Why We Buy (10 page)

Unfortunately, the managers of most companies fail to understand the importance of well-designed packaging. I've battled with young management consultants who can't wave their Wharton MBAs fast enough. They have the spreadsheets, they've crunched all the numbers, but they haven't taken a single look. Among the many pieces missing from business education is an understanding of the fundamentals of packaging and how that affects the brand. In business school, you can take courses in global brand strategy, Internet marketing, category management and so on, but to my knowledge there's no major business school in the world that teaches a course in twenty-first-century printing. Not IMD in Lausanne, not the IESE in Barcelona, not the London Business School—and certainly not Wharton. What we can do with printing presses in 2008 makes what we could do ten years ago seem quaint. Split runs and 360-degree color for starters. Today's technology makes it possible to customize packages for individual stores in different parts of the country. But a digitally-controlled printing press is only as sophisticated as the person making the order. While the graphic designers and the printers themselves know the score, that young gung-ho MBA commissioning the work usually doesn't.

Getting back to the floor, another matter of concern is something we call the boomerang rate. This is the measure of how many times shoppers fail to walk completely through an aisle, from one end to the
other. It looks at how many times a shopper starts down an aisle, selects something, and then, instead of proceeding, turns around and retraces her or his steps. We'll call it a half boomerang, say, when the shopper makes it halfway down an aisle before turning back. Typically, he or she heads down the aisle in search of one or two things, finds them, and then heads back without even looking around (or, if she looks, she doesn't see anything worth stopping for). What do you do about that? The obvious answer for retailers is to position the most popular goods halfway down the aisle. Manufacturers should attempt to do just the opposite—to keep their products as near to the end of the aisle as possible.

But there are also ways to try to keep shoppers interested. One of the newest and most effective of these requires the presence of kids, which is why it's been used so well in the cereal aisles, where Mom and Dad typically want to grab and run. There, we've seen a floor graphic of a hopscotch game work extremely well to nail shoppers down for a while. In one store we studied, the average time kids played on the hopscotch graphic was almost fourteen seconds—a long time to be standing in front of cereal without buying some.

There's one aspect of how shoppers move that most people are familiar with: the quest to get us all the way to the back of a store. Everyone knows why supermarket dairy cases are usually against the back wall: Because almost every shopper needs milk, and so they'll pass through (and shop) much more of the store on the way to and from the rear. That is pretty effective, too, or at least it was, but it also created a terrific opportunity for a competitor. In fact, the convenience store industry exists because of its ability to put milk and other staples into shoppers' hands quickly, so they can run in, grab and go. Lots of new supermarkets now feature a “shallow loop”—a dairy case up near the front of the store, so shoppers can grab and go there, too.

Large chain drugstores use the pharmacy in the same way—that section is almost always on the back wall, so customers will be forced to visit the rest of the store, too. But a special accommodation must be made for those customers, lest the strategy backfire. When shoppers are headed for the pharmacy, they typically have a serious task at hand, and so they're not interested in browsing the shelves of the store on their
way back. Therefore, drugstores must be merchandised from the rear as well as from the front—at least some signs, displays and fixtures must be positioned so they are visible to shoppers walking from the back of the store to the front. It's almost like planning two different stores on the same site, but it must be done because the pharmacy is so effective at pulling shoppers through the store.

In the opening chapter, I mentioned a drugstore that was the location of choice for young mall employees who needed a quick soda during their breaks. To take advantage, the store placed the coolers in the rear, which forced the kids to race in, hurry to the sodas and race back out so they could enjoy their fifteen minutes off. And in fact, those teenagers were never going to buy shampoo or alarm clocks or talcum on their soda runs. So the store humanely decided to move the coolers up front, as a favor to loyal soda drinkers who might have found another, more convenient place to fuel up on breaks.

