Unhappily, much furniture advertising is calculated to give the reading public a false impression of the necessary price levels of good furniture. It may be that you can please your customer with a chair at the price she has tentatively decided to pay. If not, you must please her in a more costly piece. Here you run up against new competition; for however able your demonstration of quality may be, your customer is certain to weigh that additional item of cost against the additional articles that she must give up in order to buy the chair. Hence something more than a convincing demonstration of the intrinsic worthiness of the piece will be necessary to complete the sale.
Finally, there is a third form of competition—that among different furniture stores for the same sale. However well the customer may like your chair at the price asked, it is natural for her to try to find something just as good at a lower price, or more pleasing at the same price, since that is her habit in buying other commodities.
She knows that there are other good stores nearby, with scores of easy chairs to show her, and that they are advertising bargains and holding out inducements to get her trade. You cannot prove to her in advance that she will only waste her time by looking further, and any arguments, pleadings, or high-pressure methods designed to keep her from doing so are quite likely to have precisely the opposite effect.
WHAT SHOPPERS REALLY WANT
At this point a surprisingly large percentage of salesmen weaken. Knowing that it is impossible to oppose successfully the self-interest of the buyer, they can think of nothing else to do. In point of fact there is nothing else to do in a great many cases, except to make every possible effort to create an impression sufficiently powerful to bring the buyer back after her shopping tour is over. In many other cases, however, there is a way to meet competition, if you can develop the ability to use it.
The woman who wants an easy chair, a sofa, a rug, or a desk, also wants something else which is far more important to her, namely, a more satisfying room. She doesn't tell you about it, but she really hopes that the new piece under consideration will add more beauty, comfort, distinction, or impressiveness to her room.
Get her to thinking of her room as a whole, with the new article a part of that whole. Lead her to believe that the desirable qualities which she seeks will appear in it as a result of your help in selection and arrangement. In other words, appeal to her self-interest by offering her something highly important which she knows in advance cannot be found elsewhere.
THE "ROOM PICTURE" METHOD
To overcome the inevitable competition of opposing desires, and to reduce or eliminate shopping for variety of selection or price, make your customer see the piece under consideration not as an individual unit, but as an integral part of her room. As long as she is permitted to think that she is buying a chair and nothing but a chair, she will be concerned with a multitude of details, most of which are of no real importance,[27] and will be strongly disposed to keep on looking until she has exhausted every possibility of finding something completely satisfactory in all of these details.