BUYING AND SELLING
The effects which we have studied
so far were produced by inanimate objects, posters
or displays, advertisements or labels and packings.
The economic psychotechnics of the future will surely
study with similar methods the effects of the living
commercial agencies. Experiments will trace the
exact effects which the salesman or customer may produce.
But here not even a modest beginning can be discovered,
and it would be difficult to mention a single example
of experimental research. The desired psychological
influences of the salesman are not quite dissimilar
to those of the printed means of propaganda.
Here, too, it is essential to turn the attention of
the customer to different points, to awaken a vivid
favorable impression, to emphasize the advantages
of the goods, to throw full light on them, and finally
to influence the will-decision either by convincing
arguments or by persuasion and suggestion. In
either case the point is to enhance the impulse to
buy and to suppress the opposing ideas. Yet every
one of these factors, when it starts from a man and
not from a thing or paper, changes its form.
The influence becomes narrower, it is directed toward
a smaller number of persons; but, on the other hand,
it gains just by the new possibility of individualization.
The salesman in the store or the commercial traveler
adjusts himself to the wishes, reactions, and replies
of the buyer. Above all, when it becomes necessary
to direct the attention to the decisive points, the
personal agent has the possibility of developing the
whole process through a series of stages so that the
attention slowly becomes focused on one definite point.
The salesman observes at first only the general limits
of the interest of the customer as far as it is indicated
by his reactions, but slowly he can find out in this
whole field the region of strongest desires.
As soon as he has discovered this narrower region
in which the prospects of success seem to be greatest,
he can systematically eliminate everything which distracts
and scatters the attention. He can discover whether
the psyche of the individual with whom he is dealing
can be influenced more strongly by logical arguments
or by suggestion, and how far he may calculate on
the pleasure instincts, on the excitement of emotions,
on the impulse to imitate, on the natural vanity,
on the desire for saving, and on the longing for luxury.
In every one of these directions the whole play of
human suggestion may be helpful. The voice may
win or destroy confidence, the statement may by its
firmness overcome counter-motives or by its uncertainty
reinforce them. Even hand or arm movements by
their motor suggestion may focus the desires of the
customers, while unskillful, erratic movements may
scatter the attention and lead to an inner oscillation
of the will to buy.
At every one of these points the psychological
experiment may find a foothold, and only through such
methodological study can the haphazard proceedings
of the commercial world be transformed into really
economic schemes. Indeed, it seems nothing but
chance that just this field is controlled by chance
alone. The enormous social interplay of energies
which are discharged in the selling and buying of the
millions becomes utterly planless as soon as salesman
and customer come into contact, and this tremendous
waste of energy cannot appear desirable for any possible
interest of civilization. The time alone which
is wasted by useless psychophysical operations in front
of and behind the counter represents a gigantic part
of the national budget. Even the complaints about
the long working day of the salesgirls might be eliminated
from the debit account of the national ledger, if the
commercial companies could study the psychical processes
in selling and buying with the same carefulness with
which they analyze all details in preparing the stock
and fixing the prices. In the army or in the
fire department, in the railroad service, and even
in the factory, all necessary activities are so arranged
that as far as possible the greatest achievement is
secured by the smallest amount of energy. But
when the hundreds of millions of customers in the
civilized world want to satisfy their economic demands
in the stores, the whole dissolves into a flood of
talk, because no one has taken the trouble to examine
scientifically the psychotechnics of selling and to
put it on a firm psychological foundation.
The idea of scientific management
must be extended from the industrial concerns to the
commercial establishments. The questioning and
answering, the showing and replacing of the goods,
the demonstrating and suggesting by the salesmen,
must be brought into an economic system which saves
time and energy, as has been tried with the laborer
in the factory. Wherever economic processes are
carried out with superfluous, haphazard movements,
the national resources have to suffer a loss.
The single individual can never find the ideal form
of motion and the ideal process by mere instinct.
A systematic investigation is needed to determine
the way to the greatest saving of energy, and the
result ought to be made a binding rule for every apprentice.
How the smallest influences grow by summation may be
illustrated by the experience of a large department
store, in which the expense for delivery of the articles
sold was felt as too large an item in the budget.
The hundreds of saleswomen therefore received the
order after every sale of moderate-sized articles not
to ask, as before, “May we send it to you?”
but instead, “Will you take it with you?”