Still, getting shoppers to the back wall of any store is usually a challenge. The Gap, Aéropostale and Anthropologie—all apparel store chains—put their discount sale products in the back left-hand corner of the store. They've trained their most veteran shoppers to visit the remotest corner of the store. Once they've gotten them to the back, their challenge is to make sure the pathway back to the front of the store is well merchandised and that at least some of the signage is facing the customer going back-to-front.

Wisely, most retailers don't sell their bread-and-butter merchandise from the back wall. Still, every square foot of selling space is equally expensive to rent, heat and light. A store that flows interestingly and smoothly from one section to another will automatically draw shoppers to the farthest reaches. If, from the front of the store, shoppers perceive that something interesting is going on in back, they'll make their way there at least once. A simple solution is to have what amounts to a mandala (like the statue at the far end of a Buddhist temple, meant to entice you further in) hanging on the rear wall, a large graphic, for instance, or better yet, something back there that makes some visual noise, that gives shoppers the sense that something interesting is going on. They may not head there the second they enter, but they'll drift that way, as
if drawn by a magnet. Anything is better than the sense you get in most large stores—that the rear wall is the dead zone.

The front of a store has utmost importance in determining who enters. When RadioShack decided to increase the percentage of women shoppers, it did so in great part by devoting itself to the telephone business. But it made sure to display those phones near the front of its stores, in order to lure those women in most effectively. In fact, we advise some clients to change the front-of-store merchandising several times in the course of a day, to attract the different shoppers passing by. At a mall bookstore, for instance, we realized that in the morning most shoppers were stay-at-home mothers with baby strollers. So we told our client to position books on child care, fitness and family up front. (We also advised that there be enough room for all those strollers to maneuver.) In the afternoon, kids getting out of school ran wild in the mall, so there should be books on sports, pop music, TV and other adolescent subjects. After five p.m. was when the work crowd streamed through, so there should be books on business and computers. And because the mall was used very early in the morning by senior citizens getting their walking exercise, we told our client that before the store closed for the night its windows should be stocked with books on retirement, finance and travel. In fact, the store bought large, cylindrical display fixtures that could be turned around depending on the time of day and which books needed to be shown. Supermarkets are jam-packed up front from Friday to Sunday, and so the space is designed to handle the crush. On Monday and Tuesday, though, it's mellow up there. We've advised clients to turn the area just before the registers into a new selling zone, kind of a small bazaar of impulse items rather than just the usual rack or two.

How often shoppers move through your store is also something to be accommodated. If the average customer comes every two weeks, then your windows and displays need to be changed that often, so they'll always seem fresh and interesting. Here's another example of how design and merchandising must work hand in hand: If windows are made so they are easy for employees to get into, the displays will be changed more often than if it's a pain in the neck. If something about the design makes carrying merchandise into the window a burden, or if
display racks block access to the windows, they'll suffer from a lack of attention, I guarantee.

Some facts of shopper movement can't be turned into universal principles, but they certainly have had their impact in specific environments we've studied. We did a study of a branch of a major family restaurant chain with a location on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. By day the fact that its restrooms were just inside the front door seemed to be perfectly sensible. By night, however, when the street outside came alive with, among other things, the trade of some friendly neighborhood streetwalkers, the ladies' room location was a definite liability. It became a kind of hookers' lounge, a place they could wash, put their feet up and chat a spell between engagements. Not the greatest thing for the rest of the diners.

Some Hallmark card stores feature custom-printed stationery departments, places where brides-to-be can go for invitations and so on. The design of the department, a writing table with shelves for the large stationery sample books, was perfectly adequate. But in one busy New Jersey mall, the station was located in the front of the store, just beyond the cash register, perhaps the noisiest, most populated part of the room. The sole person using it was filling out a job application.

S
tand over here.
Behind
the underwear.

What do you see? A couple? How old? Sixties? Anything special? Just your average slightly tubby mom and pop out on the town, at Target or some such place, about to splurge on new briefs for the old guy, am I right?

Hold on—what's he saying?

“Now, where's my size?”

What's she saying?

“Over here.”

Now what's he saying?

“I guess I'll just get this three-pack.”

