To redeem or not to redeem (points) ?

Women love to shop. We all know that, don't we ?

It wouldn't be surprising that the universally accepted trick to a good business is somehow to get women to the shopping floor and let them shop to their heart's content. 

When I was young, sales happened at specific times each year. In Calcutta, there was the famous "Chaitra sale" which was the inventory clearing sale at the end of the Bengali year (or the last month of the Hindu calendar). Those days are gone now - sales happen all the time. There's spring sale, summer sale, autumn sale, end of season sale. You name it and there's a sale !

Robert D Cialdini, in his seminal book "Influence: The Art of Persuasion" explains why sales and discounts work well. He writes that most of our actions automatic. We do not think through most of our actions, which trigger the same recurring reactions. For example, someone asks you permission to jump the queue, you refuse. However, if the same person says " Excuse me Sir could I please buy the train ticket before you because I have to rush to the hospital to see my mother", you would oblige. You would oblige not because the reason is very valid, but simply because there is a reason ( as you use the word "because"), you are used to thinking there would be a reason, which is good enough. So if you say, "Excuse me, Sir, may I jump the queue because I have an appointment at the parlour or I have to go to a movie", it might still work.

I will quote an excerpt from Cialdini below to explain this better : 

"This parallel form of human automatic action is aptly demonstrated in an experiment by Harvard social psychologist Ellen Langer. A wellknown principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do. Langer demonstrated this unsurprising fact by asking a small favor of people waiting in line to use a library copying machine: Excuse me, I have five pages. May
I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush? The effectiveness of this request-plus-reason was nearly total: Ninety-four percent of those asked let her skip ahead of them in line. Compare this success rate to the results when she made the request only: Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine? Under those circumstances, only 60 percent of those asked complied. At first glance, it appears that the crucial difference between the two requests was the additional information provided by the words “because I’m in a rush.” But a third type of request tried by Langer showed that this was not the case. It seems that it was not the whole series of words, but the first one, “because,” that made the difference. Instead of including a real reason for compliance, Langer’s third type of request used the word “because” and then, adding nothing new, merely restated the obvious: Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies? The result was that once again nearly all (93 percent) agreed, even though no real reason, no
new information, was added to justify their compliance. Just as the“cheep-cheep” sound of turkey chicks triggered an automatic mothering response from maternal turkeys—even when it emanated from a stuffed polecat—so, too, did the word “because” trigger an automatic compliance response from Langer’s subjects, even when they were given no subsequent reason to comply. Click, whirr!"

Cialdini goes on to explain that price discounts and sales work well because they fall into this "automatic human action" category. "Oh there's a sale - it means I will get a good deal." So sales work well and retailers keep milking this idea, many times over. Sales and discounts have now become happy "nudge techniques" which are used by retailers all the time.

Last week, though, I discovered an innovative nudge technique which wasn't a sale.

It is innovative because I have not come across any thing like this before, and if you have, let me know.

So, I have a loyalty program with Allen Solly ( A.S for short). A.S sent me an sms last month that I have 148 points to redeem by the end of September. This seemed good enough reason to nudge me to go to the shop. As if that wasn't enough, I got another sms sometime in the last week of September, saying if I shopped within September, I get an extra 250 points to redeem.








This wasn't a sale, like we know it. When I landed up in the store, it wasn't crowded, which means it was not a bulk offer. And yet, it was such a strong "nudge".

I think it worked very well because :

(a) There was a feeling of exclusivity, since sales are often associated with crowds, excessive hastling and jostling at the trial rooms. Also, such exclusivity in a way gives way to a feeling of gratitude, which binds one to some sort of reciprocity. As Cialdini points out, "people generally feel obliged to return favours offered to them. This trait is embodied in all human cultures and is one of the human characteristics that allow us to live as a society.Compliance professionals often play on this trait by offering a small gift to potential customers. Studies have shown that even if the gift is unwanted, it will influence the recipient to reciprocate." (Wikipedia) This sense of being given a "special offer" which others equally placed were not, creates a sense of gratitude, so you almost feel that you must buy something. Of course, it works even well with the fact that you already have been given some discounts, which you have to redeem in any case.

(b)  It is also a time bound offer. With sales and discounts, you know if you miss this time, there's always next. With special offers like this, which are randomly offered, you do not know if it will be offered to you again, and if so when. So you would want to make the best use of it when it is there.  This element of uncertainty which makes letting this offer go a bit tougher than others.

