Customers Are Irrational, and It’s Time You Embraced It

Welcome to Why Customers Buy, my weekly LinkedIn Newsletter series that explores how customers really make decisions. It reveals ways to unlock what customers really want with new concepts and practical tips that drive value ($). Subscribe today right here.

Here is your first surprise: 

Your customers are people. 

Here comes the second surprise: 

People are irrational. 

We do things all the time that make no sense at all. Customers say one thing and then do another. In this newsletter, we will look at why and, more importantly, give you practical tips on what to do if you are in marketing, sales, service or any area that is focused on improving your Customer Experience. 

Consider these examples of irrational behavior:

How many times have you...

… hit an appliance with your fist that wasn’t working, to see if it will fix it?

… pressed the walk signal a bunch of times to make the light change faster?

… yelled at the ref from the stadium seats to overturn the play call?

As a customer, how many times have you... 

… said you were going to buy solely the least expensive but then bought something more expensive, and then justified why your decision was correct?

… bought something to “bring yourself good luck?” (Luck is not a rational concept.)

… chose a supplier because you like them best?

I have done all of the above. However, this wasn’t rational behavior; it was irrational. I am irrational, and, unless you are a robot, deep down in your heart, you know you are, too. 

That brings me to your third surprise:

We buy emotionally and then justify with logic. 

Of course, we can be rational. We are not just impulses and reactions. We have a logical mind that helps us when necessary. 

However, the part of our mind that controls our irrational thinking is a lot more accessible than the rational thinking part is. We will take a deeper dive into this two-ways-of-thinking concept in a future issue, so, for now, suffice it to say, more often than not, we are irrational because it’s easier. 

I am sympathetic to those of you that are disappointed by all these surprises. Everybody likes to think they make logical decisions all the time. However, we don’t and that is quite apparent when we are behaving as customers. 

In this weekly newsletter, we will delve into the world of why customers buy and how they really make decisions. Our objective is to introduce you to some advanced strategy to help you drive more value in your organization, whatever that means to your company. More value might be more sales, more loyalty, more satisfaction, or even more leads.  

In other words, we want to help you have more of everything you are working toward using psychology and behavioral economics to optimize your Customer Experience.

You Don’t Always Listen to What Customers Tell You

I have a bonus surprise for you today: you can’t always listen to what your customers tell you. You can’t because they don’t always know what they want.

There is a story I like to tell about Disney theme park guests and their dining preferences. Disney was working to improve concessions years ago. They asked what people would like to see on the menu. Customers told Disney that a salad option would be nice. 

Now, Disney knows that customers don’t eat salads at the parks. Customers eat hot dogs, hamburgers, and those mounds of steaming turkey legs. Hence, that’s what you will find at most of the food venues — although they did add salads at some of their restaurants, too! 

This story is an example of the difference between what customers tell you they want, and what customers really want. Often, these two things are quite different. If Disney had listened to Customers and stocked the theme park full of salads, they would have thrown the salads away at the end of the day, uneaten. 

From a business perspective, this example of salads is essential. The problem is if you take customers at their word, you could miss out on discovering what actually drives value for your organization. Therefore, sometimes you shouldn’t listen to Customers. In this newsletter, we will tell you when that is the case. 

Why Should You Embrace Irrationality?

When deployed, using these tools to enhance your Customer Experience to influence customer behavior has an outstanding effect. We helped one of our clients, RICOH Printers in Canada improve their Net Promoter Score? by 34 points over a 30-month period that led to a 10% increase in printer sales. Not only that, RICOH achieved these results in a declining printer market.  

We spoke with CEO Glenn Laverty in a recent podcast and he said they knew they needed to do something. The product RICOH sold was a commodity by this point. Since hardware couldn’t distinguish them from the competition, they decided to try another tack. They chose to compete by offering an outstanding Customer Experience. 

“We felt that we would be tapping into that emotional component of a decision that customers were involved in,” Laverty explains.  

Perhaps most importantly, our content is designed to be useful in the real world. The theories behind customer behavior are fascinating, but useless if you don’t have a practical application for them. 

This concept of practical application is near and dear to my heart. We named the company Beyond Philosophy because we wanted to say that having a philosophy is a fantastic start, but you have to go beyond the thinking and do something. 

For all of these reasons, we will not only give you the theory behind why customers do what they do but also the practical tips for implementation. Best of all, we know they work as we've done these hundreds of times with different organizations all over the world. 

In our next issue of Why Customers Buy, we will explore the four parts of a Customer Experience and the significance of emotions on your bottom line. It turns out that squishy stuff like feelings can result in some cold hard cash. 

There you have it. No promotions, no gimmicks, just good information. 

We hope you enjoyed this issue of Why Customers Buy. If you have, please forward it to a friend or colleague.

Think reading is for chumps? Try my podcast, The Intuitive Customer instead. We explore the many reasons why customers do what they do—and what you should do about it. Subscribe today right here.