Fascinating. What did she just say?

“No, get the six…I can wear 'em, too.”

Whoa.
What kind of weirdness is going on here? I can't even bear to picture it, the two of them rolling around in only their—

Hey, stop that. You just missed an invaluable lesson in the true dynamic nature of shopping and buying. You don't even have to be a
scientist of shopping to figure out what just happened, though if you're a woman it might help, especially an overweight woman, especially an overweight woman whose choices in underwear are limited to styles with thin, biting elastic bands at the waist and the leg holes—an uncomfortable prospect, I can only imagine (reluctantly).

In 2004 I worked on underwear issues across the world—in North America, Europe and Japan. That summer I gave a keynote speech at a gathering of lingerie executives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I opened my lecture by saying that as a man who lives with a New England woman, I know much more about lingerie professionally than I do personally. A central global issue in this industry is the difference between underwear designed for sex and that designed for comfort. Most women do not parade around as if they were on this month's cover of the Victoria's Secret catalog. While some underwear for some women are items they put on so they get help taking them off, underwear for most people most of the time is about how good it feels and whether or not it complements what they're wearing on top of what they're wearing underneath. Underwear if you are eighteen is a fashion accessory, not unlike hair color. But comfort and fit are seminal drivers for most post-forty women, especially those carrying a few extra pounds.

Since that event, which happened a few years back, women's underwear styles have come to resemble men's, with their wide, flat (nonconstricting) elastic and soft cotton fabrics, thereby solving our woman's particular problem and keeping her out of her husband's drawers.

As of 2008, Victoria's Secret still sells the pink frilly stuff, but relative newcomer Gap Body carries the more athletic and comfortable stuff, or what some in the industry cynically call the butch lines. What we're still missing, however, is a powerhouse merchant who's willing to focus on the needs of the mature woman.

On the other side of the fence is an interesting boom in what's called male lingerie. It used to be boxers or briefs. Now any self-respecting underwear section has at least three more styles—boxer-briefs, slips (or the male version of a bikini) and midrise (which sit a couple of inches higher than a bikini). In my dotage I am still your basic briefs guy, but back to our story.

Shoppers make the ultimate determination of how they use the retail environment and the products that are sold in it. Product designers, manufacturers, packagers, architects, merchandisers and retailers make all the big decisions about what people will buy and where and how they will buy it. But then the shoppers themselves enter the equation and turn nice, neat theories and game plans into confetti.

In this particular case, was the general unsuitability of most underwear for ladies of size known to the designers and makers of said garments? Maybe not. Maybe they knew it but didn't know what to do with that information. Maybe they assumed that women wouldn't wear briefs that looked like men's underwear, although, clearly, the general drift in women's clothes has been toward a more masculine ideal. If some underwear executive had been standing in that aisle next to our researcher, maybe he would have realized that this woman was teaching him something extremely important about his own product. Perhaps the revolution in women's underwear would have started earlier than it did.

Then again, maybe not.

Here's another example of shoppers forcing the retail environment to bend to their will. It involves what is perhaps
the
major issue in the design and furnishing of public spaces: seating.

I love seatin g. I could talk about it all day. If you're discussing anything having to do with the needs of human beings, you
have
to address seating. Air, food, water, shelter, seating—in that order. Before money. Before love. Seating.

In the majority of stores throughout the world, sales would instantly be increased by the addition of one chair. I would remove a display if it meant creating space for a chair. I'd rip out a fixture. I'd kill a mannequin. A chair says: We care.

Given the chance, people will buy from people who care.

This happened in a large, well-known women's lingerie store. One that was providing insufficient seating for the men who wait for the ladies who shop. How do we know it was insufficient? Because the husbands and boyfriends were led to improvise, which human beings will always do when a need is going unmet. Whenever you encounter
shopper improvisation in the retail environment, you have found poignant evidence of one person's failure to understand what another person requires.

