“WHY WE BUY” ANALYSIS PROJECT

THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER

"At la st, he re is a book that gives thi s und e rrated skill the re s pe c t it d ese rves." - Th e New York Times

"Thanks, Mr. Und erhill, for explaining in clear and

witty prose why my s hopping habits are no t

all that c razy. Now, please tell my wife!"

- Bob Gale. \\ rilerlprodu('er, Back to the FUlu re tril ogy

"I'm in love. And if I didn 't have a devoted husba nd ,

two kid s and a cru shing mortgage, J swear I'd throw caution

to the wind and run away with

Paco Unde rhill . .. fasc inating."

- Rocky Mounlain News (Denver)

" Why We Buy is a

funn y and insightful book for peop le on

both s ides of the retail counte r."

- Michael Gould. CEO,

Bl oomingdale's

Praise For Paco Underhill

and Why We Buy

"The Dalai Lama said, 'Shopping is the museum of the twentieth cen- tury.' Paco Underhill explains why. Brilliantly."

-Faith Popcorn, author and Future Forecaster

"Why We Buy is useful as a. how-to. for retailers, but shoppers will dis- cover a Vance Packard for our times, on the trail of our century's hidden persuaders."

-Hardy Green, Business Week

"For retailers, this book should be mandatory. ... For the rest of us, it's just plain fun."

-Harvey Schachter, The Globe. and Mail (Toronto)

"No matter which point of view you're coming from, shopper or shop- keeper, you'll find Underhill's tips are often funny, sometimes provoca- tive, and almost always usable."

-The San Diego Union-Tribune

"What Underhill offers in this delightful and engrossing book is a primer in the science of shopping ... The effect of reading this book is that of being alternately entertained by hilarious stories and enlightened by trenchant observations."

-Newsday

"Underhill's way of looking at how we shop may revolutionize the in- dustry. ... In this day of heavy competition, advice from this book could give a retailer the edge needed to survive .... This book prOvides an

excellent method for retailers to examine their own store space and look for what may draw customers in, as well as what may be causing them to leave without buying."

-Teresa McUsic, Star-Telegram (Fort Worth)

"The guru of retail consulting offers a wealth of inSight into what makes a successful shopping experience for both buyer and seller."

-Craig Ryan, The Oregonian

'1\ fascinating voyage through the mall that will open your eyes to the psychology of modern retailing-and especially to the new dynamics of consumer shopping."

-G. William Gray, The Tampa Tribune

"Ostensibly a business book aimed at merchandisers, Why We Buy will also appeal to consumers who want to understand the art of shopping and the science of selling."

-Justin Adams, MSNBC

"Paco Underhill is Sherlock Holmes for retailers ... This sleuth makes shoppers view stores with more critical eyes."

- Trish Donnally, San Francisco Chronicle

'1\ remarkable business tool, a distillation of all those notes and tapes; packaged in a way that is useful, witty, and loving."

-Keith H. HaI?monds, Fast Company

'1\ readable, entertaining study of the behavioral science of shopping." -Adrienne Miller, Esquire

"Intriguing for both lovers and haters of the game of visual stimula- tion."

-Booklist

"This lighthearted look at shopping is highly recommended to anyone who buys or sells."

-Rob McDonald, Amazon.com

WhyWeBuy TH E SCI ENCE OF SHOPPI N'G

Updated and Revised for the Internet, the Global Consumer and Beyond

Paco Underhill

ACKS

I Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10920

Copyright © 1999, 2000, 2009 by Obat, Inc.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address

Simon & Schuster Paperbacks Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

This Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition January 2009

SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at

1-800-456-6798 or [email protected].

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover as follows: Underhill, Paco.

Why we buy: the science of shopping / Paco Underhill. p. cm.

Includes index. 1. Marketing research. 2. Consumer behavior. 3. Shopping. I Title.

HF5415.2.U53 1999 658.8'34-dc21 99-12125

CIP ISBN: 0-684-84913-5 ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-9524-3 ISBN-IO: 1-4165-9524-4

DEDICATION

Who knew when the first keystrokes of this document were made in the spring of 1997 that ten years and twenty-seven foreign translations later this book would still be alive? I am grateful that in the summer of 1999, when this book came out, my father, Francis Underhill, got to see it. I don't think he really knew what I did even after reading it. He had a lot of interests, but shopping wasn't ever among them. He died that fall. I was there. I made him a martini and helpe~ him get comfortable in bed. He went, sleeping next to my mother, his wife of more than fifty years. I still talk to him.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

For some of you, the book you hold in 'your hands may be an old friend-given as a gift, bought in an airport, secured through Amazon or assigned at a school or training progam. Thanks for picking it up again. Most volumes stocked in the business section of a bookstore have a short shelf lif~. They zoom and crash and are forgotten within a year. This book has lasted ten years and is available in twenty-seven foreign editions. I had no idea when pen first went to paper back in 1997 that my story would appeal to so many readers.

From Russia to Japan, from Spain to Thailand, I've had visits and e-mails from readers just wanting. to say hi, many looking for a job and not a few telling me their own stories. University professors from China, a Marxist minister in t;he Bengali provincial government, a jew- elry deSigner from Spain-the list goes on. My favorite pieces of corre- spondence came from a man who ran a septic tank cleaning business in Missouri. The letter was handwritten on lined paper. I don't know how many letters that man writes a year, but I know I was privileged to get one of them. He'd read the book and wanted my advice on what color to paint his truck.

In 2007, I reread Why We Buy and realized that parts of the story had progressed and that some of the example's I'd tised were dated. The book needed freshening and that's what it's gotten. If you liked it the first time, you'll like it even better the second. If you're picking it up for the first time, whether you love or hate shopping, this is a good, entertaining read, and you'll never look at the world of shopping and consumption the same way again.

