There are hard-to-please customers in almost every industry, with certain individuals being picky about which clothes, houses and even romantic partners they could think about.
A new series of research has found that shopper pickiness can go beyond searching for the “best” option. The investigators specify what it means to be “picky” and developed a scale for measuring shopper pickiness.
Margaret Meloy, department chair and professor of marketing at Penn State, said the findings might help companies devise the best approaches for satisfying their pickier clients.
“If a company knows they have a lot of picky customers, they may need to change the way they reward salespeople or dedicate specific salespeople to their pickiest customers, because picky shoppers have very narrow preferences and they see perceived flaws in products others wouldn’t notice,” Meloy said. “Alternatively, a company may allow picky shoppers to customize their products to satisfy their idiosyncratic preferences. It’s not just about offering the best products, but offering the products that are best for the picky customers.”
Meloy added that even the most robust promotional strategies, such as offering a free gift with purchase, may fail with picky customers.
Previous research has found that roughly 40% of people have family or friends they’d consider “picky,” indicating the trait is not uncommon. The researchers said it might be helpful for retailers to have a better understanding of what that characteristic meant because of their customer base, and what those clients might need out of a product or shopping experience.
Meloy stated that while pickiness affects a customer’s shopping habits And therefore impacts a company’s business, there has not been much research done on defining pickiness or exploring how it affects a client’s behavior.
“In marketing, we call customers who want the absolute best version of a product ‘maximizers,'” Meloy said. “But with picky customers, the best is more idiosyncratic. For them, it might not be about getting the best quality, but getting the precise version of a product they have in their head — a shirt in a very precise shade of black, for example. We wanted to explore this a bit more.”
For the paper — recently released in the Journal of Consumer Psychology — the investigators performed a set of studies to create a scale for quantifying shopper pickiness and to identify the consequences of that pickiness on client behavior.
The very first collection of studies dedicated to growing the scale. The researchers said that they generated a string of questions which would help discover the emotional dimensions of pickiness while also avoiding using the phrase “picky,” since the word will have negative connotations. After the investigators were confident that the scale accurately quantified pickiness, they ran additional studies to examine the possible consequences of pickiness.
The researchers discovered that people who scored higher on the picky shopper scale tend to have a small window of what they consider acceptable, and also the investigators explained as having a little latitude of approval and a wide latitude for rejection. These shoppers were likely to reject a complimentary gift when offered as a thank you for participating in a survey.
“This may seem irrational to some people who may not understand why a person would reject things that come at no cost,” said Andong Cheng, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Delaware who earned her doctorate at Penn State. “We speculate that it could be psychologically costly for picky shoppers to take free items that they don’t like because possessing these items is a source of irritation for these individuals.”
Additionally, the researchers found that picky people didn’t change their opinions based on an item’s popularity. When they were informed that their top choice of a product was less popular than other possibilities, people who shopped on the picky scale weren’t tricked by that info. They stuck with their first selection.
Meloy said the results support the concept that being picky is a general personality trait that isn’t just present in one situation or part of a person’s life.
“We looked at a range of contexts to see whether being picky in one domain meant you were likely to be picky in others,” Meloy said. “Sure enough, individuals who were picky in one domain were picky in other domains. For example, if you tend to be picky while shopping for groceries, you’ll probably be picky shopping for clothes, as well.”
Meloy said the findings also illustrate the importance of a company understanding and aligning their business practices to their client base.
“If you know you have a lot of picky customers, you might not want to bother with offering free products or promoting products by saying how popular they are with other people,” Meloy said. “It’s just not going to work as well with picky customers. These companies will need to come up with strategies that give customers more control to better align their idiosyncratic preferences with the company’s offerings.”
Hans Baumgartner, Smeal Chair Professor of Marketing at Penn State, also participated in this study.
Related Journal Article: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jcpy.1223