Why We Buy (7 page)

Anyway, when our book shopper stumbles upon a second worthy volume, she then begins wishing she had a basket to make life a little easier. And if at that exact moment a basket suddenly materialized—in plain sight and easy to reach
without stooping
—then she would probably take one, and then, perhaps, go on to buy books number three and four. Maybe even a bookmark.

The lesson seems clear: Baskets should be scattered throughout the store, wherever shoppers might need them. In fact, if all the stacks of baskets in America were simply moved from the front of the store to the rear they would be instantly more effective, since many shoppers don't begin seriously considering merchandise until they've browsed a bit of it. The stack should be no lower than five feet tall, to make sure the baskets are visible to all, yes, but also to ensure that no shopper need bend down to get one, since shoppers hate bending, especially when their hands are full. A good, simple test on placement is that if you have to keep restocking a pile of baskets through the day, it's probably in a good place.

The baskets themselves also need to be rethought. This bookstore uses shallow, hard plastic ones with hinged steel handles, the same as supermarkets and convenience stores offer. They're perfect if you're buying bottles, jars or crushable items but make no sense for books, office supplies or clothes. When the contents grow heavy the handles become uncomfortable in your hand, but you can't sling the basket over your arm or shoulder, as common sense might wish you could. As a result, you don't want to let that basket get too full. How do we usually carry books? In bags, tote bags especially. A rack of canvas or nylon tote bags would be much better here and would have the added advantage itself of being salable merchandise. The clerk could unload the bag, total up the damages, ask if the customer wants to buy the tote and then reload everything and save on plastic to boot.

The cleverest use of baskets I've seen yet is at Old Navy on Seventeenth Street in Manhattan. While the Old Navy chain has had its ups and downs, whoever manages this particular store does a great job.
I take visiting retailers there—it's one of the liveliest, most energetic shopping experiences in the city. As soon as you step inside there's a gregarious, smiling employee greeting you and proffering a black mesh tote bag to carry your purchases. The bags are cheaper, lighter and easier to store than plastic baskets, and they look a whole lot better, too. In fact, when you bring yours to the checkout, the cashier will ask if you want to buy the bag, and a fair number of people say yes, adding one final sale at the last possible moment.

The least clever use of baskets was one I witnessed in a Southern department store during the Christmas season. There was a large rack of mesh totes perfectly positioned just inside the entrance. But some merchandising wizard decided to place in front of it an even larger display of stuffed Santas—rendering the bags totally invisible to entering shoppers. (Exiting shoppers saw them just fine.) I don't know how many Santas were sold, but it couldn't have been enough to offset that bad decision.

When we studied its stores, the dinnerware maker and retailer Pfaltzgraff was already providing baskets as well as shopping carts to its customers. But at the checkout, we noticed that many of the carts were filled to capacity with dishes and bowls and so on. The supersizing of grocery carts was a retail trend Pfaltzgraff hadn't yet acknowledged. The company immediately replaced the carts with new ones that were roughly 40 percent larger. Just as fast, the average sales per customer rose.

One of my favorite stores in the world is Vinçon, a design store in Barcelona, Spain. Every season they redesign their shopping bags. They are often funny, edgy and filled with social commentary. I am convinced that a high percentage of people shop there just to get hold of that season's shopping bag. How many times walking through Chicago or New York City do you see American Girl Place bags? That shopping bag marching happily through a community is a billboard you don't have to pay for.

This all serves as a reminder of one of the most crucial big-picture issues in the world of retailing: You can't know how much shoppers will buy until you've made the shopping experience as comfortable and easy and practical as possible.

There's a rather elaborate way of keeping customers' hands free that I'd love to see some retailer try. This plan would keep shoppers feeling 100 percent unburdened until it is too late—after they've reached the exits.

The idea would be to create a combination coat check/package-call system. Customers could unload all encumbrances as soon as they entered the store. And instead of carrying their selections around with them, they'd instruct sales clerks to dispatch the bags and boxes to the will-call desk near the exit. After a full session of vigorous, hands-free shopping, the customer would head for the door, pick up coat and hat and purchases, and be gone, into a car or taxi or waiting limousine.

In 2006 we started working for the park division of the brewing giant Anheuser-Busch, which operates Busch Gardens and various SeaWorlds across America. In the parks where we worked, the company had a system at every gift store where you could send your purchases up ahead to the main store at the gate. Ride the Flume, get your picture taken (and stamped onto a mug), send it on, then jump aboard the next ride, hands free. Whee! In theory, you could make purchases throughout the park and pick them all up on your way out the door. The problem? Customers typically found out about this service only after they had bought something, and even then it wasn't as clearly explained as it should have been. I wondered how many people moving through the park or browsing the gift stores didn't understand this service—and decided not to buy something, because who wants a personalized beer mug on your lap when you're riding the Tilt-A-Whirl? My point was that Anheuser-Busch needed to spell out this great service right at the park's entrance.

