Identify
Negotiations in Buyer-Seller Interactions
Arch G. Woodside,
University of South Carolina
James L. Taylor, University of Alabama
James L. Taylor, University of Alabama
ABSTRACT - The argument is presented that a
useful choice of analysis of bargaining communications in marketing should be
two or more communication turns between two or more parties in the exchange.
Such communications are likely to include discretely packaged blocks of
interactions and breaks and connections between such blocks. The concepts of
official and unofficial identity negotiations may be useful in labeling a few
of the blocks of interactions. These concepts are defined and examples provided
from tape recordings of buyers and sellers meeting in natural settings.
"Being there" is advocated as a necessary part of research programs
to study bargaining behavior in marketing communications.
[
to cite ]:
Arch G. Woodside and James L. Taylor (1985) ,"Identify Negotiations in Buyer-Seller Interactions", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 12, eds. Elizabeth C. Hirschman and Moris B. Holbrook, Provo, UT : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 443-449.
Arch G. Woodside and James L. Taylor (1985) ,"Identify Negotiations in Buyer-Seller Interactions", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 12, eds. Elizabeth C. Hirschman and Moris B. Holbrook, Provo, UT : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 443-449.
[
direct url ]:
http://acrwebsite.org/volumes/6431/volumes/v12/NA-12
http://acrwebsite.org/volumes/6431/volumes/v12/NA-12
Advances in Consumer Research Volume 12, 1985
Pages 443-449
IDENTIFY NEGOTIATIONS IN BUYER-SELLER INTERACTIONS
Arch G. Woodside, University of South Carolina
James L. Taylor, University of Alabama
[The cooperation of
Liberty Life Insurance Co. in conducting the study is acknowledged gratefully.]
[Send correspondence to
Arch G. Woodside, College of Business Administration, University of South
Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208.]
ABSTRACT -
The argument is
presented that a useful choice of analysis of bargaining communications in
marketing should be two or more communication turns between two or more parties
in the exchange. Such communications are likely to include discretely packaged
blocks of interactions and breaks and connections between such blocks. The
concepts of official and unofficial identity negotiations may be useful in
labeling a few of the blocks of interactions. These concepts are defined and
examples provided from tape recordings of buyers and sellers meeting in natural
settings. "Being there" is advocated as a necessary part of research
programs to study bargaining behavior in marketing communications.
Extant content analytic
systems for analyzing bargaining communications call for dismembering verbal or
written exchanges of buyers and sellers and placing the separate utterances
into categories (e.g., Bonoma and Rosenberg 1975; Pennington 1968; Willett and Pennington
1966; Angelmar and Stern 1978; Bales 1968; Pettigrew 1975). For example,
building directly on the work of Bonoma and Rosenberg (1975), Angelmar and
Stern (1978) develop eight categories of semantic units of each party's turn in
a bargaining conversation.
While the analytical
schemes used by Olshavsky (1973), Angelmar and Stern (1978), and others (e.g.,
Willett and Pennington 1966; Taylor and Woodside 1979) are useful, the violence
done in uncoupling an exchange of turns between communicators needs to be
considered. The referenced content analysis schemes use something less than
exchanges as units of analysis. Classifying a communicator's verbal or written
turn as a promise or into another bargaining category without relating the turn
to the other party's response is similar to listening to one hand clapping.
Such analytic schemes fail to capture the essence of marketing exchanges.
The choice of analysis
of bargaining communication in marketing should be two or more communication
turns between two or more parties in the exchange. Bargaining communications in
marketing are likely to include discretely packaged blocks of interactions and
breaks and connections between such blocks.
