Why We Buy (5 page)

One final calculation doesn't involve any particular way to measure a store, but it's a remarkable example of businessperson ignorance: They often don't really know who their shoppers are. I've already discussed the pet treats manufacturer whose product was typically stocked high on shelves, unaware that its main buyers were old people and children. We studied a chain of family-style restaurants whose outlets had too
many tables for two and not enough tables for four, which caused headaches during busy times—all because no one had ever bothered to count the size of dining groups. In another family-style chain we studied, each restaurant devoted roughly 10 percent of its floor space to counter seating. During slow times it went unused because lone diners preferred tables, where they could read newspapers or magazines. During busy times it went unused because parties of two, three or four wanted to sit at tables. The counters were empty even as groups of diners stood in line waiting for tables.

The issue of retailers not knowing who shops in their stores comes up all the time. A newsstand in Greeley Square here in New York wanted to increase sales and planned to do so by expanding the space devoted to magazines. We pointed out that a large percentage of his customers was either Korean—the square borders on a large Korean enclave—or Hispanic. Stock Korean-language magazines (Korean papers already sold well) and soft drinks popular in the Latino market, we advised, and when they did, sales rose immediately.

This related issue comes up all the time in New York, Los Angeles and other big cities: foreign shoppers in need of a break from stores and restaurants. Almost no accommodation is made for Asian shoppers, despite their numbers and tendency to spend a lot of money on luxury goods. But there are no sizing conversion charts, no currency exchange rates posted, not even a little sign or two in Japanese or Korean telling shoppers which credit cards are accepted. Smart retailers would reward employees who learned a little Japanese, German, French or Spanish—even just a handful of phrases would make a difference, as anyone who has shopped in a foreign country would realize. Restaurants should have menus in Japanese and German on hand.

But it doesn't have to involve anything so exotic for retailers to be woefully clueless about who's in their stores. I loved visiting a national chain drugstore's branch in Washington, DC, where there was a large assortment of dye and other hair products for blondes—in a store where over 95 percent of shoppers are African-Americans. I also was amused in a Florida-based drugstore chain's Minneapolis branch, where a full assortment of suntan lotion was on prominent display—in October.

T
he first principle behind the science of shopping is the simplest one: There are certain physical and anatomical abilities, tendencies, limitations and needs common to all people, and the retail environment must be tailored to these characteristics. Our technical term for it is “the biological constants.”

In other words, stores, banks, restaurants and other such spaces must be friendly to the specifications of the human animal. There are all the obvious differences in shoppers due to gender, age, income and tastes. Going outside North America, we face other issues, too—the relative density of a population, the weather, security considerations, a country's economic well-being and so on. But, that said, there are many, many more similarities. This fact—and the accompanying thought that any built environment (whether it's a hotel, a stadium, an airport, a hospital, even a home or an apartment complex, much less a store or bank) should reflect the nature of the beings who must use it—seems too obvious to bear mentioning, doesn't it? After all, who designs and plans and operates these premises but human beings, most of whom are
also at one time or another shoppers or users themselves? You'd think it would be easy to get everything right.

Yet a huge part of what we do is uncover ways in which environments fail to recognize and accommodate how human machines are built and how our anatomical and physiological aspects determine what we do. I'm talking about the absolute basics here, such as the fact that we have only two hands and that at rest they are situated approximately three feet off the floor. Or that our eyes focus on what is directly before us but also take in a periphery whose size is determined in part by environmental factors, and that we'd rather look at people than objects. Or that it is possible to anticipate and even determine how and where people will walk—that we move in predictable paths and speed up, slow down or stop in response to our surroundings.

Whether I'm in Tokyo or Paris, Cape Town or Orange County, California, whether I am two hundred centimeters tall (read six feet, five inches) or five foot four, our basic human measures fall into a completely predictable range. I can be Chinese, Indian or Mexican—it doesn't matter. Everywhere in the world, our eyes work and age in the same way.

The implications of all this are clear: Where people go, what they see and how they respond determine the very nature of their experience. They will either see merchandise and signs clearly or they won't. They will reach objects easily or with difficulty. They will move through areas at a leisurely pace or swiftly—or not at all. And all of these physiological and anatomical factors come into play simultaneously, forming a complex matrix of behaviors that must be understood if any environment is to adapt itself successfully to our animal selves.

