying “works with these doors” or to the door listing saying “will look great on these cabinets”?
I suspect strongly that the reason they haven’t done that is because my question is a stupid one. If I talk to a more DIY-literate friend they will probably tell me that it is obvious that all the doors will fit on all the cabinets, that the pre-drilled holes cover a range of fitting options and that all the hinges I’m looking at will work.
But it is nevertheless the case that my fear of getting it wrong and looking like even more of an idiot nearly resulted in a missed purchase. And in this economy, no retailer can afford to be losing sales for the want of a one-line explanation on a product page.
This phenomenon is not limited to DIY, either. I spent a few years in the mobile phone business during the period when every manufacturer and network was obsessed with selling phones based on the number of ‘megapixels' the camera had without ever bothering to consider than no-one really understood what that metric meant.
It is indisputable that the overwhelming emotion felt by customers considering any expensive purchase (a car, furniture, a TV or a mobile phone) is insecurity. We often don’t know as much about the products we are buying than the people selling them, and therefore live in fear of buying the wrong thing, being sold something solely based on the commission it earns for the salesperson or asking a dumb question and being made to feel like an idiot.
That’s a tricky place to start a sales discussion from, and I’d observe that the best sales people in all of these industries are those who exude calmness, can explain the product and process in everyday language and provide the reassurance that a nervous customer requires.
In physical stores, then, that reassurance is often forthcoming (except in car dealerships, as I’ve written before!) because it is simply the best way for the team in store to do business.
But even if that’s true for your stores, do you offer the same calm, simple reassurance on your website, in your marketing material and through your other channels? Because my experience is often the opposite. And if you’ve missed out on helping inexperienced and nervous customers because you have forgotten what it is like to be one, you are throwing away money.
P.S.
Moving Tribes is kept free for you to read and share thanks to generous support from partners. I’m delighted to be working with the excellent team at Howard Kennedy for this series of posts - they are a full-service legal team with a lot of experience of the kinds of issues consumer businesses often face, so do look them up if you need to. I suspect they are also better at putting kitchen cabinets together than I am too!