Sometimes even that might not be enough. A souvenir shop that we studied at Disneyland is still working on this problem. There, all day long the store is virtually empty, since visitors wisely don't want to lug their purchases around the park all day. But by 4:30 p.m. it's a madhouse of souvenir lust. A will-call desk was established so that shoppers could buy in the morning, leave the store empty-handed, and then drop by the will-call desk to retrieve their purchases at day's end. The only problem is that a great many shoppers forget to come by for their purchases.

My fullest vision of such a service was one I suggested to
Bloomingdale's. In the flagship store in Manhattan, the eighth floor is not terribly well suited to selling, due to its hard-to-reach location. So I suggested that the floor be turned into a kind of semiprivate retreat for better customers, complete with attended restrooms, ATMs, a café, a concierge, and other similar amenities—including, of course, the coat check/will-call desk. If shoppers are just visiting New York, delivery could even be made to their hotels. In fact, I envisioned that membership in this semiprivate club could be sold to hotels, which would then pass along the benefits to their guests. This kind of service would actually be most profitable on an even bigger scale. Someday soon a mall or shopping center developer will institute such a system to serve all tenants, doing his part to drive up sales—and, of course, his or her own take, too.

It's hard to overemphasize the importance of the hand issue to the world of shopping. A store can be the grooviest place ever, offering the finest/cheapest/sexiest goods to be had, but if the shopper can't pick them up, it's all for naught. Later I will explain the crucial matter of touch, trial and other sensory aspects of shopping. If shoppers can't reach out and feel certain goods, they just won't buy. So it's not simply a matter of making sure shoppers can carry what they wish to take. They won't even get close to making that decision if their hands are full. It's why, in many cases, flat tabletop displays are better for showing apparel than hangers on racks: It's a struggle to examine something on a hanger if you've only got one hand free, while you can place your burdens on the tabletop and unfurl that sweater to get a good, close look and feel.

The most amusing manifestation of the hand issue was in a supermarket I visited. Like just about every retailer in America today, this market had decided to put in a coffee bar where shoppers could sit and drink if they wished. This wasn't the first coffee shop I'd seen in a supermarket, but it was the first one to truly understand how the whole thing should work: It had also put in cup holders on the shopping carts, meaning that you could drink and drive. That clever little touch sells coffee, I'll bet.

W
ell,” he says to me, “what do you think?”

And with that, the marketing executive unveils the sign that's about to go into five hundred or so stores.

I'm seated in a comfortable chair, in a climate-controlled conference room with perfect lighting. The sign is right in front of my nose, at the ideal viewing distance, beautifully printed on expensive paper, which has been exquisitely matted by professionals. There's a kind of hush all over the room.

“Gee,” I answer, “I don't know what I think.”

Worried glances all around. They're not worried about me—they're worried
for
me.

“What do you mean you don't know?” the executive asks. “You're
supposed
to know.”

And that's when I try to explain.

I start by saying that unless every customer is going to come upon the sign, or more recently a flat-screen television display, under the exact same conditions that I first saw it, it's impossible for me to know if it's
the greatest piece of communication ever designed or a tragic waste of time, space and money. I attempt to remind everybody that people in stores or restaurants or banks are almost never still; they're moving from one place to another. And they're not intent on looking at signs or flat screens—in fact, they're usually doing something else entirely, like trying to find socks, or seeing which line is shortest, or deciding whether to have the burger or the chicken. And there's that brand-new piece of communication, somewhere in the distance, off at a sharp angle, partially hidden by a tall man's head, and the lighting isn't so hot and there's a little glare coming into the store, and anyway somebody's talking to the customer and distracting her.

In other words, I end by saying, showing me a sign in a conference room, while ideal from the graphic designer's point of view, is the absolute worst way to see if it's any good.

To say whether a sign or any in-store media works or not, there's only one way to really assess it—in place. On the floor of the store.