If I may digress for a good illustration: In the casino-hotels of Atlantic City, where kindness is, shall we say, not excessively idealized, you see lots of people who have wagered and lost but must linger until their tour buses depart. The casinos, for obvious reasons, wish these people would wait in the gaming area, parked in front of a slot machine or a dealer. To encourage that, there are no chairs in the hotel lobbies. How do the visitors respond? They sit glumly on the floors, dozens and dozens of sour-faced losers in a row, not a sight that evokes the opulent gaming ambience of Monte Carlo for the incoming suckers. These people need chairs!

In lingerie stores, too, the need is plain. While women shop, men wait, and when men (or women) wait, they prefer to sit. Is any truth truer? Is any nose on any face plainer than that fact? Still, designers of commercial spaces screw up royally when it comes to seating. In my days as a scholar of parks and plazas with the Project for Public Spaces, we spent a great deal of our time thinking about how to improve outdoor benches—where they should go, how wide they should be, whether they should be in shade or sunlight, how close they should be to the main thoroughfares, whether they should be wood or stone (stone gets awfully chilly in winter). A bench, we realized, might actually double the distance an older pedestrian could cover—someone might walk a while, tire slightly, and consider turning back, but then there'd be an inviting bench in the shade. Once restored, the pedestrian would continue forth. In the retail environment, a chair's main purpose is slightly different: When people go shopping in twos or threes, with spouses or children or friends along for the trip, seating is what keeps the nonshopping party comfortable and contented and cared for and off the shopper's back.

In that lingerie store, the womenfolk were shopping but the menfolk were not—they were waiting for the womenfolk. They'd have loved a place to sit, but this store chose not to provide it. Why not? Maybe there wasn't enough space for chairs. Maybe there was a chair and it broke.
Maybe somebody decided that a bunch of guys hanging around would spoil the decor.

Did that mean the men would stand, or lean? Of course not—it meant they'd invent seating. In this case, they gravitated toward a large window that had a broad sill at roughly the height where a bench would be. And the sill became a bench.

And where exactly was this ad-hoc bench? Through no one's fault or design, it was immediately adjacent to a large and attractive display of the Wonderbra, the architectural marvel that gave life such a lift. It seems easy in hindsight to predict what happened next: Women approached the display, began to study the goods, and then noticed that they were being studied by the guys on the windowsill. On the day we visited the store, there were two elderly gents loitering there, unabashedly discussing the need for Wonderbras of every woman who was brave enough to stop and shop.

Did I mention that no Wonderbra was purchased while those two codgers sat there?

Now, everyone knows that adjacencies are of huge importance to every product, especially something like the Wonderbra, which requires a little examination and consideration and then a try-on. Great retail minds churn themselves into mush trying to unravel the mysteries of which products should be sold near one another for maximum spark and synergy. And here, completely without intention, a very bad adjacency was created (bad for the shoppers, bad for the store, not so bad for the guys) by human beings who were forced by a retailer to improvise.

We've tried to organize the seating idea by calling it short-, medium-and long-term parking. Short-term parking is outside a dressing room. It's designed for the bored wallet carrier, surrogate security guard or two-legged dog to be parked for three minutes. Medium-term parking is the chair at the doorway or bench immediately outside the door, where the guy, the guard and the dog can be left for ten minutes. Ideally, medium-term parking is designed as a perch for people-watching, not too close, though, so that muttered comments can't be overheard. We find long-term parking in a shopping mall. It's quiet and restful. Sometimes
it has a whiff of Zen to it—the noise of falling water or a fountain. It is a comfortable place to be for twenty minutes or longer, whether that's to read a newspaper, fiddle with a BlackBerry or feed a child.

Here's another instance where shoppers rightly confounded the narrow-minded agenda of retailers.

There's an ongoing struggle afoot between the makers of cosmetics and the users. Women want to try on certain cosmetics, lipstick especially, before buying, which is understandable considering how expensive makeup is and how it differs in appearance depending on the skin of the wearer. Cosmetics makers, on the other hand, wish that women would not sample their products quite so liberally, since even slightly used lipsticks are rarely purchased. There are many plans and systems that provide testers to shoppers, but none of these has been so flawlessly successful that it has become the industry standard. And so the game goes on.

