People's Buying Behavior/Purchasing Process

Off Topic
#1

Continuing the discussion from Agenda Item: Chairs:

High involvement purchasing decisions (cars, houses, mattresses, mail-order brides) are quite complicated, brain-wise, I think. In the case of a mattress, yes, people spend a very large percentage of their life on it. As I think about getting a mattress, it is not “holy crap! $2000…for that thing? That’s a rip-off”. It’s more “I am going to be spending a very large percentage of my life on this, and at $2000, I can’t afford to be wrong when I make a choice. I think I’ll do even more research.”

Which of course is a fool’s errand, as anything one can find that’s posing as information is pretty much a lie, or at least marketing propaganda.

Cars and other high involvement decisions are similarly complicate, albeit for maybe different reasons e.g. unlike mattresses, some people buy cars for status purposes and don’t want to buy something that makes them look stoopid, like a C class Mercedes Benz.

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#2

I buy cars that break down, so I can fix them :slight_smile:

There are so many good mattress companies today selling good stuff for good prices, I’m extremely happy with my $200 amazon mattress but I’m sure not everyone would be.

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#3

Hang on, you’re not fooling me. You tell me whatever I can find online is a lie, which means what you said online is probably a lie, which means I need to do more research. :wink:

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#4

We are all from the truth-telling tribe here on @Talk!

#5

@200$, I would totally take a punt on a mattress and toss it if it didn’t work out. @$2000, no way. Right?

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#6

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#7

There is a world of difference (or their should be) in how you decide to spend your own money and how you decide to spend other’s people money. When DMS makes a spending decision, they are effectively spending other’s peoples monies.

This should be something that is approached with more thought and contemplation than an individual may choose to do if they were only spending their own money.

In the case of the chairs which prompted this thread; we currently have chairs that meet the definition of such. They allow people to sit and the chairs hold them up. Because a selection of members are concerned about essentially aesthetics issues concerning the chairs we are contemplating spending $10000+ (Franks quote for the chairs that they seem to have settled on is $13000+). That is not an insubstantial sum of money for our organization.

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#8

That’s exactly what “they” would want me to think, so …

Time to laser-cut me a new tinfoil hat, this one isn’t working! :smiley:

#9

IMO, that’s because $400 or even $2000 are far more concrete to people, whereas $40K is just a number.

Take this as an example. The average NFL player’s is paid $1.9M per year. OK, to most of us that’s just a number. But what if I say that person makes 25 times as much as the average salaried professional. Now 25 is a number we can all relate to. Imagine living in a house 25 times as large. Imagine having 25 cars. Those you can at least sort of visualize. $1.9M annually most of us can’t.

And not all of us have the detailed knowledge to analyze the value proposition of a $40K automobile, while most of us fancy that we can understand the details of a chair.

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#10

Now take that to the next level and no one can understand it. Imagine billions! 20000 cars! A house 20000x the size of your existing one :slight_smile:

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#11

No doubt this is a key consideration…the complexity of the decision and a person’s ability to get their brain around it. Information overload, including too many offerings and then trying to distinguish the pros and cons between them, is a big hurdle, especially nowadays.