Even there it's no picnic. First you've got to measure how many people actually looked at it. Then you've got to be able to say whether they looked long enough to read what it says, because if they're not reading it, even the best sign won't work. Now, the difference between an inadvertent glance at a sign and a thorough reading might be two or three seconds. So you can see what kind of challenge this is for our researchers. They've got to discreetly position themselves just so, behind the sign itself, and then watch a shopper's smallest eye movements while simultaneously keeping track of the stopwatch, just to be able to say with absolute scientific certainty that this man focused on that sign for four seconds, and then his eyes shifted to that poster and looked at it for four seconds. We watch shopper after shopper for hours on end, hundreds of people, thousands of minutes, and then assemble all our findings before we can say whether a sign is any good.

Go try. It ain't easy.

But after thirty years of doing this work, we're pretty confident about shooting from the hip, and most of the time we're right. There are some basic rules about typefaces, colors and layout. And we've learned some things as well about how what we call “on-location
communication” interacts with circulation in different environments. But to really measure the success or failure of a sign, we need to put some alphanumeric values to it—17 percent notice the sign; of those, 12 percent bother to read it; and the average viewing time is 2.9 seconds—and the only real way of doing that is to put the thing in place and watch it.

There are companies that will measure sign readability by putting subjects into high-tech helmets that measure the smallest eyeball movements and holding signs before them. But even that won't tell you if you've put the right sign in the wrong place, which happens all the time (and which, by the way, is actually worse than putting a so-so sign in the perfect place). And it surely can't predict whether shoppers will read and respond to a sign on the floor of a store, where distractions abound.

 

But back to our conference room. The most common mistake in the design and placement of signs and other message media is the thought that they're going into a store. When we're talking signs, it's no longer a store. It's a three-dimensional TV commercial. It's a walk-in container for words and thoughts and messages and ideas.

People step inside this container, and it tells them things. If everything's working right, the things they are told grab their attention and induce them to look and shop and buy and maybe return another day to shop and buy some more. They are told what they might buy, and where it is kept, and why they might buy it. They're told what the merchandise can do for them and when and how it can do it.

A great big three-dimensional walk-in TV commercial.

And just as if scripting and directing a TV commercial, the job is to figure out what to say and when and how to say it.

First you have to get your audience's attention. Once you've done that, you have to present your message in a clear, logical fashion—the beginning, then the middle, then the ending. You have to deliver the information the way people absorb it, a bit at a time, a layer at a time, and in the proper sequence. If you don't get their attention first, nothing that follows will register. If you tell too much too soon, you'll overload
them and they'll give up. If you confuse them, they'll ignore the message altogether.

This has always been so. The main reason it's so important today, as I mentioned earlier, is that more and more purchasing decisions are being made on the premises of the store itself. Customers have disposable income to spend and open minds, and they're giving in to their impulses. The impact of brand-name marketing and traditional advertising is diffuse now because we all absorb so much of it. The role of merchandising has never been greater. Products now live or die by what happens on the selling floor. You can't waste a chance to tell shoppers something you want them to know.

And shoppers are more pressed for time than ever. They're not dawdling like they used to. They've grown accustomed to stores where everything for sale is on open display, and they expect all the information they need will be out in the open, too. Nobody wants to wait for a clerk to point him or her in the right direction or explain some new product. Nobody can find a clerk anyway. Once upon a time you went into a coffee shop and the only thing to read was the menu and the
New York Post.
Now you go into even the smallest Starbucks and there are eleven distinct signage positions communicating everything from the availability of nonfat eggnog to the tie-in with Paul McCartney's latest album.

So you can't just look around your store, see where there are empty spots on the walls, and put the signs there. You can't simply clear a space on a counter and dump all your in-store media. Every store is a collection of zones, and you've got to map them out before you can place a single sign. You've got to get up and walk around, asking yourself with every step: What will shoppers be doing
here
? How about
here
? Where will their eyes be focused when they stand
here
? And what will they be thinking about over
there
? In this zone people will be walking fast, so a message has to be short and punchy—arresting. Over there, they'll be browsing around, so you can deliver a little more detail. In this area they'll be thinking about—oh, let's say we're standing near the motor oil shelf, so they'll be thinking about their cars. So maybe it's a good opportunity to tell them something about replacement windshield wipers. Over here by the registers they will be standing still for a minute and
a half, a perfect window for a longer message. And then they'll be on their way out of the store, but you can use the exit path to give them a thought for the road.

Each zone is right for one kind of message and wrong for all others. Putting a sign that requires twelve seconds to read in a place where customers spend four seconds is just slightly more effective than putting it in your garage.

I'm forever walking around and adding to my mental list of places shoppers stand around doing nothing, where some message might be appropriate. One struck me the other day: In a shoe department, you tell the clerk what you want and he or she goes off to find your size. At that point you've already examined all the shoes, so what do you do? It's probably a good spot for a sign promoting other merchandise. You'd probably welcome something to read right then and there; maybe something about handbags.

