Merchandising and Emotional Selling

A successful model home can be a builder’s most powerful marketing tool. It can be the key ingredient in making the sale. And what makes a model home successful? The merchandising. It’s the merchandising when done right, that personalizes the home and brings out the emotions in the buyer. Staying competitive requires builders to provide a strategically designed and merchandised model home. A home that sparks emotions in a prospective buyer; one that is merchandised to facilitate that emotional sale. Effective emotional selling can be the key differential in a builder’s profits.

What is Emotional Selling?

Emotional selling is a sales strategy that focuses on a customer’s emotional experience. It relates to their feelings and helps to motivate them to make a purchase. Unlike many other sales strategies, the focus of emotional selling is on the customer, not the product. It relies on uncovering someone’s motivation for a purchase and/or the lifestyle they are looking for, or feel they deserve. This involves truly understanding the customers’ needs, wants, expectations, and dreams. It is about creating an environment that results in a positive experience during the tour through the model. It is like building the dream you experience on a Disney ride, pulling on the strings of “what life could be…”

Emotions and the Model Home

Creating that positive experience in your model home is what a good, professional model merchandising firm does. We work with the builder, listen to their experience and understanding of the potential buyer. We study the results from all demographic and psychographic research that helps with the understanding and success of the community. Knowing your buyers and what is going to inspire, motivate, and encourage them to buy is paramount. We ask ourselves, what is important for them to see in the model? To answer that we study the buyer and learn who your prospects are and what messaging will speak to them. Understanding the buyer from the beginning of the process helps us to create the most effective emotion to help sales.

Why do Buyer Research?

Buyer research helps provide a detailed sketch of your ideal customer helping to understand who your buyers are, what they’re buying, and when they’re buying it. It involves uncovering both the demographics and psychographics of your prospective buyers. Demographics are facts such as age, gender, marital status, etc. Psychographics are the unique interests and lifestyles of your prospects. For example, do they like to ski? Is sailing a hobby? Are they dedicated to the local sports team? What is their passion?

Inspiring Emotions through Merchandising

As model merchandisers, we put ourselves in the minds of the potential buyer. Where we place the furniture, the selections and even the wall colors are all part of the dream creation. But it’s often the little things that pull at a person’s heartstrings, it’s the third layer principle of merchandising. Using unique, thoughtful, or well-placed items that drive home a feeling of belonging and longing for being in a better place, such as a new home is what the third layer principle is all about. The goal is to create a design that helps the buyer see how they could live in your home and the positive emotions that doing so would inspire. We want to portray an aspirational lifestyle. A home and life that is not too far beyond their reach. When interior designs inspire the emotions of the potential buyer, homes sell.