Why people buy more when they serve themselves
Removing human interaction from the equation is good for business?
You might think that a brand like McDonald's are just trying to save costs by replacing staff with kiosks at their outlets, but according to the BBC, research shows that self-service machines actually cause people to buy more...because they feel less judged for it.
There are apparently a number of reasons why the machines drive sales:
"Firstly, you are removing the psychology of speaking to someone and feeling judged, we think that is a key factor."
"Plus, there's really good product imagery on the terminals, so you can see the product, you can see what's in it, you can see all the other products linked to it as well. So there's that.
"And also around upsell. At every opportunity within the customer journey on the terminal, you are asked would you like to add this, would you like to do that? Because you've got more time and you're not being judged, you're very much more inclined to actually say yes to these things."
According to the report - the increased amount that people spend when ordering on a machine, instead of talking to another person, is as much as 40% more.
Now although this article uses laughable assumptions; such as 'behavioural science is at play here' (we all know that there is no such thing as behavioural science and that anyone peddling such nonsense is a professional bullshitter hunting for suckers) the truth is that human beings are fallible to some predictable mental biases (which is not grounded in proper, falsifiable science) that appear to have some influence on consumer behaviour.
Manipulating consumer behaviour with things like self-serving kiosks may well influence how much gets spent per transaction, but at the same time - one does wonder what kind of a long-term effect it has on how the brand is perceived as a result.
The short-term bump in sales volume could come at the long-term expense to brand perception.
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Meanwhile Starbucks are ditching the machines in favour of bring back the human-touch...
Alex Bitter