Channel Advantage - expert field marketing for technology

"Products are your business, people are ours"

The Face 2 Face Blog - Tony Hall, Managing Director

How to sell to confused customers.

Have you tried to buy a television recently? Never mind that all you want is a nice big screen and a chunky remote control, you're now faced with a mind-boggling array of options stretching from contrast and aspect ratios, resolution, decoders, A/V connectors, the HDMI/DVI acronym nightmare and even casing colours. And what exactly IS the difference between HD Ready and Full HD? Does anyone know?

Gone are the days when you could walk into a store and simply browse a selection of a few toasters, a couple of tellys and a washing machine. Most outlet style electronics retailers now stock upwards of 100 televisions and countless add-ons and doo-dads, all of which make product selection almost impossible for the poor consumer.

It's leading to a condition the experts are calling 'technology terror', that state of mind where the buyer is faced with such a bewildering set of choices that they retreat back to the sofa with quivering arms and bloodshot eyes, vowing never to buy another product again.

Nor is it confined to television equipment. A BBC online report a few years back revealed that many people resist upgrading their mobile phones simply because they don't understand what they are buying, 'the survey shows that consumers may resist swapping their existing phone for a 3G one because of widespread confusion about the bewildering number of ways to pay for phones and the vast array of features most have onboard.'

The retailers are, of course, aware of the problem and are desperately trying to provide as much help as they can in the form of detailed point of sale leaflets and specification glossaries, but in many cases there are just too many things to cover and not enough shelf space to go round. The result is that many consumers are buying what they didn't want and becoming frustrated in the process.

For many would be purchasers the confusing welter of technologies and brands are putting them off buying or upgrading completely. A research report completed for the Consumer Advisory Board a while ago concluded that 'consumers are delaying purchasing technology because in many cases they don't understand the technology used to hawk new products, or indeed what the products are. For example only 65% of the 1500 consumers surveyed in the UK, US, China and Japan knew the meaning of 'megahertz', despite the frequency of its use in advertising.'

The problem is typically made worse by the lack of qualified sales staff available to help, and often those that are there have less knowledge than the consumer. Even something as simple as putting together the right combination of television and audio system can prove to be a massive challenge on a crowded shop floor, and that's just one sale type to cope with.

Retailers and manufacturers have, however, started to fight back against the knowledge gap by reverting to a new form of a technique that the FMCG sector has been using for nearly 60 years, namely specialist field marketing. In many of the larger retail stores you will now find trained, qualified consumer technology consultants roaming the sales floor as a type of technology ambassador, able to calm ruffled consumer nerves and suggest the kind of product combinations that work.

Although the idea is not new, the difference with this new generation of specialist field marketing is the in-depth understanding of how different technologies work together, it's much more than just demonstrating a new lipstick colour. Computers, media centres, A/V and high tech consumer appliances, typically high ticket items, need more careful explaining, and it is the job of these new specialists to fit all the pieces together so they make sense and work properly.

A lot of the retailer's enthusiasm is of course, driven by the threat from the increasing popularity of online shopping, which often comes with its own set of customer reviews, forums and other non-expert guides to help with the buyer's purchase decision. The thinking goes that if the retailer can match that kind of inexpert help with more specialist guidance at the point of sale, fewer sales will be lost as frustrated customers walk out of the door and resort to the perceived safety of a Web store.