Why We Buy (9 page)

Here's a personal example. I spend a lot of time waiting for planes in airports, and like most road warriors I work while I wait. Lately, though, my concentration is always being broken by Airport Network—the CNN-produced programming for air travelers. Try as I might, I can't find a way to have it turned off (a few years ago, I saw advertised online something that its maker claimed would allow you to turn off any public TV set, but every time I tried to log on to the site, it was down). Even when I'm the only person in the lounge, it must remain on. And so I quietly burn and vow never to watch CNN again. But there is a place in airports where even the busiest traveler stands around dumbly waiting rather than working: Near the baggage carousel, praying for luggage. There, before the suitcases begin to roll, we're all grateful to get a little Wolf Blitzer.

In general, the state of commercial messages is haphazard. Half of
all signs that are shipped to stores, banks and restaurants never even make it onto the floor, according to one study. All over America, retail managers end long, tiring days by sitting in storage rooms, unloading huge cartons of signs and other point-of-purchase materials sent by a merchandising manager who may never even have seen their particular store. Believe me, those tired, overworked store managers aren't agonizing for too long over which sign goes where.

Once I went to a sales meeting of one of the world's largest manufacturers of carbonated beverages at which they ran a competition between different display manufacturers: How fast could they set up their point-of-purchase display designed for the front aisle of a supermarket? It was pretty comical. The teams were a bunch of twentysomethings clad in Ralph Lauren chinos and oxford shirts with the name of the company embroidered across their chests. The fastest time clocked was about three minutes. When asked for my commentary, I suggested they run the same competition at midnight, when the same teams had been working for twelve hours straight—oh, and it had to happen in a crowded back room under the lousiest possible lighting.

Conversely, once some signs make it onto the floor, it's hell getting rid of them. Every February I make a game of seeing how many liquor store windows still bear holiday-themed displays and signs. It's always quite a few. We once studied a major New York bank branch where bits and pieces of twenty-seven different promotions were all still evident. In a car dealership's window, we once found a sign announcing the arrival of new cars—the
previous year's
new cars.

Some signs are perfectly fine, except they're in places they were never intended to go. You'll pass a drugstore display window and see a stack of cough syrup boxes with a tiny sign showing the sale price, a sign that was obviously meant to go on the shelves, where shoppers are a foot or so away, not in a window facing a busy street. Often, retailers simply ask too much of a sign—more than any sign can deliver. A fast-food chain tested a sign system explaining one version of its “meal deals,” then tried to make the signs clearer, then tested them again and fixed them again until they realized that it wasn't the signs that were bad—the meal deals were just too complicated to be explained. The
deals were changed and the signs worked just fine. We did a study for a department store in the South that blanketed the place with signs announcing big discounts. The only problem was that you practically had to be a mathematician to figure out what you'd save. Even the sales clerks had trouble keeping all the percentages straight. That store didn't need signs to explain the discounts, it needed university textbooks.

The world of signs today is actually enjoying something of a renaissance. Just look at what's happened to billboards. Thirty years ago, Lady Bird Johnson was going to outlaw them as part of her American beautification scheme. Today, even in postliterate America, they're our most visually exciting, inventive and clever form of commercial expression. They're more stylish than print ads, hipper than TV commercials and more fluent in the language of imagery and graphics than anything you'll find on the web. Both the iPod and the Mini Cooper have used the billboard to their advantage. Billboards are to print ads what YouTube is to the Internet—the edge of the envelope, the lab for experimenting with new ideas in communication. Technology has given us three-part shifting billboards, video JumboTrons, rotating sports arena message boards and digital menu boards featuring flying french fries. At a fast-food restaurant we studied, a moving digital menu board panel was read by 48 percent of customers, compared to 17 percent for the same menu board—a nonmoving version—tested earlier. Those numbers have held up over many tests we've done comparing moving and nonmoving signs. But there's an underside to this data: While an “activated” sign attracts more than twice the number of eyeballs as a static sign, the amount of time people look at the thing stays the same.