The overarching lesson that we've learned from the science of shopping is this: Amenability and profitability are totally and inextricably linked. Take care of the former, in all its guises, and the latter is assured. Build and operate a retail environment that fits the highly particular needs of shoppers and you've created a successful store. In the five chapters that follow, we'll see how the most elemental issues—the holding
capacity of the human hand, the limits to what a being in motion can read, even the physical needs of the nonshopper—matter in determining the shopping experience.

Take that same model and you'll notice it applies to every physical environment you interact with.

S
top.

Stay here with me a minute. Don't ask. Just watch.

I
know
we're standing in the middle of the parking lot. That's the point.

Do you notice how everybody's moving at a pretty brisk clip toward the store? Is it because they're all so darned excited to be going there? Well, maybe, but I've spent a lot of time watching people move through parking lots, and this is how they all do it—fast. A parking lot isn't the place for a leisurely stroll. It's not Fifth Avenue, or even Main Street. It's speeding cars, exhaust fumes and asphalt, with the usual elements on top—rain, wind, cold, heat.

Okay, so let's join everybody rushing for the store. What do you see ahead? Windows. And what's in them? Stuff. Or is it signs? Or is it stuff
and
signs? It's hard to tell, exactly, because of how the sunlight glares off the glass. Or because it's dark out, and the lighting is too low. Most retailers don't change the lighting depending on whether it's day or night,
meaning that visibility must be pretty bad during at least one of those periods, if not both.

For the sake of discussion, let's say we actually can tell what's in the windows: some kind of display—mannequins or a still life. Whatever it is, though, the scale is wrong. There are too many small things there that we can't quite see from this distance. Bear in mind, too, that the faster people walk, the narrower their field of peripheral vision becomes. But by the time we get close enough to see the goods or read the signs, we're in no mood to stop and look. We've got that good cardiovascular parking-lot stride going, and it's bringing us right into the entrance. So forget whatever it is those windows are meant to accomplish—when they face a parking lot, if the message in them isn't big and bold and short and simple, it's wasted.

Boom. We hit the doors and we're inside. Still got that momentum going, too. Have you ever seen anybody cross the threshold of a store and then screech to a dead stop the instant they're inside? Neither have I. Good way to cause a pileup. Come over here, stand with me now and watch the doors. What happens once the customers get inside? You can't see it, but they're busily making adjustments—simultaneously they're slowing their pace, adjusting their eyes to the change in light and scale, and craning their necks to begin taking in all there is to see. Meanwhile, their ears and noses and nerve endings are sorting out the rest of the stimuli—analyzing the sounds and smells, judging whether the store is warm or cold. There's a lot going on, in other words, and I can pretty much promise you this: These people are not truly in the store yet. You can see them, but it'll be a few seconds more before they're actually
here.
If you watch long enough you'll be able to predict exactly where most shoppers slow down and make the transition from being outside to being inside. It's at just about the same place for everybody, depending on the layout of the front of the store.

All of which means that whatever's in the zone they cross before making that transition is pretty much lost on them. If there's a display of merchandise, they're not going to take it in. If there's a sign, they'll probably be moving too fast to absorb what it says. If the sales staff hits them with a hearty “Can I help you?” the answer's going to be “No
thanks,” I guarantee it. Put a pile of fliers or a stack of shopping baskets just inside the door: Shoppers will barely see them and will almost never pick them up. Move them ten feet in and the fliers and baskets will disappear. It's a law of nature—shoppers need a landing strip.

The same thing is true in a hotel lobby. Put a directory too close to the front door, and the people behind the front desk will have to answer stupid questions 24/7. Throughout our work looking at the lobbies of business hotels, the lack of what we call an “information architecture plan” can have a disastrous effect on customer service. If the concierge or bellhop has to tell people coming into your hotel all day, every day where the bathroom is, well, I don't care how much training you give people,
you
try answering the same question five hundred times a week and see if you don't get cranky, too. The windows, the doorways and the landing strip are the start of the consumers' experience, and the same goes for hotel guests.