Within the talking or verbal part of a negotiation, a
content analytic scheme of such exchanges should build upon the recognition of
the following facts,
which seem grossly apparent to relatively unmotivated examination of conversational materials. In any
conversation:
1) speaker change recurs, or, at least occurs;
2) overwhelmingly, one
party talks at a time;
3) occurrences of more
than one speaker at a time are common, but brief;
4) transitions from one
turn to a next with no gap between them are common, together with transitions
characterized by slight gap or slight overlap, they make up the majority of
transitions;
5) turn order is not
fixed, but varies;
6) turn size is not
fixed, but varies;
7) length of conversation is not
fixed, specified in advance;
8) what parties say is
not fixed, specified in advance;
9) relative distribution
of turns is not fixed, specified in advance;
10) number of parties can change;
11) talk can be
continuous or discontinuous;
12) turn-allocation
techniques are obviously used, current speaker addresses a question to another
party; parties may self-select, in starting to talk;
13) various
turn-constructional units are employed, turns can be projected one word long
or, for example, they can be sequential in length;
14) repair mechanisms
for dealing with turn-taking errors and violations obviously are available for
use. For example, if two parties find themselves talking at the same time, one
of them will stop prematurely, thus repairing the trouble (Sachs, Schegloff,
and Jefferson 1978, pp. 10-11; Morley and Stephenson 1977; Morley 1978).
Exchanges between
insurance salesmen and prospective clients are used in the present article to
describe what the parties do in such interactions to juggle their official and
abstract identities with informal and personal identities in the course of
their conversations. Schenkein (1978; 1971) first called attention to the
"identity negotiations" which are likely to occur in seller-buyer
encounters. "Whatever else they might or might not share, such encounters
are made up of talk between strangers who might know one another only as local
versions of some abstract identity like 'salesman' or 'client.' For these
encounters, strangers not only conduct their business under the auspices of
their official identify relations, but they also negotiate into the unfolding
of their encounter eminently personal identities from their separate
biographies" (Schenkein 1978, pp. 57-58).
OFFICIAL AND UNOFFICIAL IDENTIFY NEGOTIATIONS IN
BUYER-SELLER INTERACTIONS
Both official and unofficial identity negotiations are
likely to occur in buyer-seller interactions of the type described, i.e.,
between a life insurance salesman and prospective client meeting for the first
time. Similar negotiations are likely to occur in
industrial marketing, distribution channels, and in retail transactions
involving expensive items.
Official identity
negotiations are two or more conversational turns between parties which provide
some information about one of the parties and comment by the other party
related directly to the main purpose of the meeting (e.g., selling and buying
insurance). Official identity negotiations help to specify the rather abstract
identities of "salesmen" and "client" characteristics of
the Parties in the meeting.
Unofficial identity
negotiations are two or more conversational turns between parties which provide
some information about one of the parties and comment by the other party not
directly related to the main purpose of the meeting. Attempts by salesmen to
use "referent power" (French and Raven 1959) by first learning and commenting
to the client on the similarity of a planned, unofficial, identity negotiation.
Official and unofficial
identity negotiations may be centered on characterizing and commenting on
either the buyer or seller. Thus at least 4 types of identity negotiations may
occur in a customer-seller meeting:
Focus
Type Salesman Customer
Official (1) Os
(2) Oc
Unofficial
(3) Us (4) Uc
Several hypotheses can
be developed and tested concerning the frequencies and sequences of occurrence
of each type of identity negotiation relative to the purchase and satisfaction
outcomes of buyer-seller meetings. The purpose here is to describe several
examples of such negotiations, how they might be classified into discrete
blocks of exchanges, and report on the separate interpretations a salesman and
buyer offer later to identities earlier negotiated between them. In several
instances, conjectures and other comments are offered with the examples.
METHOD
Excerpts of
conversations from several buyer-seller meetings were transcribed from a study
(Taylor and Woodside 1980) of exchanges of insurance salesmen and customers
which occurred in natural settings. A total of 40 salesman-client parties was
included in the study. All face-to-face meetings of the salesman and client for
each of the 40 parties were tape-recorded. The second author accompanied each
of 3 salesmen on sales calls to collect the data. Each client was requested to
permit the tape recording "for a study of conversations among persons
meeting for the first time." A total of 15 customers purchased life or
health insurance and 25 did not during the meeting and taping of the exchanges,
details are reported in Taylor (1977). Given the wealth of data produced, only
a few of the recordings have been transcribed. A long excerpt of one
conversation is available elsewhere (Woodside, Taylor, Pritchett, and
Morgenroth 1977).