One clever placement I've seen lately is the small signs tacked on the inside of bathroom stalls. It almost guarantees a 100 percent capture rate, and it's a place where you can get really creative with the message.

Here's another good spot for signs currently being neglected: escalators. That struck me as I ascended from the tracks on the Underground in London. There you spend a lot of time rising slowly past what used to be signs and are now flat screens. When someone asks me about a good application of digital signage I ask if they've ever ridden the Tube.

It isn't enough simply to figure out the general vicinity where a sign should go. We once studied shoppers who came upon a banner hanging directly over the cash/wrap area of a store. Good placement, no? No. A very low percentage of shoppers even saw it. Nobody stands around in a store looking straight up in the air. We recommended that the banner be moved four feet away, and the number of people who saw it doubled. When it comes to positioning a sign, the difference between an ideal viewing spot and a terrible one is often just a few feet or a ten-degree angle. For maximum exposure, a sign should interrupt the existing natural sight lines in any given area. So you've got to stand in a spot and determine: Where am I looking? That's where the sign goes. It's no surprise that the number-one thing people look at is other people.
That's why some of the most effective signs in fast-food restaurants are the ones sitting atop the cash registers—more or less at the level of the cashiers' faces. Smart sign placement simply tries to interrupt the shopper's line of vision and intercept her gaze.

Sometimes, though, you've got to get creative with message placement. Lawn mower manufacturing company Toro made an in-store video to promote its automatic-mulching mower. Naturally, they were placing them in home and garden supply stores, but where? In the mower section, where shoppers would see the monitors going but then realize that they'd have to stand still for ten minutes to watch the whole thing, and not only that, but they'd have to stand in the middle of an aisle and quite possibly get mowed down (and mulched) by shoppers on their way to barbecue accessories?

Instead, the video went into repair department waiting areas, where it played before captive audiences grateful for even the slightest distraction. Everyone who visits the repair department of a home and garden supply store is going to buy a new mower
someday.
For some reason, we find that even retailers who pile on the signs elsewhere will fail to appreciate the possibilities for communication in waiting areas, where people tend to be bored to tears. We once studied a car dealership's service area waiting room that offered not one word of reading material—not a single piece of promotional literature. Not an issue of
Car and Driver
or
Road & Track.
Not even an old
Reader's Digest.

It's no secret that New Yorkers don't like to wait—we want our egg and cheese on a roll almost instantaneously after we order it; if we have to wait any longer than that, we're going to the deli across the street the next time. So I had to appreciate the popular upscale sandwich shop around the corner from my office, which cleverly offers the day's
New York Times
and magazines for varied interests in order to placate the customers, who are often waiting more than five minutes for their made-to-order slow-roasted pork and pickled-pepper relish delicacy.

 

Nobody studies signs like the fast-food industry. Even if you don't plan on owning a Burger God franchise, it's instructive to see how they do it.

They realize that you can put an effective sign in a window or just inside a doorway, for example, but it has to be something a customer can read in an instant. Just two or three words. We've timed enough people to know that such signs get, on average, less than two seconds of exposure per customer.

I was once asked to evaluate a door sign that had ten words on it.

“How much can you read in a second and a half?” I asked the designer.

“Three or four words, I guess,” he admitted.

“Hmmm,” I replied.

Fast-food restaurants used to hang all kinds of signs and posters and dangling mobiles in and around doorways to catch customers' attention fast, until studies showed that nobody read them. When you enter a restaurant, you are looking for one of two things: the counter or the bathroom.

There's no point in placing a sign for people on their way to the bathroom to see. They've got more important things on their minds. But a sign facing people as they leave the bathroom works just fine.

As people approach the counter, they're trying to decide what they're going to order. In the fast-food arena, that means they're looking for the big menu board. But they're not going to read every word on it—they're just going to scan until they see what they're looking for. If they're regular customers (as most customers are), they probably already know what they want and aren't even looking at the menu.

If there's a long line, customers will have lots of time to study the menu board and anything else that's visible. After the order is placed, the menu board and counter-area signs still receive prolonged customer attention. McDonald's found that 75 percent of customers read the menu board
after
they order, while they wait for their food—during the “meal prep” period, which averages around a minute and forty seconds. That's a long time, and that's when people will read almost anything—they've already paid and received their change, so they're not preoccupied. That's a perfect window for a longer message, something you want them to know for the next time they come. If we look at the aggregate of all menu board data, from fast food to deli counters in supermarkets,
61 percent of the total time someone spends looking at a menu board is done after they've ordered.