But a sign need not be on the cutting edge of technology to leave an impression. Not long ago I entered the elevator of a hotel in the financial district in New York. On the wall was a mirror, below which were these words: you look famished. And below that were the names and brief descriptions of the hotel's restaurants. I guarantee that sign gets close to 100 percent exposure and that everyone who sees it smiles, then checks in with their stomachs to see if they really
are
famished. A good sign.

A
natomically speaking, the most crucial aspect of shopping is the one that looks the simplest—the matter of how exactly human beings move. Mainly, how we walk.

Now, people move pretty much as their bodies allow them to move, as is most natural and comfortable. This gets tricky only when you realize that a good store is by definition one that exposes the greatest portion of its goods to the greatest number of its shoppers for the longest period of time—the store, in other words, that puts its merchandise in our path and our field of vision in a way that invites consideration. It's fairly simple to measure whether a store accomplishes this or not: We simply chart the paths of shoppers and then determine which parts of the store are going undervisited. We routinely perform an hourly “plot” of a store—on the hour, a tracker quickly breezes through every part of the store, counting how many shoppers are in each. If a store's flow is good, if it offers no obstacles or blind spots, then people will find their way to every nook and cranny. If there's a problem with flow, some flaw in the design or the layout, then we'll find some lonesome corners.
The smart store, then, is designed in accordance with how we walk and where we look. It understands our habits of movement and takes advantage of them, rather than ignoring them or, even worse, trying to change them.

Here's a simple example: People slow down when they see reflective surfaces. And they speed up when they see banks.

The reasons are understandable: Bank windows are boring, and nobody much likes visiting a bank anyway, so let's get past it quickly; mirrors, on the other hand, are never dull. Armed with this information, what do you do? Well, never open a store next to a financial institution, for when pedestrians reach you they'll still be moving at a speedy clip—too fast for window-shopping. Or, if you can't help being next to a bank, you can make sure to have a mirror or two on your facade or in your windows, to slow shoppers down.

Here's another fact about how people move (in retail environments but also everywhere else): They invariably walk toward the right. You don't notice this unless you're looking for it, but it's true—when people enter a store they head rightward. Not a sharp turn, mind you; more like a drift.

One of the questions I'm asked a lot when I travel is, how much of this right-hand bias is based on how we drive? Do people in Japan, Britain and Australia, much less India, have this same drift-to-the-right tendency? Yes, there's a local effect. Go to the Tate Britain art gallery in London. The people circulating clockwise are locals and the people circulating counterclockwise are visitors. Say what you will about the English love of order, but to my eye an English store such as Selfridges or Harrods functions more schizophrenically than any store in New York City, where walking manners are important. All the bad ethnic jokes point to Brits having a history of crimes against nature. However, my British colleagues who teach environmental psychology tell me that if you yell “Fire!” in a dark movie theater, in Britain people will head automatically toward the door on the right. Generally, in retail, the traffic patterns in England mimic how they drive.

Japan? A case unto itself. People from Osaka walk differently than people from Tokyo. In Osaka people waft toward the right, in Tokyo
they waft toward the left. My friend Kaz Toyota, who comes from Nara, a suburb of Osaka, explains the difference this way: In Tokyo people are overcivilized, while the folks in his hometown are more natural and free.

This right-leaning bias is a profound truth about how most humans make their way through the world, and it has applications everywhere, in all walks of life. It took us a while to see this pattern, and ever since we've collected data that bears it out (though not in Japan, apparently). But how can a retail environment respond?

We performed a study for a department store where just to the right of the entrance was the menswear department. And by our count, the overwhelming majority of shoppers in the store was female. Having menswear there meant that women shoppers would simply sail through the section, barely looking at the merchandise, determined to get to their main destination—ladies' clothing—first. In fact, because the front door was in the center of the store rather than to one side, our trackers charted lots of women who walked in, stepped right, looked around and saw that they were in menswear, then veered off sharply to the women's apparel sections on the left side of the store—never again to return to the right side, even to the right rear, where the children's clothing was displayed. Not coincidentally, our track sheets showed that children's clothing was the least-visited section in the entire store; fully half of the main floor was going undervisited due to this error in planning—because female customers never even saw it! An obvious solution to this adjacency mix-up would be to place the children's clothing section at the rear of the women's apparel section, rather than beside the neckties and men's bathrobes.

