Techniques in reducing customers’ post purchase dissonance

‘Post purchase dissonance’ this world is very familiar to marketing guys. A successful marketer must always try to reduce post purchase dissonance. Customers often have this dissonance behaviour when they buy products that are highly attractive in their promotional drives especially advertising campaigns but fail to satisfy customers’ expectations performance wise.

Anyhow what is this post purchase dissonance? Assume a customer purchases a product as it seems a nice product with nice packaging. At home he starts using it. But the performance of that product is not in line with that customer’s expectation. So he or she may feel ‘I made a wrong choice’ ‘I just zilch my purse’.

This dissonance makes enormous impacts in the success or failure of a product. Dissonanced customer will not even bother to re buy the product and may also influence others to not buy. A smart marketer or sometimes sales person should always try to reduce dissonance.

First thing is letting customer to know what other benefits are inline with the product. Eventhough product didn’t perform to the level of customer’s expectation; he or she may try to negotiate with the product as it has some supplementary benefits. A product may be ‘health friendly, skin friendly, environment friendly and innovative etc’. Thus these indirect benefits may help to negotiate with the customer.

Some marketers practice sales promotions to reduce dissonance. They offer another free product with theirs. But I doubt to what extend there will be use of it. Of course customers will buy the product as just they are getting another product. But how long you are going to do this promotion? After you stop the promotion, customers will not bother to buy your product.

The best way to reduce dissonance is telling about the benefits that customers gain with your product. So they can be happy with the benefits that they have got instead of what they lost. There is nothing like positioning and branding you in order to be a succeeding business. A good positioning will itself attract customers who fall into that positioning category instead of looking at the product features. Positioning is relied on the positioning tactic. For an example positioning tactic of a restaurant would be ‘truly vegetarian’. So this tactic connects all people who are against to meat and like to save animals instead of looking at the taste of foods and other cognitive benefits such as status orientation and reputation.

Anyhow it is necessitate keeping on doing research in order to know the requirements of customers and therefore offering products according to their requirements. So it eliminates dissonance and stimulates preference and of course loyalty to the product.