Probably none of the many thousand daily customers
observed the difference, the more as it was indifferent
to most of them whether they took the little package
home themselves or not. In cases in which it
was inconvenient, they would anyhow oppose the suggestion
and insist that the purchase be sent to them.
Yet it is claimed that this hardly noticeable suggestion
led to a considerable saving in the following year,
distinctly felt in the budget of the whole establishment.
We must not forget, however, that
the process of buying deserves the same psychological
interest as that of selling. If psychotechnics
is to be put into the service of a valuable economic
task, the goal cannot possibly be to devise schemes
by which the customer may easily be trapped.
The purpose of science cannot be to help any one to
sell articles to a man who does not need them and
who would regret the purchase after quiet thought.
The applied psychologist should help the prospective
buyer no less, and must protect him so that his true
intention may become realized in the economic process.
Otherwise through his suggestibility, the determining
idea of his goal might fade in his consciousness and
the appeal to his vanity or to his instincts might
awaken an anti-economic desire which he would be too
weak to inhibit. The salesman must know how to
use arguments and suggestions and how to make them
effective, but the customer too must know how
to see through a misleading argument and how to resist
mere suggestion.
The postulate that the psychical factors
in commercial life are to be carefully regarded is
repeated in more complex form in the wholesale business
and in the stock exchange. It is a perfectly justified
and consistent thought which recently led a large
credit bureau to an effort to base its information
on psychological analysis. It is well known that
there are bureaus in which the ledger experiences of
a large circle of companies in the same commercial
line are collected, tabulated, and recorded, thus
affording an automatic review of the occurrences,
focusing early attention on doubtful accounts and
pointing out weaknesses in the customers’ conditions,
as they develop, as well as evidences of prosperity.
The ledger experience which a single company has with
all its customers is tabulated without revealing its
identity to the associates, who get reports containing
it, and the many combined ledgers become a valuable
guide. Yet all such methods can show only actual
movements in the market, and cannot allow the prospects
of future development to be determined, simply because
they cannot take into account the personal equations.
Only an acquaintance with the character and the temperament,
the intelligence and the habits, the energy and the
weakness, of the head of a firm can tell us whether
the company, even with satisfactory resources, may
go down, or whether, even though embarrassed, it may
hold out. The psychological pioneer, therefore,
aims not only toward an exchange of ledger accounts,
but toward a real psychological diagnosis and prognosis.
If a member of a firm is personally known to some scores
of business men who have had commercial dealings with
him, and each one of them, without disclosing his
identity to any one but the central bureau, sends
to it a statement of personal impressions, a composite
picture of the mental physiognomy can be worked out.
Of course all this has been often done in the terms
of popular psychology and in a haphazard, amateurish
way. The new plan is to arrange the questions
systematically under the point of view of scientific
descriptive psychology. Regular psychograms,
in which the probability of a particular kind of behavior
is to be determined in an exact percentage calculation,
are to replace the traditional vagueness, as soon as
a sufficient number of reliable answers have been
tabulated.
Commercial life as a whole finds its
contact with psychology, of course, not only in the
problem of how to secure the best mental effect.
Those other questions which we have discussed essentially
with reference to factory life and industrial concerns,
namely, how the best man and the best work are to
be secured, recur in the circle of commercial endeavors.
It seems, indeed, most desirable to devise psychological
tests by which the ability to be a successful salesman
or saleswoman may be determined at an early stage.
The lamentable shifting of the employees in all commercial
spheres, with its injurious social consequences, would
then be unnecessary, and both employers and employees
would profit. Moreover, like the selection of
the men, the means of securing the most satisfactory
work from them, has also so far been left entirely
to common sense. Commercial work stands under
an abundance of varying conditions, and each may have
influences the isolated effects of which are not known,
because they have not been studied in that systematic
form which only the experiment can establish.
The popular literature on this whole group of subjects
is extensive, and in its expansion corresponds to the
widespread demand for real information and advice to
the salesman. But hardly any part of the literature
in the borderland regions of economics is so disappointing
in its vagueness, emptiness, and helplessness.
Experimental psychology has nothing with which to
replace it to-day, but it can at least show the direction
from which decisive help may be expected in future.