Paco Underhill

January 2009

CONTENTS

I INSTEAD OF SAMOA, STORES:

THE SCIENCE OF SHOPPING

1. A Science is Born 3

2. What Retailers and Marketers Don't Know 28

II WALK LIKE AN EGYPTIAN:

THE MECHANICS OF SHOPPING

3. The Twilight Zone

4. You Need Hands

5. How to Read a Sign

6. Shoppers Move Like People

7. Dynamic

III MEN ARE FROM HOME DEPOT,

WOMEN ARE FROM BLOOMINGDALE'S: THE DEMOGRAPHICS OF SHOPPING

8. Shop Like a Man

9. What Women Want

42

50

61

77

89

102

121

xii CONTENTS

10. If You Can Read This You're Too Young 137

11. KJds 151

IV SEE ME, FEEl ME, TOUCH ME, BUY ME:

THE DYNAMICS OF SHOPPING

12. The Sensual ShQI>per 171

13. The Big Three 194

14. Time 201

15. Cash/Wrap Blues 208

16. Magic Acts 213

V SCREEN SAVERS, JET LAG AND WHIRLING DERVISHES:

THE CULTURE OF SHOPPING.

17. The Internet 227

18. Come Fly with Me 254

19. Windows of the World 268

20. Final Thoughts ( 280

Acknowledgments 293

Index 299

I Instead of Samoa, Stores: The Science of Shopping

ONE

A Science Is Born

o kay, stroll, scroll, stroll. , . .<tot> Shhh. Stay behind that potted palm. Get out your clipboard and

pen. Our subject is the fortyish woman in the tan trench coat and blue

skirt. She's in the b~th section. She's touching towels. Mark this down~ she's petting one, two, three, four of them so far. She just checked the price tag on one. Mark that down, too. Careful-don't get too close- you don't want her to see you. She picked up two towels from the table- top display and is leaving the section with them. Mark the time. Now, tail her into the aisle and on to her next stop.

Thus begins another day in the vineyards of science, specifically the science of shopping. But let's start by addressing a fundamental ques- tion: Since when does such a scholarly discipline even exist?

Well, if, say, anthropology had devoted a branch of itself to the study of shoppers in situ (a fancy Latin way of saying shoppers out shopping), interacting with retail environments (stores, but also banks

, and restaurants), the actual, physical premises, including but not limited

3

4 WHY WE BUY

to every rack, shelf, counter and table display of merchandise, every sign, banner, brochure, directional aid and computerized interactive

informational fixture, the entrances and exits, the windows and walls, the elevators and. escalators and stairs and ramps, the cashier lines and teller lines and counter lines and restroom lines, and every inch of every aisle-in short,· every nook and cranny from the farthest reach of the parking lot to the deepest penetration of the store itself, ifanthropology had already been studying all that ... and not simply studying the store, of course, but what, exacdy and precisely-scientifically-human beings do in it, where they go and don't go, and by what path they go there; what they see and fail to see, or read and decline to read; and how they deal with the objects they come upon, how they shop, you might say- the precise anatomical mechanics and behavioral psychology of how they pull a sweater from a rack to examine it, or read a box of heartburn pills or a fast-food restaurant menu, or grab a shopping basket, or react to the sight of a line at the ATMs ... again, as I say. ifanthropology had been paying attention, and not just paying attention but then collect- ing, collating, digesting, tabulating and cross-referenCing every litde bit of data, from the extremely broad (How many people enter this store on a typical Saturday morning, broken down by age, sex and size of shopper group?) to the extremely narrow (Do more male supermarket shoppers under thirty-five who read the nutritional information on the side panel of a cereal box actually buy the cereal compared to those who just look at the picture on the front?), well, then, we wouldn't have had to invent the science of shopping. In 1997, when this volume was origi- nally written, the academic world knew more about the marketplace in Papua New Guinea than what happened at your local supermarket or shopping mall. Twentieth-century anthropology wasn't about what happened in your backyard.

I~1997, I'd been fighting for what I knew was right for more than ten years-and since then, a whole lot has changed. Companies across . the world are now employing anthropologists to staff what have been popularly tided shopper and consumer insight groups. Ethnologic stud- ies (that is to say. a science that breaks down humans into races, cultures and their various obvious and not-so-obvious characteristics) are part

A Science Is Born 5

of mainstream market research. But when I first hung out my shingle, my· academic colleagues thought I was selling out, and the marketers and merchants I sought to serve looked at me as an alien from a distant

planet. Down the hall from my office then and now is an equipment room

with more than one hundred cameras. Eight-millimeter video cameras,

direct to hard drive, digital, even a few ancient Super 8 time-lapse film

cameras. To keep track of them, every camera is assigned a name-the video cameras are named after rock stars, the digital stills are signs of the zodiac. We find giving a camera a name rather than a number helps

it last longer, and when Jimi Hendrix feels poorly, he gets to the shop faster than if he were camera number 26. In that same equipment room are piled cases of blank eight-millimeter videotapes, two hours per

tape, five hundred tapes to a case. Across the world, we have now shot

more than fifty thousand hours of tape per y~ar. We also have dozens of handheld computers, or PDAs, on which we painstakingly jot down the

answers from the thousands of shopper interviews we conduct; there are laptops in there, too, plus all manner of tripods, mounts, lenses and other camera accessories, including lots of duct tape. Oh, and many

well-worn hard-shell cases for everything, because it all. travels. A lot. The studio next to the equipment room has two complete digital edit-

ing suites and eleven stations at which to watch all those tapes-because

everything we shoot, we look at. We have more than enough gear in that room to make broadcast-quality documentaries and, while we're at it, to equip a good-sized university's school of social anthropology or

experimental psychology, assuming the university has a deserved reputa- tion for generating tons of original research gathered from all over the globe.

Even with all that high-tech equipment, though, our most important . research tool for the past thirty years remains the piece of paper we call

the track sheet, in the hands of the individuals we call trackers. Track-

ers are the field researchers of the science of shopping, the scholars of shopping, or, more precisely, of shoppers. Essentially, trackers stealthily

make their way through stores following shoppers and noting every- thing ·they do. Usually a tracker begins by loitering inconspicuously near

6 WHY WE BUY

a store's e~trance, waiting for a shopper to enter, at which point the "track" starts. The tracker will stick with the unsuspecting individual (or individuals) as long as he or she is in the store (excluding trips to ~e dressing room or the restroom) and will record on the track sheet virtu- ally everything the shopper does.

