Marketing

There’s a fascinating marketing concept known as ‘buyer’s remorse’, you may even have experienced it yourself. It’s the feeling of regret someone has after they’ve bought something, especially if it’s quite an expensive item. It’s the feeling that maybe they don’t really want it after all, that they’d rather have the money it cost instead.

Clever marketers know this, and this is one of the reasons why guarantees are offered. Knowing that you can get your money back is an easy way to make buyer’s remorse vanish. Guarantees are also offered to remove the perception of risk from a purchasing decision, hence the proliferation of guarantees that something will work as promised or your money back, no questions asked.

Your business already offers a guarantee!

You may think that your business doesn’t offer a guarantee because you haven’t decided to offer one. But in fact your business already has a guarantee.

It hopefully hasn’t happened too often, but you have probably had a customer say that what they bought from you didn’t work properly or that a service wasn’t carried out to their satisfaction.

And you probably didn’t shout at them and call them every name under the sun. In fact, it’s likely that you were very courteous and fixed the problem straightway, either by giving them their money back or replacing whatever it was that didn’t work or wasn’t to their satisfaction.

It’s therefore not such a big step for your business to formalise what you are already doing, and reap the benefits.

 
Make it simple

When you do ‘officially’ offer a guarantee it’s important to keep it simple. This is one reason why the phrase ‘no questions asked’ is so common in guarantees, because a guarantee must be easily understood for it to be effective. For example, a major Australian bank a few years ago introduced a guarantee that if a customer had to wait more than five minutes in line to be served by a teller they would get five dollars.

The guarantee was great for the bank, and also great for customers. And because the big banks have a lousy reputation for service, it won them lots of free publicity for their unusual and unexpected consideration of customers.

Branding

The bank’s teller guarantee shows another way in which guarantees can be useful – they can reinforce your marketing messages and positioning in the market by enhancing your branding.

If your business is serving coffees to commuters in a rush on their way to work you may want to guarantee them the coffee they want in three minutes or it’s free. If you are operating a courier business you may also want to offer a time-based guarantee.

Magazine publishers have also discovered the power of the guarantee when offering subscriptions. The opportunity to cancel at any time for a full refund entices many people to sign up.

 
Guaranteed disasters

Some guarantees are so vague as to be meaningless, make sure that yours doesn’t fall into this trap!

For example, one firm of electricians advertises in their local Yellow Pages ‘Guaranteed emergency service 24 hours, seven days a week’. But they don’t say exactly what they are guaranteeing beyond the term ‘emergency service’ and neither do they say what they will do if they are unable to provide this ‘emergency service’.

Then there’s the big chain of bookstores that guarantees they will match any competitor’s price. This is a powerful and very effective guarantee, but in this company’s case there was a problem – they were reported in the newspaper as charging more than the recommended retail price for some of their books. The funny thing is guarantees are so powerful that their guarantee still worked as a marketing tool!

The best thing about a guarantee

The best thing of all about offering a guarantee is that very few people will ever take you up on it. Isn’t that wonderful? Here is this incredibly powerful marketing tool and, according to research, only one or two people in a hundred will ever take it up. All it needs is some careful thought as to what sort of guarantee works best for your business, and choosing the right words.

Testing testing

Once you have decided on what form your guarantee will take, and the snappy words that best describe it, you are well on the way to making it an integral part of your business and your branding.

But before you put it all over your promotional material and have big signs made up and pay for an ad that will run for at least the next year in the Yellow Pages, test it in a low-key way first. You may find that you can make it even better. Or on the other hand, you may find that you haven’t defined its terms properly or made it too generous and it’s going to cost you lots of money!