Die? or Delight?

The latest in the JEWELRY STORE POSSIBLE series discussing how delighting customers can immensely grow your business.

There is a part of our brains that causes us to ignore boring, repetitive messages. This area unconsciously takes all of the messages that we receive and either records them into memory or it kicks them to the curb like an old tin can. This area is called Broca’s area. Roy Williams has deemed this area the Gatekeeper of the Mind. And if we want to throw away dollars and time, all we have to do with Broca’s area is bore it. How do we do that? With messages and experiences that are the same all over. Quality, Service, Value, We’ve been in business since 1942! We have the largest diamond ring selection around! Nobody beats our prices!

Or even better yet, cheesy cliches that just fill ad space such as, Spring into savings! or For everyone on your Christmas shopping list! And it’s not just in advertising. How about our diamond presentations? Well Tom, this is a very beautiful diamond. It’s a carat five round brilliant with H color and SI 2 clarity. That’s what everyone says! And then they all whip out the exact same brochure to show how special THEIR diamond is.

Then there’s our decor. How many of our stores have the exact same duratrans or posters from our vendors? We’re telling people we’re all the same with our decor and thus boring Broca’s area. If we continue to give the same messages as everyone else out there, we become irrelevant. We become just like them and now we’ve commoditized our jewelry store. We didn’t mean to do it. It’s just what the industry dished out.

NOW let me tell you what happens when we DELIGHT Broca’s area. When the Gatekeeper receives a message that’s new and especially delightful or interesting, Broca’s area allows that message to be tucked ever so neatly into the long term memory area of the brain. Here’s the really neat part…. For later recall. I love this because the more you delight Broca, the more psychological landscape you acquire. Your investment grows. And if you’ve done this well enough, when your potential customer has a need for jewelry, they’ll think of you. Yup, they’ll think of you… even if the other guy in town is shouting louder than you. They’ll recall your store and want to come in. This is why in marketing, it’s good idea to get people mentally rehearsing the action YOU want them to take. For example, if we want them to come into our jewelry store, we PLANT a phrase such as, When you walk through our door at Woodard’s Diamonds and Design, you’re going to be greeted with the friendliest, most delightful no pressure staff in Tennessee. I’ve just told them what’s going to happen WHEN they walk through the door, not IF.

The more we DELIGHT Broca’s area in every aspect of our business, the better we’ll do long term. I say long term because just like an investment, it takes time to grow, and we don’t know what any one person’s jewelry buying cycle is. To a Pandora customer, it may be every few months, for others it may be every few years. Our goal is to just keep delighting Broca in our messaging, our stores, our people and presentations, the smells in our stores, the music, all the way to our jewelry and our cases.

So here’s how you can get started. Pick one area. For this exercise, let’s use our diamond presentations. How do the following things look just like everyone else out there?
The words we use to greet people
The questions we ask
Our bridal and loose diamond displays
Our cases
Our display elements
Our sales tools
The refreshments we offer
The chair or stool the customer sits in

NOW, what can we do (or start doing) to add an element of delight to these areas,to stand out from all the others, to create a memorable experience or as Shane Decker calls it, a WOW experience? If we can begin to make little changes one step at a time to keep delighting Broca’s area of the brain and cause people to recall those delightful stored memories in THEIR time, when THEY have a jewelry moment in their lives, then we’ll see a LOT less of the Be-Back bus. We’ll get a ton more referrals and we’ll start seeing a lot more new faces and bridal sales than ever before. Go ahead. You can do it. Pick one area and make that list right now.