Befitting a science that has grown up in the real world, meaning far from the ivory towers of academia, our trackers are not stamped from the usual researcher mold. In the beginning we hired graduate environ- mental psychology students, but we found they were often unsuited to the work-more often than not, they came to the job burdened with newly learned textbook theories they wished to prove or disprove. As a result, they didn't possess the patience necessary to watch many

shoppers at great length to see what they actually do. Creative people, however-playwrights, artists, actors, novelists, a puppeteer-have proven to be perfect for this work. They have no theories to uphold or demolish, just open minds and boundless curiosity about what people do and how and why they do it; They are dispassionate yet avid observ- ers with no agenda except for wanting to accurately document how human behavior plays out in the retail arena. They manage to see the forest, the trees and everything in between.

When we find someone with the temperament and the intelligence for this work, we first put them through a training session in our office. There's a lot to learn-how do I watch and simultaneously take notes, for instance, or how can I tell whether someone is reading a sign or just staring at the mirror next to it? We have to teach the most important tracker skill of all: How do I stand close enough to study someone without being qoticed? B~cause it's crucial to our work that shoppers don't realize they're being observed. There's no other way to be sure that we're seeing natural behavior. Fact is,' we're al( still surprised by how close you can stand to someone in a store and still remain invisible ..

We find that positioning yourJelf behind the shopper is a bad idea-we all pick up on the sensation that we're being watched. But if you stand to the side of a shopper, his or her peripheral vision reads you as just another customer-harmless, in other words, an~ barely worth notic- ing. From that position you can get close enough to see exactly what

A Science Is Born 7

a shopper is doing. You can be sure that he's touched, say, nine golf gloves, not eight or ten. Then we throw the tracker-hopefuls out into the real world, into a store setting, to see them in actioI?-' Most of them wash out at this point-you can teach technique, but not the smarts or the slight case of fascination required to do this work well. It's weirdly addictive, and many of our trackers have been with us for a decade or more.

John has been doing fieldwork for my company, Envirosell, for more than ten years, in between workirtg as a kindergarten teacher. Trained to monitor five-year-olds, does he have patience? Oh, yeah. He also just c9mpleted his two-hundredth fieldwork assignment. He's of medium height, with brown hair, a spare build, crinkles in-the corners of his eyes and big broad feet. He has no trouble standing all day. In our tracker

pool, we also have rookies who are still getting twenty trips under their belts, intermediate-level trackers~ master trackers, team leaders . . . and Noah, who, after thirteen years of tracking and team leading, now directs the forty-plus members of our tracking staff based out of our home office in New York City. We found Noah in Nashville. He was a last-minute replacement, a struggling music student who three hours into the job had found his calling. The first time he walked into my of- fice he was dripping with nervous sweat (he'd never been to New York before). Thirteen years later, I still can't break him of the habit of calling

me Mr. Paco. In addition to measuring and counting every significant motion of

a single shopping trip, our trackers also have to contribute incisive field notes describing the nuances of customer behavior and make good -inferences based on what they've observed. These notes add up to yet another, this time anecdotal, layer of information about a particular environment and how people use it. Our trackers crisscross this conti- nent, as well as the globe. As of 2008, we have offices in Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Milan, Bangalore, Moscow and Tokyo, and each office has its own tracker pool. All across the world, Envirosell trackers spend more time in stores in a month than most people do in several years. They visit every kind of retail business imagin~ble, from banks to fast-food restaurants to high-end fashion boutiques to hangar-sized discounters.

8 WHY WE BUY

Since 1997, we've worked hard to expand our repertoire of field sites, adding concert halls, stadiu~s, train stations and airports as well as li- braries, museums, hotels and websites (more about those later). But our sweet spot remains what we've always done. Of the world's fifty largest merchants, we've worked with approximately half, and in the U.S. alone, our clients include more than a third of Fortune magazine's top one huri- dred corporations.

As for the forms our trackers use? They're also marvels of data gath- ering. They have evolved constantly over the three decades we've been doing this research and are, without a doubt, the key to the entire en- terprise, a great achievement, if I may say so, in the art of information storage and retrieval, nondigital division. We have tried scanning sys- tems, exotic software packages ... and we keep going back to the same old system. It works, it's flexible, and thanks to Wite-Out and a copy

machine, it can be changed on a dime and on the fly. Our ability to react to what and whom we find walking through the door of wherever loca- tion we go is critical to our success. 1'd guess that at least one third of the time we go on location, we end up finding something very different than what our client told us we'd find. The store has six aisles and not seven, the shelf layout has been mysteriously reversed or that interactive machine we were hired to study arrived at the store nearly a month ago and hasn't worked since.

Our earliest track sheets were able. to record maybe ten different variables of shopper behavior. Today. we're up to around forty. The form is reinvented for every research project we undertake, but typi- cally it starts with a detailed map depicting the premises we're about to study, whether it's a store, a bank br~nch, a parking lot (for a drive-

_ ~ru project) or just a single section-even just one aisle-of a store. The map shows every doorway and aisle, every display, every shelf and rack and table and counter. Also on the form is space for information about the shopper (sex, race, estimate of age, deSCription of attire) and what he or she does in the store. Using the system of shorthand nota- tion we've developed over the years, a cO':Ilbination of symbols, letters and hash marks, a tracker can record, for instance, that a bald, bearded man in a red sweater and blue jeans entered a department store on a

A Science Is Born 9

Saturday at 11:07 A.M., walked directly to a first-floor display of wallets, . picked up or otherwise touched a total of twelve of them, checked the price tag on four, then chose one, and moved at 11: 16 to a nearby tie rack, stroked seven ties, read the contents tags on all seven, read the price on two, then bought none and went directly to the cashier to pay. Oh, wait, he paused for a moment at a mannequin and examined the price tag on the jacket it wore. We'd mark that down, too, just as we'd note that he (the man, not the mannequin) entered the cashier line at 11:23 and exited the store at 11:30. Depending on the size of the store and the length of the typical shopper's stay, a tracker call study up to fifty shoppers a day. Usually we'll have several trackers at a site, and a single project may involve the simultaneous study of three or four locations. For huge stores like a home improvement center or a mass merchan- diser, we may put ten or twelve trackers on the floor.