A similar situation held at an electronics store we studied. There, the cash/wrap was against the left-hand wall, near the front of the store. Shoppers would enter and head right, but then see the register and the clerks and turn sharply left so they could examine the merchandise there or ask where to find what they had come for. In some cases, those shoppers headed toward the rear to browse the displays there, but few of them ever made it back to the right half of the store. They were moving in a kind of question-mark track. To alter that, the register was
moved to the right-hand wall and farther back, about halfway into the store. That then became the main hub of activity. A second area of high shopper interest, a telephone display, was installed on the right wall but closer to the front. The hope was that shoppers would enter, walk right toward the cash register area, and then visit the phone displays. Those adjustments shifted the store around to a configuration more natural to how people move, and instantly, the circulation patterns improved—more people saw more store. Because American shoppers automatically move to the right, the front-right of any store is its prime real estate. That's where the most important goods should go, the make-or-break merchandise that needs 100 percent shopper exposure. That's one way to take advantage of how people move.

Shoppers not only walk right, they reach right, too, most of them being right-handed. Imagine standing at a shelf, facing it—it's easiest to grab items to the right of where you stand, rather than reaching your arm across your body to the left. In fact, as you reach, your hand may inadvertently brush a product to the right of the one you're reaching for. So if a store wishes to place something into the hand of a shopper, it should be displayed just slightly to the right of where he or she will be standing. Planograms, the maps of which products are stocked where on a shelf, are determined with this in mind: If you're stocking cookies, for instance, the most popular brand goes dead center—at the bull's-eye—and the brand you're trying to build goes just to the right of it. (Again, in Britain and Australia, the drive-left-reach-right rule creates conflicts in design that we do not have in North America.)

An even simpler aspect of how people move is the one that raises the greatest number of logistical issues for stores. In fact, this particular peculiarity of human ambulation can be said to render nearly every retail space seriously ill-suited to its purpose. It's this: People face and walk forward.

The implications of this are enormous, only because the normal retail environment is actually designed for those nonexistent beings who walk sideways—sidling like the figures drawn in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs—rather than place one foot in front of the other. Picture it: If you're walking straight down a store aisle, you're looking ahead. It
requires an effort to turn your head to one side or the other to see the shelves or racks as you pass them. That effort even makes you vaguely uncomfortable, because it requires you to train your eyes somewhere other than where you're walking. If it's a familiar environment (say, your favorite supermarket) and the setting feels safe (wide aisles, no boxes or other obstacles on the floor to trip you up), then maybe you'll turn your head as you walk and take in the merchandise. In a less familiar setting, you'll see less—subconsciously, you've got your peripheral vision on the lookout so you don't trip over a box or a small child and fall on your nose. If, as you walk, a display gets your attention, you may stop in your tracks and look upon it as it was meant to be seen, straight in the eye, as it were. But only then.

This issue is not limited to a store's shelves. On the street, how do you approach a display window? In almost every instance, from an angle—as you're walking toward the store from the left or the right. But most display windows are designed as though every viewer is just standing there staring into them head-on. Which is almost never the case. This comes up regarding outdoor signs, too. Near my office there's a new restaurant that spent a lot of money on a very handsome hanging sign, but instead of positioning it perpendicular to the building, so it is visible to pedestrians approaching from either side, it hangs parallel to it, so it can be read only from directly across the street. Which is how maybe 5 or 10 percent of possible customers approach the facade.

Obviously, that sign could be rehung in an hour and the problem would be solved. Windows can easily accommodate how people approach them: Displays must simply be canted to one side, so they can be more easily seen from an angle. And because we walk as we drive—to the right—window displays should usually be tilted to the left. Such a move instantly increases the number of people who truly see them.

But how can our insistence on walking and looking forward be accommodated inside the typical store? One method is used in almost every store already. Endcaps, the displays of merchandise on the end of virtually every American store aisle, are tremendously effective at exposing goods to the shopper's eye. Almost every kind of store makes use of them—in record stores you'll see one particular artist's CDs or some
discounted new release; in supermarkets there's a stack of specially priced soft drinks or a wall of breakfast cereal. An endcap can boost an item's sales simply because as we stroll through a store's aisles we approach it head-on, seeing it plainly and fully. Endcaps are also effective because you pass them on your way into an aisle, so if you see, say, a mountain of Oreos on the endcap, you'll stock up before coming upon the rest of the cookie display ten feet down the aisle.