ACTION SEQUENCES IN IDENTITY NEGOTIATIONS
Schenkein (1978)
observed the presence of a common four-turn Puzzle-Pass-Solution-Comment action
sequence or discrete conversation block in identity negotiations. The following
exchanges may be an example of such a block for an unofficial identity
negotiation (U ) of a customer (C) with a salesman (S):
C: I have one son who
will take over the business someday.
S: How old is he?
C: Six.
S: So it won't be for
awhile before he's ready to take over. Ha, ha.
Such four-turn action
sequences are very common in the conversations among the 40 customer-salesman
parties and for both official and unofficial identity negotiations.
Though not always
present, a question by the second party is a common identifying feature of the
Pass. The following exchange illustrates the presence of a question in the Pass
in a Us (unofficial identity negotiation of the salesman) in the same meeting
as the U just reported.
S: When I was in the
military I was out at Fort Knox.
C: At Fort Knox?
S: Yeah.
C: I'll be.
Us and Uc occurred
commonly during the first 1 to 5 minutes of the first meeting between the
salesmen and clients (Taylor and Woodside 1980). Us and Uc are
likely to be planned specifically to occur by the salesman as a method for
developing referent power over the customer. Thus, Wilson (1977) hypothesizes
that the first time period of a dyadic customer-salesman exchange is devoted to
source legitimization attempts by the salesman. This may include attempts by
the salesman to induce Os, Oc, Us, and Uc.
"Unless this basic acceptability [of source legitimization] is developed,
further communication tends to be ineffective if not impossible" (Wilson
1977. p. 36).
Identity negotiations
require the willingness of both parties to participate in the exchange. While
such negotiations can be stopped during the action sequence, specific changes
in the topics of conversation nearly always occurred after participating in the
full Puzzle-Pass-SolutionCComment sequence, in the meetings of the
40 customer-salesman parties. Thus, it may be that some action sequences are
organized to resist interruptions, and with even an unwilling participant, they
run to completion, as first noted by Schenkein (1978, p.74).
Examples of discrete
blocks of exchanges believed to represent Os, Oc, Us,
and Uc are provided from different salesman-customer-parties in
Tables 1 and 2. The exchanges shown are taken from the same meeting. Different
customer parties and two salesmen (A or B) are included between the tables.
Notice in comparing Oc's
in Tables 1 and 2 that the third turns are different. In Table 1, the Solution,
or third turn, is a confirmation to the candidate solution offered by the
salesman to the customer's first turn: "I work for State Farm
Insurance." The Oc in Table 1 may be best described as an
example of the following action sequence:
C: Identity-Rich Puzzle
S: Candidate Solution
C: Confirmation
S: Comment
More than a confirmation
is provided in the third term in the Oc in Table 2: "I
make all the decisions for this shop, but he does as far as the corporation
goes." Thus both confirmations and/or "Identity-Rich Solutions"
(using Schenkein's term) may be offered as solutions to a prior Pass or
Candidate Solution. The willingness to provide Identity-Rich Solutions versus
Confirmations only may be an indication to the other party, especially the salesman,
of the likely outcome of the meeting.
The first part of the Os in
Table l, "I've been with Protection Life for 5 years now, and ..." is
a tentative presentation of a Puzzle by the salesman which received no verbal
response from husband and wife as customers. The salesman continued the turn
then but changed the subject from himself to the customers and presented a
direct Puzzle in the form of a question: "Are you familiar with Protection
Life" [disguised name]. The Comment by the wife (WC) in the second turn,
"More or less" appears to be ignored by the salesman. The Pass is
followed by an Identity-Rich Solution in the third turn by the salesman. Any
Pass by the customer is likely to follow with this solution, is one conjecture
which may be reasonably suggested. Only the provision of a Candidate Solution
in the second turn in place of a Pass is likely to change the contents of the
third turn.
