Customer Experience v/s Buying Behaviour

I was driving on my way to home and at a traffic signal, I saw people selling toys, car wipes and some miniature Indian Tricolor. What intrigued me was that people who were sitting in their Porsches and Audis were negotiating with these sellers. Now let me tell you something about these sellers - they are not representing any brand or part of a retail sales team of a shopping mall. They are people who sleep on the roadside at night. So coming back to the point, when I saw that the buyers were negotiating on these items, I was struck by an irony. The same people who drive their Porsches and Audis never negotiate or bargain when they buy a similar product from any large retail brand. There they blindly give the credit card to the cashier and it doesnt matter whether the store is charging VAT or service tax, they buy.

Now the question is why not bargain with the large brands and why negotiate with those road side sellers? Is it because the quality of product is good or bad. Let us assume that the products are of same quality. The answer is human buying pattern. Buyers have a picture in their mind that if a product is packaged properly and presented in a nice box packing with an organically prepared carry bag, they are impressed and they "assume" that the product is of impeccable quality. Whereas the roadside sellers dont package it and they give the product as it is. What is the buyer/customer getting - Customer Experience. The packaging of the product is an experience that companies are giving to buyers, which stimulates the buying behavior.

In the era where customers have a plethora of products to buy from multiple channels, its becoming even more inevitable parameter to provide the right experience to the customer which entices the customer to stick to a particular brand and repeatedly buy from the same product. Hence organizations are now investing more in providing the best experience to their customers, whether it is in the form of product packaging, incentives or from product promotion side.

Quality of product is definitely the top parameter but if it is combined with the right experience - the organizations will strike Gold-dust