By the end of a job, an incredible amount of information has been crammed onto those sheets. They come back t<;> the office, where an experienced clerk spends another day or so typing all the informa- tion, every single notation on every track sheet, into a computerized database. Over the years, we've spent tens of thousands of dollars and

countless frustrating hours with computer programmers, trying to come up with a database that could handle the kind of work we do .. The big problem is that while we crunch the same numbers in the same ways from job to job, each project 'usually requires us to do something a little differently-to collect different kinds of data or to' devise new comparisons of facts we just uncovered. We've hired fancy consultants who spend six months at a crack with us, trying to build us a computer system. They ask us to list everything we want our program to do, but every week we ~dd six new things to the list that negate all their work from the previous month. And of course, our turnaround time has to he swift, so there's no time to change the system completely for each job- we may need to do one new comparison for a project today and then not have to perform that function again for seven months.

In the early '90s, Microsoft Excel came along. Where had it been all my life? It wlis designed as a spreadsheet program, intended for ac- countants to do the relatively simple calculations they require. But

10 WHY WE BUY

Excel's beauty was its open architecture-you could get in there under

the hood and tinker, soup it up, make it purr. It also had a fairly simple

way of writing macros, or lines of code, that allowed you to make the

alterations easily. Today, while we still use Excel, we've moved on to

other programs like Access and SPSS-but for years, Excel made our

work possible. It's as though Microsoft built a very nice bicycle, which

we then turned into a data-busting all-terrain vehicle. When Microsoft

became a client and we showed them what we'd done with Excel, they

were amazed.

When the videotapes come back from the sites, it's someone else's

. job to screen every bit of footage. Depending on the size of the store,

we may have ten cameras running eight hours a day trained on specific

areas-a doorway, for example, or a particular shelf of products. The

video produces even more hard data. If, for example, a client wants us

to determine in part how a particular cash register design affects worker

fatigue, we may use the video and a stopwatch to time how long it takes

for a clerk to ring up a sale at ten A.M. as compared to four P.M.

The list of particulars we're eapable of studying-what we call

the "deliverables"-grows with every new project yve take on. At last

count, we've measured close to a thousand diff~rent aspects of shop-

per-store interaction. As a result of all that, we know quite a few facts

about how human beings behave in stores. We can tell you how many

males who take jeans into the fitting room will buy them compared to

how many females will (65 percent to 25 percent). We can tell you how

many people in an IBM employee cafeteria read the nutritional infor-

mation on a bag of corn chips before buying (18 percent) compared to

those lunching at Subway (2 percent). Or how many browsers actually

buy computers on a Saturday before noon (4 percent) as opposed to

after five P.M. (21 percent). Or how many shoppers in a mall housewares

store use shopping baskets (8 percent), and how many of those who

take baskets actually buy something (75 percent) compared to those

who buy without using baskets (34 percent). And then, of course, we

draw on all we've learned in the past to suggest ways of increasing

the number of shoppers who take baskets, for the science of shopping

is, if it is anything, a highly practical diScipline concerned with using

A Science Is Born 11

research, comparison and analysis to make -stores and products more amenable to shoppers.

Because this science is being invented as we go along, it's a living, breathing field of study-meaning we never quite know what. we'll find until we find it, and even then, we sometimes have to stop to figure out what it is we're seeing. Yes, for a ~ot of work now, after more than thirty years we have a good sense of what we are going to find, but what makes the science of shopping interesting is that things 'change and we still get surprised. I like to think of retail as the dipstick of our evo- lution. As we change as a species, those changes show up both in how we shop and what we shop for. That said, there are constants that relate to what we are biologically, and much of this book is about those con- stants.

For example, we discovered a phenomenon ,that journalists love to report-what's become known as the 'butt-brush" effect-completely as the result of a happy accident. As part of a department store study, we trained a video camera on one of the main ground-floor entrances, and the lens just happened also to take in a rack of neckties positioned ,near the entrance, on a main aisle. While reviewing the tape to study how shoppers negotiated the doorway during busy times, we began to

notice something weird about the tie rack. Shoppers would approach it, stop, and shop until they were bumped once or twice by people heading, into or out of the store. After a few such jostles, most of the shoppers would move out of the way, abandoning their search for neckwear. We watched this over and over until it seemed clear that shoppers-women especially, though it was also true of men, to a lesser extent-don't like beiIig brushed or touched from behind. They'll even move away from merchandise they're interested in to avoid it. When we checked with our client, we learned that sales from that tie rack were lower than they expected from a fixture located on a main thoroughfare. The butt-brush factor, we surmised; was why that rack was an underperformer.

And in fact, when we delivered our findings to the store's president, he jumped up from his chair, grabbed the phone, and ordered someone

12 WHY WE BUY

to move that tie rack to a spot just off the main aisle. A few weeks later, we heard that sales from the rack had gone up quickly and substantially. Since that day we've found countless similar situations in which shop- pers have been spooked by too-close quarters. In every case, a quick adjustment was all that was needed. So the idea of a body bubble gets applied to shopping-and we can push the idea even farther. It~isn't that we hate crowds. A teeming cluster of people can be exhilarating. At Yan- kee Stadium, or even a sale at the local fashion emporium, we show up expecting company, and a lot of it. Sure, we can get claustrophobic and sometimes even scared, but after all, we're the ones who put ourselves there. Where butt-brush kicks in big time is where we get bumped :and we don't expect it ..

Another such "accident" of patient observation and analysis hap- pened during a supermarket study we performed for a dog food manu- facturer. While staking out the pet aisle, we noticed that while adults bought the dog food, the dog treats-liver-flavored biscuits and such- were ~ore often being picked out by children or senior citizens. After giving it some thought, we realized that for the elderly, pets are like chil- dren, creatures to be spoiled with sweets. And while feeding Fido may not be any child's. favorite chore, filling him up with doggie cookies can be lolids of fun. Parents indulged their little ones' pleas for treats here just as they did over in the cookie aisle.