Some years ago, a makeup maker thought it had devised a foolproof lipstick—one that couldn't be twisted open without breaking a tape seal. This, the maker thought, would allow women to peer into the tube to see the color but not actually touch the lipstick itself. The boys in packaging were certain that this was going to save the company millions. We were hired to observe how women interacted with the prototype. We watched shoppers remove the cap, look inside, and unsuccessfully attempt to twist it open—at which point they lowered their pinky fingernails into the tube and gouged out a dab to have a look. The experts were foiled again. Their mistake was in even trying to stop women from testing lipstick. The more progressive cosmetics makers recognize that testing leads to buying, and so they encourage it by making it possible without turning women into outlaws. To my mind, the best solution would be one that came with a profit motive—simply package small samples of each season's new colors of lipstick, blush and face powder, enough for two or three applications of each, and charge a dollar or two.

In Japan in 2002, I found that exact idea outside Shibuya Station in Tokyo. The store is called Three-Minute Happiness. The sign reads miscellaneous goods that make our life happy and easy. Could anything
be simpler? Just three minutes—that's all it takes. A fleeting, serene shopping experience. Even better, it leaves you feeling happy, just as advertised. The store sells samples—of lipstick, nail polish, other beauty products and a few household items—and is organized by price: one hundred yen, two hundred yen, three hundred yen, roughly translating into one dollar, two dollars, three dollars. Off to the side is a coffee and ice cream bar where you put your money into a vending machine with a picture menu board, and out spits a coupon that you then present to the server who makes your coffee or scoops your ice cream—no fumbling with cash. I call it a three-minute retail vacation.

Not every form of improvisation requires remediation. In the heyday of the video retail boom before Netflix (remember the dark ages?), many American families made the weekend pilgrimage to Blockbuster and Hollywood Video mostly in search of new-release movies. The video-rental business made pennies on renting the latest releases but scored big time when it could get you to rent the old stuff—classics like
North by Northwest
or
The Great Escape.
Their ongoing dilemma was how to get what they called “basic inventory” out the door.

We noticed that quite a few of the truly expert searchers among their clientele headed not for the new releases section but for the returns cart, the trolley where incoming videos go before they are filed. There's no reason to attempt to alter that behavior—it actually saves some clerk a little labor, which is a good thing. We suggested spiking that return cart with a few classic films, particularly ones that had some connection to a new release. It worked.

Here's a final example of customers using stores in ways other than those intended, this time to the complete benefit of the business. More than half of all fast food in the United States is purchased at the drive-thru window, and we (along with everyone else) assumed that those diners either ate as they drove off or took the food back to their offices or elsewhere and downed it there. During a series of recent studies, though, we noticed something odd: Around 10 or more percent of drive-thru customers would get their food and then park right there in the lot and eat in their cars. Curiously, the drivers who did this tended to be in newer cars than the restaurants' average customers.
Were they elitist burger-lovers who were simply embarrassed to be seen in a humble grease pit? Or did they enjoy the luxury of eating in an environment where they could talk freely on their cell phones, listen to their own music, and sit in their own seats? Either way, it's a segment of fast-food diners that's worth accommodating—after all, these customers bring their own chairs and clean up after themselves. As a result, we now advise fast-food restaurants to make sure their parking lots are visible from the street, so that drivers can see that there's space for them. We also emphasize the importance of maintaining pleasant conditions—shade, with a view of something other than the Dumpster—for cars as well as people. (In one restaurant we studied, all the best parking spots were taken by employees, whose cars would remain in place for eight hours at a pop, a very dumb practice.) Finally, our finding affirms the overall trend among fast-food restaurants to shrink the size of the building and increase the size of the drive-thru and the parking lot, thereby allowing customers to have it their way—which, in nearly every case, is as it should be.