Has Southwest ever cancelled your flight while you’re all hunky-dory and ready to return home? Sh*t indeed happens, but hey, you can get credit for your next ticket while Southwest Airlines dumps you in like say Philadelphia for 3 winter days. Always look on the bright side. You probably already know this, but these credit offers are actually a technique to improve and maintain customer relations. If you didn’t know that, well as I twirl my thick moustache (if I had one, I probably would) like a dork, my ‘speculative intuition’ would say these gift card/credit balance offers prime the customers’ minds to stick with Southwest, thus, spending the credit would be the behavioral reinforcement to the retained loyalty. In other words, if it weren’t for the credit offer, you’d probably ditch Southwest. Along with Southwest, online department stores like Amazon also do credit offers (along with many other “evil” techniques) for refunds and trade-ins. So it goes like this: if you’re unsatisfied with a product and then decide to return it, you’re stuck with unused store credit. You get the idea. Pretty crafty.
If that’s not news for you, well there’s actually a lot of psychological research behind all this, in improving customer relations. This would be called evaluative research which is a type of applied psychology research, especially done by big businesses. I’ll share a bit about what it is: the purpose of evaluative research is to improve, for examples, specific programs or specific product features and etc. The methods would be adequate, not “gold-plated”, but adequate enough to be done quickly and cheaply. It’s not the kind of research that’s seeking some fundamental understanding of like say happiness, adolescence or anything academic. Non-applied psychology research tends to use more elaborate methods. Jo-ann Fabrics has done their homeworks and came up with something really bizarre, but surprisingly effective. Joann Fabrics would have deals like “Buy 2 Sewing Machines and Save 10%.” Who the hell wants 2 sewing machines?! Ok...sweatshops. Maybe share the good will with a friend? Silly enough, that’s what Joann fabrics was shooting for. This taken-for-granted idea actually transforms customers into salespersons. Shockingly, this kind of offer actually boosted revenues by increasing the number of consistent customers due to the chain reaction of referrals.
A few more examples of applied evaluative research:
• Charities and Political Campaigns do research to find which appeals increase giving
• Online Newspapers and Blog sites test how different layouts increase the probability of readers clicking through to articles
• Article on business models behind social gaming:http://www.gamespot.com/news/6284524.html (The article has moral suggestions but looking at things with a moral lens is a way of getting an easy, tangible understanding of a new concept. So you don’t have to buy into all of its morals, but basically, emotion increases memory consolidation. PSA: And now you know.)
Anyways, so what can you take out of this? That’s up to you. If you were my mom taking my emptied tin lunchbox and asking, “So Ryan, what did you learn in school?” I would say, “Well…Today, I learned that my teacher is nice *kekeke*,” but apart from that, I would usually share something interesting such as this. One of the valuable lessons could be: to rationalize the ‘teaser’ shopping offers. You don’t have to know the true psychology behind every coupon or bonus you get, but questioning them may help you refrain from experiencing buyer’s remorse, especially for the compulsive shoppers.
Side Note/Blog Outtake: You know what would be super awesome/dorky? Getting my hands on evaluative research behind Facebook features like the ‘like’ button. Nerd alert: The ‘like’ button and Facebook features alike that are taken at face value and for granted may actually suggest research on how this generation is widely accepting social networking. From a historical perspective, early newspapers have been used to impose nationalism in developing countries but they also instilled imagined communities between people of far distances—with the help of a standardized language and instilling a notion of ‘us’ as a ‘nation.’ There has to be some grounds laid out and social processes that shaped our brains to accept social networking as a pervasive part of our everyday life in order for us to experience real-life consequences from imagined, shared events.
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