Because no one had ever noticed who exactly was buying pet treats, however, they were typically stocked near the top of the supermarket shelves. As a result, our cameras caught children actually climbing the shelving to reach the treats. We witnessed one elderly woman using a box of aluminum foil to knock down her brand of dog biscuits. Move the treats to where kids and little old ladies can reach them, we advised the client. They did so, and sales ~ent up instantly.

Even the plainest truths can get lostin all the details of planning and stocking a store. A phrase I find myself using over and over with clients is this: The obvious isn't always apparent.

While studying the cosmetics section of a drugstore chain, we watched a woman in her sixties approach a wall rack, study it carefully and then kneel before it so she could find the one item she needed:

A Science Is Born 13

concealer cream, which, due to its lack of glamour, was kept at the very bottom of the display. Similarly, in a department store we watched an overweight man trying to find his size of underwear at a large aisle dis- play-and saw him stooping dangerously low to reach them, down near the floor. In both cases, logic should have dictated that the displays be tailored to the shoppers who use them, not to the designers whGl made them. Move the concealer up, we advised, and put something aimed at younger shoppers down near the' floor. Young shoppers will find their products wherever they're stocked.

In some studies, we synthesize every bit of information we can pos- sibly collect into a comprehensive portrait of a store or a single depart- ment. A major jeans manufacturer wanted to know how its product was sold in department ,stores, so in one weekend we descended on

four sites, two in Massachusetts and two in the Los Angeles area. Each department was similar-the jeans section was a square area that held

, from eight to twelve tabletop displays and some wall shelving. We started by drawing a detailed map of' each, showing the displays and the aisles leading into and out of the sections but also where any signs or other promotional materials were posted. During that weekend we tracked a total of 727 shoppers and observed many more on camera. We paid particular attention to the "doorways," our term for any path leading into or out of an area of a store. Until the client knew which

paths were most popular, it was impossible to make informed decisions about where to stock what or where to place the merchandising materi- als meant to lure shoppers.

By the time our study was completed, we could say what percentage of customers used which paths into each of the sections. Once we knew that, it was clear, for instance, that much of the signage was misplaced- common sense dictated that it be positioned to face the main entrance of the store, when in fact most jeans shoppers came upon the section from a completely different direction. Even the client's big neon logo and a monitor shOwing rock videos were faCing the wrong way if their job was to signal to the greatest number of shoppers. We tracked shop- pers from table to table, seeing where they stopped, what signs they read, whether they noticed the video monitors, and how they handled

14 WHY WE BUY

the merchandise, including if they took anything to the dressing rooms. If they seemed to be showing jeans to a companion, we noted that, too. Our interviewers also questioned some of the shoppers captured on video so that their demographic information and their attitudes and opinions could be correlated with their behaviors-to see, for example, ' whether young shoppers with high school educations who say they depend on brand name when choosing jeans read price tags. After the research is done and the numbers are crunched and analyzed, we see what sense can be made of what we've learned.

For example, if we were to find that a high percentage of male shop- pers b~ys from the first rack of jeans they encounter, and that these shoppers tend to enter the section through the aisle leading from men's accessories rather than from the women's side of the store or from the escalator, then we would advise our client to ask for the display table nearest men's accessories.

Or maybe there's another determining factor-maybe men who are accompanied by females and entering the sectioI?- from the women's de- partment buy more jeans than men who are alone. In that case, the best table would be nearest the women's merchandise. But no one knows for sure until we collect the data.

In other instances, we're hired to study some small retail interaction in great detail. A premium shampoo maker who wanted to know about the decision-making process of women shoppers who buy generic, or store-brand, beauty products commissioned one such project. The client was interested in the "value equation" women bring to each shopping experience-how does the shopper who buys from the generics section at the supermarket in the morning and then from Bloon.ungdale's in the afternoon decide which product she'll buy where? Does she judge that her skin deserves the premium brand but her hair can settle for the generic? Once upon a time, only the budget-conscious bought store brands, but now you find them in everyone's shopping basket. What's the secret?

Let's call her shopper number 24, a thirtysomething woman in yel- low pants and a white sweater, accompanied by a preschool-age girl, who enters the health and beauty aisle of a supermarket at 10:37 A.M.

A Science Is Born 15

on a Wednesday morning. She has a handbasket, not a shopping cart, and has already selected store-brand vitamin C capsules and a large con- tainer of Johnson's baby powder. She is also holding a shopping list and a store circular. She goes directly to the shampoo shelves and picks up a bottle of Pantene brand, reads the front label, then picks up a bottle of the store brand and reads the front label, then reads the price tag On the Pantene, then reads the price on the store brand, and then puts the store brand in her basket and exits the section forty-nine seconds .after she entered it. In that brief encounter, there was lots of data to collect- what she touched, what she read, and in what order-about twenty-five different data points in all. If, in one day, we track a hundred shoppers in that store's health and beauty aisle, it amounts to twenty-five hundred separate data entries. As the woman exits the section, we interview her, asking twenty questions in all. Soeach of the twenty-five data pOints has to be cross-tabulated with each of her twenty answers-a cross-tab chal- lenge, take it from me. Until quite recently no university ever attempted such a study, and so it was left to the world's businesse~its retailers, banks, restaurant chains, manufacturers and designers of displays and packaging-to underwrite the creation of this sCience, which' they did and continue to do by hiring us and sending us out into the field.

I make much of the accidental nature of the science of shopping, and perhaps it's because this all began almost by accident when I was a stu- dent and admirer of one of America's most esteemed social scientists, William H. Whyte, author of such highly influential books as The Or- ganization Man, The Last Landscape, City: RedisCOVering the Center and The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. He was also the founder, in 1974, of the Project for Public Spaces, or PPS, which still exists and .is still a magnifi- cent contribution to the preserv~tion and ongoing good health of the urban landscape.