Of course, there's a built-in limitation to the use of endcaps: There are only two of them per aisle, one at each end. But there's another effective way to display goods so they'll be seen. It's called chevroning—placing shelves or racks on an angle, like a sergeant's stripes, so more of what they hold is exposed to the vision of a strolling shopper. Instead of aisles being positioned at a ninety-degree angle to the back wall of the store, they're at forty-five degrees. A huge difference, and an elegant solution, too. There's only one catch: Chevroning shelves takes up about one fifth more floor space than the usual configuration, so a store can show only 80 percent as much merchandise as it can the traditional way. The big question is, will chevroning more than make up for that loss with increased sales? Can a store that shows less sell more, if the display system is superior? I can't answer that. We've suggested chevroning schemes to a number of clients, but no one wants to take the total plunge. It's certain, however, that especially for products that benefit from long browsing time, chevroning works.

How we walk determines to a great degree what we'll see, but so too does where our eyes naturally go. If you can only see a tabletop full of sweaters when you're standing right in front of it, then its effectiveness is limited. If you don't see a display from a distance—say, ten or twenty feet—then you won't approach it except by accident. That's why architects have to design stores with sight lines in mind—they must ensure that shoppers will be able to see what's in front of them but also be able to look around and see what's elsewhere. It's also why printed display fixtures, such as a sign reading five pre-washed t-shirts for $20.99, should bear their message on every surface, so no shopper confronts a blank side.

Once sight lines are taken into consideration, retailers must take
care not to place merchandise so that it cuts them off. This happens all the time: A freestanding display is placed in front of wall shelves, blocking whatever's there from the shopper's vision. Or a sign obscures the goods it's meant to describe. Ideally, a shopper should be able to examine goods but then look up and notice that over there, fifteen feet away, there's something just as appealing. It's a pinball effect—the felicitous dispersal of merchandise bounces shoppers throughout the entire store. In that way, the merchandise itself is a tool to keep shoppers flowing. That's how good stores operate: You feel almost helplessly pulled in by what you see up ahead or over there to the right.

We have studied how much of what is on display in supermarkets is actually seen by shoppers—the so-called capture rate. About one fifth of all shoppers actually see the average product on a supermarket shelf. There's a reliable zone in which shoppers will probably see merchandise. It goes from slightly above eye level down to about knee level. Much above that or below and they probably won't see it unless they happen to be looking intently. This, too, is a function of our defensive walking mechanism, for if you're looking up you can't see what's in your path.

This means that a huge amount of retail selling space is, if not quite wasted, seriously challenged. If a store can avoid displaying goods outside that zone, fine. But most stores don't have that luxury. One thing stores can try is to display only large items above or below the zone. It's easier to spy the economy-size Pampers down by your ankles than it is the Tylenol caplets. If the bottom shelf tilts up slightly, that helps visibility, too. Packaging designers can also effectively address this issue. Every label, every box, every container should be designed as though it will be seen from a disadvantageous perspective—either above the shopper's head or below her knees. Packaging should also be made to work when seen from a sharp angle rather than just head-on. We'd see a lot more large, clear type in high-contrast colors if that happened. This also has implications in stores where merchandise is stored on the selling floor instead of in stockrooms. I'm thinking here of computers, telephones, personal stereos and other consumer electronics that are sometimes stacked from the floor to over one's head. The boxes
haven't been designed to be on display, but that's exactly how they end up. That alone should make no-frills packaging—brown kraft paper, no images, little description of the contents—obsolete. Boxes should be thought of as signs or as posters for a product—same as a box of cereal. Typically, package designers will place the manufacturer's name at the top of a label, thereby satisfying corporate egotism, and the product ID on the bottom; but this is exactly the wrong decision if the box is ever stored down near the floor. When it's down there, shoppers will see the brand name easily but not the description of what is in the box. And since no designer has control over where or how a box is stored, the product ID should
always
be on top, and the label should always look a little like a billboard—clean, high contrast, with a visible image and large-enough type.