When I talk to clients, they invariably point to our findings on the transition zone, or what has been termed the “decompression zone,” as among our most meaningful and useful work. It is also perhaps the most startling news we deliver. I think that's mostly because our counsel defies the most ingrained human yearnings about the front: We all want to be there, at the front of the pack, the head of the line, the top of the class. To the front-runner go the spoils.

In the retail environment, however, up front is sometimes the last place you want to be. For instance, retailers will charge manufacturers for placing their name on the front door, which sounds like a smart use of the marketing dollar—everybody sees the front door. And then you realize that when shoppers approach a door, all they're looking for is a handle and some sign indicating whether to pull or push. We've yet to see a shopper actually stop his or her progress to read a door. There's only one time when anyone pauses to study what's written there: when the store is closed. Which may be worth something, as marketing tools go, but not a lot.

Today many stores have automatic doors, which make life easier for customers, especially those with packages or baby strollers. But the effortlessness of entering only serves to enlarge the decompression
zone—there's nothing to slow you down even a little. Revolving doors are even worse, as they actually thrust you into the store with a fair amount of momentum. Some stores, especially smaller ones, benefit from having the entrance provide more of a threshold experience, not less. Even a small adjustment—a slightly creaky door or a squeaky hinge—does the trick. Special lighting on the doorway also clearly marks the divider between out there and in here. Other stuff works too, like a change in flooring color or texture.

A big store can afford to waste some space up front. A smaller one can't. In either case, store merchandisers can do two sensible things where the decompression zone is concerned: They can keep from trying to accomplish anything important there, and they can take steps to keep that zone as small as possible.

A good lesson in what
not
to do with the entrance and decompression zone comes courtesy of a big, sophisticated company. In the early '80s, Burger King was testing a new salad bar. To introduce it with a bang, they decided that they'd switch the entrances and exits on many of their restaurants. Until then, the door closest to the parking lot was always the entrance. They turned that entrance into an exit and put the salad bar just behind the big window next to it, so you'd walk from your car, go to the old entrance, see the salad bar, and be so tempted by it that when you entered—through the
new
entrance—you'd head straight for the lettuce.

But here's what actually happened: Customers went to the old entrance and tried to find the handle, which had been removed as part of the reconfiguration. They would then back up, scratch their heads and begin searching for a way to get into the place. They weren't looking at the salad bar—they were too busy looking for a door! And once they found it, and burst into the restaurant feeling hungry and frustrated, all they wanted to do was find the counter and order their usual burgers and fries. In that atmosphere, the salad bar never had a chance.

Another bad idea for the decompression zone was invented at an athletic goods chain where management decreed that every incoming shopper had to be greeted by a salesclerk within five seconds of entering the store. Here's how that played in the real world: You'd walk in and
come face-to-face with a lineup of eager clerks hovering just inside the entrance like vultures, ready to pounce with a hearty hello. There's an interesting curve here: Greet people too early and you scare them away. Talk to them too late and you get a whole lot of frustrated customers. In our work with Estée Lauder's cosmetic counters, we were able to plot this curve pretty precisely. Leave people alone for at least one minute. Let them play first, and then you go from salesperson to cosmetics coach.

We discovered another misuse of the zone a few years ago, when we tested an interactive computerized information fixture that had been designed for Kmart by a division of IBM. It had a touch screen and a keyboard, and you'd ask it where men's underwear was, for example, and it would give you a map of the store and maybe a coupon for T-shirts or socks. A terrific idea, executed well. It helped customers and spared the store from having to pay someone to stand behind a desk and tell people where boys' sweaters were seventy-two times a day.

It wasn't long, though, before store executives discovered a little glitch: Few shoppers used the fixtures. The problem was that no one admits, six steps into a store, that they don't know where they're going. At that point you haven't even looked around long enough to realize you're lost. Placing the computers too close to the door had turned them into very expensive pieces of electronic sculpture. The store gave up on them right away, but I'm certain they could have worked just fine—maybe a third of the way into the store, at about the point where customers really
do
realize they're lost.

