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I left a long comment on Andrew Warner’s program with Sally Hogshead, and I feel it’s necessary to expand on that. In the post below, I will explain a pleasant shopping experience that I had today on Sand Hill Road after meeting with a Googler, discuss key factors driving consumers to make unconscious decision, as a reward for people to read my blog, I am presenting a Free idea that Aardvark should probably pay me for further discussion;)

I was shopping at safeway near Sandhill Road at Palo Alto today for two things: facial cream for men, and one bottle of wine. Coming into the store, I was completely confused with all those brands display on the shelf: the only things that make sense to me are the price, discount offered through safeway membership card, and a few names I recognize overheard on Radio or TV commercial. Since it’s a small purchase, I didn’t really care about price, all I really wanted was for someone to tell me right there what facial cream is best for my skin. But no one was around in the skin care aisle. I didn’t want to be stuck for months with a big bottle of cream that is not good for my skin. I was struggling…

I finally pulled the trigger, bought a bottle of facial cream, based on the following factors that I “neurologically” remembered, in this order of importance.
1. brand name (that I heard from TV): I feel certain brands have a more prestige than others;
2. the smell of my own shaving cream: I want my facial cream to have similar “manly” scent
3. the scientific word such as “clinically proven”: as superficial it sounds, a few words written on the label do make me feel “safer”
4. the looks of the bottle, packages: I am naturally drawn to more condensed, thought out design and package.
5. the price:
Because of all the guesstimate, I am not entirely comfortable with my choice.

In the same Safeway on Sand Hill Road, there is bigger (huge) collections of wines. Looking at thousands of bottles can be overwhelming. After staring for 15 mins today, I still could not decide which one of the thousands wines available to buy: I just want ONE bottle of wine that goes well with my to-be-baked dry spice marinated pork BBK!! Why does this have to be this complicated!
Luckily, there was a wine steward by the name “John” working in the aisle helping consumer making decision. What I did was to walk to John, striking up a conversation, told him what I am about to cook, and ask for his recommendation: I was wowed! It has become the BEST wine introduction I ever had! With only 15 mins, through interactive conversation, all live, with him, I am comfortable to say that I have leaned more about wine (types, names, bottle shapes, origins, flavors, ages, pairing etc.) than probably 90% of consumers walking down that aisle, and, I bought 3 bottles of wine, more sales for Safeway.

Decision making is a very tricky process for human brain, options won’t surface without advocate. An live advocate like John at the right time can be critical.

That got me thinking: why there is not such a system in place?

I am talking about a live help system like Aardvark (vark.com) in real time.

Forget about yelp.com, forget about Amazon’s reviews, forget about ratings.

Imagine you are shopping for a bottle of wine, knowing that you will entertain people with certain type of cooking. You are walking down the wine aisle, ask your iphone app: shopping for wine. The app will automatically reach out to people with knowledge about wines. Those who are available to help you in live time will be presented to you on your iphone (or whatever smart phone you use), you simply pick a person, the app will connect you two in real time through voice (hands free) mode and the wine expert will be able to see the collections of wines you are staring at through your iphone’s camera, while you guys can have a live conversation through the app which may rout through skype.

This type of live recommendations will be exponentially more powerful than what Aardvark, or any big guys including Google (now that Aardvark is part of Google) has. Why can’t they build a system like this. Given Google’s resource, it’s not that hard!

Tags: consumer decision making, facial cream, recommendation, safeway, shopping, wine

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 8th, 2010 at 11:52 pm and is filed under Authentic Entrepreneurship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.