William H. Whyte, or "Holly," as his friends called him, was, in his active days, a quixotic, beloved figure (he died in 1999). He had the white hair and aristocratic mien of a WASP banker, yet he had fallen in love with the streets of New York City and worked hard to learn how

16 WHY WE BUY

people might best use them. Whyte's greatest contribution wa~ his re- search into how people use public spaces-streets, parks, plazas and so on. Using time-lapse photography, hidde~ trackers and interviews, he ahd his associates would stake out some urban plaza or minipark, say, and study it, minute by minute, over the course of several days. By the time they finished, they could tell you everything about every bench, ledge, path, fountain and shrub, and especially how people interacted with them, using them as places to lunch, sun, socialize, people-watch, nap or just happily and peacefully loiter. Whyte and his colleagues would measure everything-the ideal width of a ledge for sitting; how

. sunlight, shade and wind affect park use; and how a public space's sur- roundings, the office towers or construction sites or schools or neigh-

borhoods, determined the , quality of life there. Whyte, who started his career as an editor at Fortune magazine, was,

essentially, a scientist of the street-the first one, which is amazing when you think of how long streets existed before he came along. His work has ,been used to make public spaces better and more useful to citizens, which in turn made cities better and more useful, too. Whyte's methods were a kind' of lens through which a physical environment could be studied and improved, and my work on behalf of shopping owes a great

deal to his methods. Back in 1977, I was a part-time instructor at City University of New

York, teaching courses in fieldwork techniques for the environmental psychology department. I was also working in an establishment of which I was part owner, the Ear hin, a bar in downtown Manhattan. There, I had a customer who had been hired to design a system of

signage at Lincoln Center, the performing arts complex that's home to the Metropolitan Opera House, Avery Fisher Hall-about a dozen theaters in all. He told me they needed someone to look into the usage and circulation patterns of the underground concourse that connected the buildings to parking garages and the subway. There was a small, makeshift gift shop down there at the time, but Lincoln Center wanted to see if a larger store might be viable there. First, though, they needed to make sure that a store wouldn't create congestion in the pedestrian walkways. With my customer's help, I got the job.

A Science Is Born 17

So I recruited a few of my students to help and we took some cam- eras, staked out our observation spots and went to work counting and mapping. The crowding question was easy enough to answer-we roped off an area exactly the size of the store they wanted to build, then watched and filmed pedestrians streaming through during the. busiest times. We suggested then that with the room available, they should add some benches down there, to make it something of a destination rather than just a corridor. Our client declined to take our advice then, but today the benches· are in place. I also strongly recommended that they dQuble the size of the ladies' room, and they declined to take that ad- vice, too.· Today, thirty years later, the line at the ladies' room still goes out the door during busy times. Shameful.

As I was compiling the data to write the report and looking at the many hours of film I had shot, I realized that from one of the camera positions I could see inside the gift shop, allthe way to the cash register. There, as I watched, two customers lined. up to pay. One looked to be a wealthy woman, probably an opera-goer, who had piled a small tower of boxes on ~e counter. Next to her was a teenage girl whose purchase required just one small brown paper bag. I couldn't see enough to tell exactly what was going on, but I was intrigued.

I visited the shop the next day and talked to the clerk, who told me that the woman was the wife of a Mexican diplomat who had decided to buy some fancy music boxes as gifts to take home with he~. The boxes were expensive, and she was buying about a dozen of them, for a total sale of close to $9,000. She needed to pay quickly, before intermission ended, and she had to arrange to have the boxes delivered to her. There was also the matter of having sales tax waived owing to her diplomatic status. A complicated transaction, to say the least.

But this had to wait while the clerk handled the transaction with the teenage girl, who had arrived at the register first bearing her selection- a ballerina pen.

It was clear even to an academic like me that the cash register pro- cedure could stand a little reorganization and clarification. These two transactions should not be competing for the same clerk's attention. And then the lightbulb clicked on. Why not take the tools of urban

18 WHY WE BUY

anthropology and use them to study how people interact with the retail environment?

Years earlier I had witnessed an argument between the esteemed so- ciologist and author Erving Goffman ~nd Jack Fruin, the chief engineer of the Port AuthOrity of New York and New Jersey, who was at that mo- ment in the midst of a gigantic undertaking, the planning and construc- tion of Newark International Airport. Jack was expressing his emphatic ~ustration with the world of academia; he had attempted to hire some scholar-experts to guide his engineers and architects in their work, but instead of the clear-cut advice he had hoped to receive, he was getting buried under the academics' typical inability to assert any fact, no mat- ter how small, that hadn't been completely proven by research. Goffman held the intellectual high ground in their argument, but at one point I clearly remember thinking, 1'd have a lot more fun workingfor Jack than for Erving. Erving's hiding in his ivory tower. Jack is out there doing stuff.

Not long after the Lincoln Center assignment, I was sitting with some friends at a nightclub in Greenwich Village. One of the guys at our table was a young executive with Epic Records, a division of CBS, and I described to him my bright idea of measuring what happens in stores-the thought that there might be something worth learning by turning scientific tools on shopping. And over the course of a few beers

, my idea must have sounded interesting, because the guy said, "Why don't you send me a proposal?"

Full of ambition the next morning, I rose early, dragged out my manual typewriter and drafted a plan. I sent it over qUickly, then waited. For, oh, about a year. Of course I tried writing again and telephoning during that time, but no pne ever returned my calls. These were the dark ages of the science of shopping, remember.

And then, out of the blue, I heard from a woman who was in charge of market research for CBS Records. She said that they had found my proposal in a dusty file somewhere and were all quite fascinated by it, and was I still interested in studying a record store?

Sure, I said, inwardly rejoicing that 'a major American corpo- ration was actually going to underwrite-to the. tune, I think, of -about $5,OoO-my research into the habits of the modern shopper. I

A Science Is Born 19

immediately called a few of my students, assembled some notebooks and time-lapse cameras, and made my way to a record store in a north-

ern New Jersey mall. Now, nearly decades and close to two million hours of videotape

and much personal observation later, that study seems almost charm- ingly rudimentary. But at the time, it felt as though the discoveries came flying fast and furious.