What
can
you do with the decompression zone? You can greet customers—not necessarily to steer them anywhere but to say hello, remind them where they are, start the seduction. Security experts say that the easiest way to discourage shoplifting is to make sure staffers acknowledge the presence of every shopper with a simple hello. Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton's homespun advice to retailers was that if you hire a sweet old lady just to say hello to incoming customers, none of them will dare steal.

You can offer a basket or a map or a coupon. There's a fancy store in Manhattan, Takashimaya, where the uniformed doorman proffers a handsomely printed pocket-size store directory as he ushers you in.
Just to the right of the entrance, within the transition zone, is the store's flower department. As you enter, you see it from the corner of your eye, but you don't usually stop in—instead, you think, “Hmm, flowers, good idea, I'll get them on my way out.” Which makes perfect sense, because you wouldn't want to shop the rest of the store carrying a bouquet of damp daisies.

Right inside the door of an H&M, Gap or Wal-Mart, there's what's known as a “power display”—a huge horizontal bank of sweaters, or jeans or cans of Coke, that acts as a barrier to slow shoppers down, kind of like a speed bump. It also functions as a huge billboard. It doesn't say, “Shop me.” It says, “Just consider the idea.” It serves as a suggestion, plain and simple, and it also gets you in the mood for the rest of the store. You can catch up with the product later, at another time, typically in another section of the floor. Remember that more than 60 percent of what we buy wasn't on our list. And no, this isn't the same as an impulse purchase. It's triggered by something proposing the question “Don't you need this? If not now, then maybe in the near future?” The power display of beverages may remind you of who's coming home from college next Tuesday, the sweater of fall coming or the chilly weather in Maine, where you're planning a getaway weekend—and lo and behold, you leave the store with two six-packs of ginger ale and a new fleece.

Another solution to the decompression zone problem, which I saw at Filene's Basement, is to totally break the rule. Not just break it, but smash it. There, just inside the entrance, they've placed a large bin of merchandise that's been deeply discounted, a deal so good it stops shoppers in their tracks. That teaches us something about rules—you have to either follow them or break them with gusto. Just ignoring a rule, or bending it a little, is usually the worst thing you can do.

I'd love to see someone try this out-of-the-box strategy: Instead of pulling back from the entrance, push the store out beyond it—start the selling space out in the parking lot. After all, football fans make elaborate use of parking lots even in the worst weather, barbecuing and eating and drinking and socializing on asphalt. Drive-in movies everywhere are turned over to flea markets during daylight hours, proof that people will comfortably shop al fresco. Some supermarkets bring seasonal
merchandise out into the parking lot during summer; I visited one at a seashore resort that had all barbecue supplies, beach toys, suntan lotion and rubber sandals in a tent outfitted with a clerk and a cash register—allowing beachgoers to pull up, grab a few necessities and drive away, all without having to drag their wet, sandy selves through the food aisles and long checkout lines.

Pushing the store outside also begins to address an interesting situation in America, the fact that so much of the country has been turned into parking lots. Buildings can be put to a variety of uses—a clothing store can sell electronics or groceries or even be converted into office space. But our vast plains of asphalt will require more imaginative thinking. A few years ago, I visited a shopping mall in Johannesburg, South Africa, where they put a drive-in movie on the roof of one of their city's parking garages. Also in Johannesburg, I saw a display of Audis—every model car in every color an Audi can come in, some forty-seven cars in all, lined up in tight rows—and yeah, you bet, it was mobbed with people.

 

Our finding that being first isn't necessarily best actually extends beyond the decompression zone and into the store proper. In any section of a store, the first product customers see isn't always going to have an advantage. Sometimes just the opposite will happen. Allowing some space between the entrance of a store and a product actually gives it more time in the shopper's eye as he or she approaches it. It builds a little visual anticipation. Someone making a study of, say, the computer printer section of a store is highly unlikely to stop at the very first model and buy it with no further comparisons. By the time he reaches the midpoint of the printer section, though, he may feel confident and informed enough to decide. At trade shows, the booths just inside the door may seem most desirable, but they're pretty bad locations. Visitors zoom past them on their way into the hall, or, even worse, they arrange to meet friends by the entrance, thereby creating the (false) impression that there's a crowd at the first booth and scaring off genuine clients. Besides, just inside the door is usually drafty. It feels as though you're in the vestibule.