The Effect of Salesman Similarity and Expertise on Consumer Purchasing Behavior

Abstract

From a managerial standpoint, the important question about salesman-customer interaction is how the salesman's behavior affects the outcome. What can the salesman do to shape the course along which the interaction proceeds? Are certain selling strategies and techniques more effective than others in this regard [4]? Brock [2] partly examined this question by comparing the selling efficacy of a paint salesman perceived as similar but inexperienced against the same salesman perceived as dissimilar but experienced. In the similar-inexperienced condition, the salesman emphasized that the magnitude of his own consumption of paint was the same as the amount being purchased by the customer; in the dissimilar-experienced condition, the salesman reported his own magnitude of consumption to be 20 times that of the customer's prospective purchase. The results indicated that similarity was more important than experience in the attempts to persuade customers to buy higher- as well as lower-priced paints than originally intended. Following Howard and Sheth's [7] concepts. Brock's findings would suggest that customers purchasing paint are following either Limited Problem Solving ' or Routinized Response Behavior^ decision processes involving psycho-social versus problem-solving game playing. Psycho-social game playing is the customer's reliance and use of the perceived power and attractiveness of the communicator in making purchase decisions. Problem-solving game playing can be defined as the customer's reliance and use of the perceived competence and trust, i.e., credibility, of the communicator in making purchase decisions, with experience and expertise being dimensions of competence [6, 8]. Thus, salesman attractiveness manifested in similarity of paint consumption