The original start of
the Puzzle in Os in Table 1, "I've been with Protection
Life for 5 years now, and ...," includes a pause indicated by the three
dots. The pause allowed time for the customer to start a conversation turn and
participate in an Os. The customer did not participate in an Os,
i.e., the negotiation attempt by the salesman failed. The salesman immediately
executed a restart that was a more direct Os, "Are you familiar
with Protection Life?" than indicated by the original start.
"Are you familiar
with Protection Life?" may be better classified as a start to a discrete
block of exchange to help establish source credibility, i.e., the company is
trustworthy and capable, rather than an ¦s
Distinguishing characteristics of company versus salesperson specific official
identify negotiation can be made. Both, one and not the other, or neither
sometimes occurred in the meetings tape-recorded.
The Comment in the
fourth turn of the Os in Table 1 is followed by a comment and a
transition to a new conversation topic by the salesman leading to an Oc.
The salesman announced to the customer that he wanted to learn a great deal of
information in the next few minutes of the meeting before the Oc occurred.
"You didn't know
that. They try to keep some of those things not too much before the public
notice, but they are a good, strong, substantial company. And the -people that
have been policyholders of their for years, they like to take good care of
them. So they assigned Buyers [name disguised] family to me, so that's why I
called C.C. [husband] and asked him if I could come out and sit with you and go
over what you presently have and maybe talk about some things you might want to
accomplish in the future. OK? And to do that, I've got a little questionnaire
that takes a few minutes to answer. Now we might discuss some things that are
somewhat confidential. If you'd care not to divulge something say so, OK? But
it's basic stuff. For instance, Linda, where do you work? "
This presentation served
several purposes beginning with a comment to close an Os to an
attempt to legitimize the company, to provide a rationale for the meeting with
a vague implication to purchasing additional insurance, to gaining cooperation
to complete a "little questionnaire," to starting an Oc.
The "little questionnaire" did not include a written form but the
term was used to set the immediate future exchanges to facilitate participation
in several successive Oc's.
The use of such a
strategy may appear to be intuitively beneficial for a salesman to use.
However, in several other instances of the 40 exchanges no Oc's were
found. Oc's did not occur in all customer-salesman meetings. An Oc followed
by another type of identity negotiation (Os, Us, and Uc)
often occurred but the inclusion of all 4 identity negotiations occurred for
less than 50% of the meetings.
Successful bargaining of
information by the salesperson (i.e., the customer receives, understands, and
accepts information offered by the salesman), may depend significantly on the
ratio of Oc and Os. Specifically, when Oc/Os >
1, then the probability of successful information-negotiation by the salesman
is likely to increase.
Both the number of Oc and
Os as well as their ratio can be hypothesized to be related to
the sales outcome. The likelihood of purchase -increases as 1) Oc >
0, 2) Os > zero, and 3) Oc/0 > 1. However, the
primary effect of identity negotiations is likely to be on other discrete
blocks of exchanges during customer-seller meetings and not the purchase
outcome. Identity negotiations may be related- most strongly with information
bargaining. In turn, information bargaining may be related most strongly to
other discrete blocks of exchanges occurring during the meeting.
A RETROSPECTIVE ANALYSIS
Following the meetings
for 3 customers and salesmen, separate meetings were held with each customer
and one of the researchers. The tape recording of the initial meeting was
played to each customer with the request to stop the recording every few
minutes and comment on what was happening. In several instances, the researcher
stopped the tape and asked the customer why he/she made a particular comment
and what did the customer think "when the salesman said that?" The
retrospective comments by the customer to the original meeting were cape recorded.
The same procedure was followed with the salesmen. The tape recording of the
original meeting was stopped at the same locations in both of the separate
meetings with each salesman and each customer.