For instance: In the late '70s, when the study was being done, tradi- tional singleS--45 rpm records-were still big sellers. The store, wisely, displayed the Billboard magazine ch~rt of bestselling singles near the racks of records, as a stimulus to sales. But our film showed that most buyers of 45s were adolescents-and the chart was hung so high on the wall that the kids had to stand on their toes and crane their l(l,ecks to see what exactly was at the top of the chart. We suggested to the manager that the chart be lowered, and a week later he called to say that sales of 45s had gone up by 20 percent. Just like that! Lower the chart! It worked!

We spent a lot of time that weekend watching people in line to pay at what the retail industry calls cash/wraps. Regardless of what store designers and merchandise managers think, in many ways the cash / wrap area is the most important part of any store. If the transactions a~en't crisp, if the organization isn't clear at a glance, shoppers get frus- trated or turned off. Many times they won't even enter a store if the line to pay looks long or chaotic.

At this store, there were several big displays of new releases as soon as you walked in, just a few feet from the cashier. This was fine as long as the store was empty, but if customers were in line, their bodies com- pletely hid the displays. Put up a stanchion and a velvet rope to keep the line off to one side, we suggested, and again, our advice had an instant effect-sales of records from the displays went up immediately.

Doesn't all this sound just the least bit obvious? It does to us, too, especially after we've spent so much time watching and filming and timing and interviewing and so on. Until then, however, these were the kinds of problems that had remained hidden in plain view.

While watching the record store customers, we noticed an odd

20 WHY WE BUY

pattern: The LP section (this was pre-CD, remember) was always more crowded than cassettes, but sales were split evenly between th'e two

formats. Following customers, the reason became clear: Because the LP covers were bigger, it was easier to read the song lists and see the pho- tos, so cassette shoppers would browse in LPs, make up their minds, and then go to the tapes section to find their choices. Our suggestion was to make the aisles wider in LPs so that shoppers wouldn't feel crushed and rushed, a definite sales killer. Also, we thought the store should in- vest in more durable carpet for the sections that got Significantly more traffic.

My final memory from that study 'comes' from a video clip I. still show to audiences: a young man shoplifting classical music tapes. Only after watching him take the tapes over and over on the film did I notice that the bag he slipped them into was from a chain that had no location at that mall. I passed this tidbit on to the client's security executive and told him that they should be watchful whenever such "wrong" bags were spotted in their stores (remember, this was before security tag- ging). I got back a note saying that they had prevented several thousands of dollars in theft using that method of detection.

And thusly, a science was born.

Before the science of shopping existed, there were at least two other

ways to measure what took place in a store. The most common way of viewing a store is to simply examine "the tape" -the information that comes from the cash registers, which tells what was bought, when and how much of it. This is how virtually every retail undertaking, from the largest, most sophisticated multinational chain to the corner newsstand, does it. It's a fine way to see how the store as a whole has performed this quarter, or this year, or on any given day, or even time of day, and is,in the end, the measure of a store's overall health and growth (or decline) that counts. But as a diagnostic tool, or as a way of figuring out what happens in the store and how, it is not very useful. Sales research records your victories; what it does not do is look at where you are lOSing. What hurts is when you get the shopper in the door, down the aisle and in

A Science Is Born 21

front of the product, and for whatever reason, they don't buy. When businesspeople attempt to infer too much from sales data, it can be downright misleading. Here's a good example, from a chain drugstore in a Massachusetts mall. This was the first mall store owned by ~s par- ticular company, and so management was eager to see the results. Based solely on total sales, our client was pleased overall, and in particular with how the aspirin section of the store was performing.

But based on all our many previous studies both of drugstores and of the aspirin category, one crucial figure was on the low side. The prod- uct conversion rate-the percentage of shoppers who bought-was below what we expected. In other words, plenty of customers stopped at the aspirin section and pi,cked up and read the packages, but too few of them actually bought aspirin. And the conversion rate for aspirin is usually high-it's not the kind of product you idly browse; you tend to go to that aisle only when you're in need. So we spent some time spe- cifically watching the aspirin shelves, and we trained a video camera on them, too.

Over the course of three days, a pattern emerged. The aspirin was displayed on a 1l?-ain aisle of the store, on the path to some refrigerated cases of soft drinkS, which tended to draw a great many customers to that part of the store. That might lead one to expect that the aspirin would sell well, but just the opposite happened. The main customers for cold drinks were teenagers, and our observation showed many of them entering and making a beeline for the coolers. In fact, this was a favorite place for the mall's young employees to grab a quick cold soda during breaks.

These young shoppers were supremely uninterested in aspirin. The shoppers, often seniors, who did want aspirin stood a little nervously at the shelves, searching for their usual brand or figuring out which was the better deal while also trying to stay clear of the teenagers tearing down the aisle. In fact, a substantial number of aspirin shoppers became so irritated or thrown off balance by the teenagers that they would prematurely break off their browsing and walk away empty-handed. It was a modified version of the butt-brush effect-the shoppers weren't being jostled exactly, just a little rattled. You could see it plainly on the

22 WHY WE BUY

videotape-some customers were practically cringing and hugging the shelves, not the ideal shopping position. And when we timed shoppers, we found that they were spending less time at the shelves than our expe- rience led us to expect.

This is something that comes up in our work all the time: A store. has more than one constituency, and it must therefore perform several functions, all from the same premises. Sometimes those functions co- exist in perfect harmony, but other times-especially in stores selling di- verse goods, like cold drinks and medicines-those functions clash. We also saw this in a Harley-Davidson dealership, where a roughly three- thousand-square-foot showroom has to make room for well-off male

menopause victims looking to recover their virility by buying bikes, blue-collar gearheads who are there for spare parts, and teenage dream- ers interested in the Harley-logo fashions. All three groups want nothing to do with one another. When a premises' functions clash, a way must be' found to accommodate as many uses as possible. In this drugstore, we advised our client about what we had learned and suggested a coun- terintuitive move-that the aspirin be relocated to someplace off the

. ' main drag. Fewer total customers would come upon jt, we knew, but more aspirin would be sold. When they moved the shelves, sales rose by 20 percent.