This could bring in more people to the counters, and pump up the sales. However, it does have problems in the long run :

a) If everyone starts using it, it would look like a common trick and wouldn't appear to be all enticing. However, the "uncertainty factor" would still remain - so even if you know it is a common trick, you still wouldn't know when you get it again and hence, the force of "nudge" would still remain. Everyone knows that during sales, it is often the old stock that is sold, whereas this special offer comes during normal season sales, and one has access to new in-season collection at some discount. All this might still make the offer look lucrative.

b) It can only be used in places where the customers do not interact with each other often and there is no sense of unfairness or discontent amongst those who have not been offered. The selection has to be random and spread out.

c) Like I said, sales are inventory clearing exercises. But giving discounts during season means the profit margin for such discounted sales decrease. Unless the "nudge" is considerably strong to make the customer shop a lot more than the item of discount, this might be countered.


It will be interesting to see if this strategy catches up in the future. I will keep an eye on this. If you find out, let me know too.

Designs, phones and kitchens

Being trained as  a lawyer and not having any technical education, I have always been blissfully ignorant of design aesthetics in a product.

I always assumed that the beauty of a product ( gadgets mostly) would only be relevant from a technical point of view - you judge a television by how good the picture quality is, you judge a laptop by its configuration, and similar such things. To the rest, like me, design and aesthetics in a product always seemed synonymous - an iphone is beautifully designed, simply because it looks beautiful ( why wouldn't it - it has everything that a pretty gadget needs). The house that overlooks the cafeteria in my office is designed well, because it is white, majestic, has dreamy balconies, and a terrace garden, and hence, beautiful. In other words, design didn't really an independent meaning in my world-view other than inter-changeable relation to aesthetics.

All of this changed when I read Steve Job's wonderfully written biography by Walter Issacson. I am still someone with no technical education ( so I do not know the difference between an intel processor and a microchip or a frying fan), but the book made me realize that a product isn't merely its technical configuration. Or for that matter, a product isn't always gadget. Or, that design isn't only about aesthetics. There is a lot more to a product than I had perceived it to be for so long.

Design is, contrary to what I believed earlier, a far more holisitic and integral element which gives identity to a product. Also, equally important is that utility is also an important element of design. Of course, there is the debate that sometimes design is mutually exclusive from utility, but I would think that utility is an integral part of designs.

As it would happen, weeks after I finished reading Job's book, and was looking around the world, trying to segregate the world into binary categories of "good designs" and "bad designs",  I happened to watch a program on BBC on a design used by Samsung for user manuals. This design is created by a company called the "Design Vitamins" and looks like this :

Look how beautiful it is again :

As the excerpt on the Design Vitamins' site rightly says "good design is for everyone", it indeed is. A good design can convert a prosaic user manual to a handy, useful tool, more accessible to everyone. The irony of a good design is that you almost look at it say " Oh come on ! How could anyone not have discovered it before ? Doesn't it seem like the only obvious way of doing a user manual ?" A good design also makes the earlier commonly used design look all the more stupid and ugly in retrospect - imagine going back to the user manual which doesn't look like this ever after knowing such beautiful designs exist. What is essential perhaps in creating a good design is to understand what the product wants to achieve and what value it intends to provide to its user. A user manual is of no use, if the user does not like to use it. Univerally, X is of no use, if the user of X doesn't like X.

With this, I began to again distill the world with the design-locator radar and looked at how flats are designed.  By way of a hypothesis, I asked myself what could be a well designed flat for an urban crowd that is predominantly double income nuclear family. The woman in this family works, she has long hours at office and often un-predictable work hours as most private sector jobs are. While her husband is helpful, he doesn't cook. They have a cook who comes daily. Like most Indian families, they do not like eating packaged food, and would prefer fresh cooked food, made twice daily. Waiting for the cooking lady in the morning means that she has to co-ordianate her gym timings with her, or miss out on yoga classes. It is even more problematic in the evening, when either of them has to rush home to open the door for the cook, or just end up missing the cook's timings and re-heating the food. She isn't comfortable giving the keys to the cooking maid for the whole house.

Would it not make sense if the kitchen had a separate entrance in most flats ? It would mean that the kitchen is secluded from the rest of the house, and the key can be given to the cook easily without being giving access to the whole house. It also means more flexible in and out time for residents in the house.

More and more women are going to work in the coming decades, and cooking, being a traditionally done by women, will continue to remain a difficult thing to manage. However, with the rich culture of home cooking habits that we have inherited from our mothers and grand-mothers, it is not very likely that we will shift to the American culture of packaged food. The food habits will therefore, continue to be fresh cooked food, but mostly done by cooking helps, and not the women in the family. All of this would probably work very well, if flats and houses had an extra door to the kitchen. It would mean that you didn't have to co-ordinate your day with the kaamwali bai's timings and still have fresh cooked food when you are back home - all of this comes at no extra cost , but just an extra door.

I would think it adds more utility to the house, and is better design. What do you think ?

I will write more on more design-efficient products as I locate more.