Two brief excerpts
involving identity negotiations from the original meeting of a customer and
salesman with their retrospective comments are provided in Tables 3 and 4. The
Us in Table 3 was followed shortly by the Oc in
Table 4.
Both the salesman and
the customer report in their retrospective comments that they were manipulating
the conversation, "I was crying to build rapport ..." and "I was
just trying to find out ..." Both report a discovers about the other party
in exchange.
Note that the original
excerpt begins with a comment by the salesman. This refers to a previous U .
Following "That's interesting," the salesman elaborates an
Identity-Rich Puzzle. "That's where I got my MBA degree (University of
South Carolina)." This is followed by a puzzle expansion plus candidate
solution by the customer and a confirmation by the salesman. Then the customer
comments "OK" and shifts the conversation to indicate willingness to
accept insurance information, "Lay it on my head ..." A brief comment
by the researcher appears at the bottom of Table 3 on the exchange.
The Us in
Table 3 appeared to serve to help permit the occurrence of the Oc in
Table 4. Notice that the Us in Table 4 represents the following
scheme: S: Puzzle-Candidate Solution, C: Confirmation, S: Comment-Conclusion,
C: Confirmation, S: Transition. The coupling of a puzzle and candidate solution
by either the salesman or customer may occur most often after both Us and
Uc have occurred. The coupling of verbal actions may serve to
imply to the other party that the conversation is directed to a specific goal.
Notice in the salesman's
retrospective comment in Table 4 that he had a hidden agenda that he expected
the customer to discover. The customer failed evidently to discover this
agenda. The salesman evidently did not realize this, or he believed the
discovery to be unimportant to future agendas since he shifts the conversation:
"In light of that, let's look at your present plan." The salesman may
be about to elaborate on the original O in the conversation about the present
plan to accomplish his goal mentioned in his retrospective analysis. Later in
the meeting he specifically tells the customer the conclusion he believes she
should reach based upon this and other Oc's.
CONCLUSIONS
Some discrete parts or
blocks of buyer-seller interactions may represent identity negotiations of both
the seller and buyer. Such identity negotiations may be classified as official
or unofficial. Possibly more categories than two should be used to classify
such negotiations, e.g., semi-official, semi-unofficial.
Identity negotiations
represent only a part of the total exchanges in meetings of buyers and sellers.
As theorized by Wilson (1977) and Taylor and Woodside (1980), attribute
delineations and attribute value negotiations are likely to occur in such
meetings. The important point is that interactions appear to occur in discrete
blocks of exchanges linked by transitions. The separating of the seller's and
buyer's interactions into different classification categories may be useful but
also violates the nature of the exchange. Both the analysis of chunks of
exchanges and complete exchanges, as well as classifying buyer's and seller's
turns into separate categories are advocated for use within the same research
program.
Detailed analysis of
salesman-customer conversational turn-taking in natural settings is a necessary
step to understanding bargaining behavior in marketing exchanges. Case-by-case
research programs of salesman-customer meetings are needed for marketing
exchanges in several settings. Several empirical studies incorporating such
ethnomethodologies are available (e.g., Lombard 1955; Browne 1973; Varela 1971)
which reduce the arguments that 1) the approach is too time consuming and too
much work, 2) the customers and salesman will not agree to be observed or
tape-recorded, and 3) it's too obtrusive to be valid.
Lombard (1955) and his
associates found substantial numbers of meetings of 20 salespersons and
customers can be observed meaningfully in 6 months. Browne's (1973) participant
observation study of salesmen and customers meeting in a used-car lot indicated
that nearly all the customers and salesmen were willing to be observed. The
rates of sales of the salesperson during the studies by Browne (1973), Lombard
(1955), and Taylor (1977) were not significantly more or less than the sales
recorded before the studies nor expected by the salespersons. Given these
findings, the recognition of the need to learn "theory in use"
(Zaltman, LeMasters, Heffring 1982), and the serious problems with self-reports
(cf. Wilson and Nisbett 1978), "being there" needs to be included in
most research designs on marketing exchange behavior.
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