We performed research for a large bookstore that had recently put a big table of discounted books just inside the entrance, where every customer would s~e it first thing. And it performed admirably-almost everyone stopped for at least a cursory browse, and the percentage that bought at least one book was high. Which meant that, according to the

cash register tape, the table was a resounding success; . Except that as we tracked shoppers, we found that the number who

would go to the tabie and then travel through the rest of the store was lower thal1 it should have been. In a case like this, every hour on the hour a tracker would hurry through the entire store and note how many shoppers were in each section, including the register area, the cof- fee shop and so on. This is the density check that we perform as part of every store study, and it tells us a great deal: It gives an instant snapshot of the store's population and where people are drawn or not; it suggests

A Science Is Born 23 -

when something about the architecture or the layout may be inhibiting shoppers from visiting certain areas; and it shows how shoppers move (or fail to) through the premises. And in fact, taken section by section, the number of shoppers who were penetrating the rest of the store was uniformly down. Also, our track sheet maps of customer travels began showing a telltale shallow loop-shoppers would enter, hit the bargain table, then maybe visit one or two more displays, but they never strayed far from the front of the store before heading to the cashier. This was no coincidence, needless to say-customers were choosing from the dis- count table, then going direcdy to the register, paying for their bargains and leaving without even brOWSing the bestsellers or any of the other books selling at the normal profit margins. Our shopper jntervie~s turned up an unfortunate side effect, too: Thanks to the prominence of the bargain table, the store was gaining a reputation as a discounter rather than as the place to go for the hot new book. The success of the table was causing the failure of the rest of the store.

So much for what can be learned from the ,register tape. The second means of learning what goes on in a store, employed

by the most famous names in market research (whether political, com- mercial or any other) is simply to ask people questions about what they just saw, or did, or considered doing. That can happen in person, online, on the. phone or in a focus group-it's all about asking people what they think.

Let's take a telephone poll conducted by the Democrats and the Re- publicans, for instance, or just the shopper interviews that take place as you exit a store or a shopping center. After a long list of questions, some basic demographic information is taken (age, education, income, s~x, race and so on). From those two, a big fat binder full of suppositions is assembled: Forty-year-old Caucasian college-educated married mothers of two living in Northeastern suburbs and driving station wagons would prefer Jif even more if it were low-fat, for example. Or men who buy Coke at convenience stores say they would notice their brand less often if it were any color but red. Or one quarter of all college graduates eats pasta once a week. The possibilities for cross-referencing are endless, and there is undoubtedly some marketing wisdom to be gotten from

24 WHY WE BUY

such studies. But they don't really reveal much about what happens in a store, when shoppers and goods finally come together under the same roof. There at:e surveys that do ask customers for information about what they saw and did insi& a store, but the answers are often suspect. Sometimes people just don't remember every little thing they saw or did in a store-they weren't shopping with the thought that they'd have to recall it all later. In a fragrance study we performed, some shoppers interviewed said they had given serious consideration to buying brands that the store didn't carry. In a study of tobacco merchandising in a con- venience store, shoppers. remembered seeing signs for Marlboro even though no such signs were in that store.

If we went into stores only when we needed to buy something, and if once there we bought only what we needed, the economy would,

, collapse-boom. Fortunately, the economic party that started the second half of the

twentieth century has.fostered more shopping than anyone would have predicted, more shopping than has ever. taken place anywhere at any time. You almost have to make an effort to avoid shopping today. Stay out of stores and museums and theme restaurants and you still are face- to-face with Internet shopping twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, along with its low-rent cousin, home shopping on TV. You have to steer clear of your own mailbox, too, if you're going to duck all those catalogs.

As a result, every expert agrees, we are now dangerously over- retailed-too much is for sale, through too many oudets. The economy even at its strongest can't keep up with retailing's growth. Judging from birthrates, we're generating stores a lot faster than we're producing new

shoppers. In 2008, across most of the first world, we are building stores and

malls no longer to serve new customers but to steal someone else's. There is no irony that the cutting edge of retail today is no longer found in North America or.Western Europe. Moscow, Dubai, Shanghai a?d Mumbai are the newest retail hot spots-places where money is

A Science Is Born 25

young, economies are booming and you have a whole lot of pent-up demand.

Still, here in the United States, our focus has been on same-store sales-how can you do more business in the same space or location? That focus on tactics has been another accelerant that has fueled the

growth of the science of shopping. There's another reason that the science of shopping is a force today.

Generations ago, the commercial messages intended for consum- ers' ears came in highly concentr~ted, reliable forms. There were three TV networks, AM radio only, a handful of big-circulation national magazines, and each town's daily papers, which all· adults read. Big brand-name goods were advertised in those media, and the message got through loud, clear and dependably. Today we have hundreds of TV channels, and remote controls and TiVo to allow us to skip all the ads if we choose to. There's PM and satellite radio now, a plethora of magazines catering to each little special interest, a World Wide Web of infinitely expanding sites we can visit for information and entertain- ment, and a shrinking base of daily newspaper readers, all of which means that it is harder than ever to reach consumers and convince them of anything at all.

Simultaneously, we are witnessing the decline of the influence of brand names. A generation or two ago, you chose your brands early in

life and stuck by them loyally until your last shopping Jrip. If you were a Buick man, you bought Buicks. If you were a Marlboro woman, you smoked Marlboros. You chose youx: team-Coke or Pepsi, Kenmore or Whirlpool, Zest or Ivory-and stayed with it. Today, in some ways, every decision is a new one, and nothing can be taken for granted.

What all that means is that fewer buying d~cisions are being in- fluenced outside the premises of the store. And many more of those decisions are being made in the store itself. It means that shoppers are susceptible to impressions and information they acquire inside stores,

rather than relying on brand-name loyalty. or advertising or market- ing to influence what they buy. The level of impulse purchasing is go- ing through the roof-in supermarkets and everywhere else, too. Even big decisions are being made right there on the selling floor.

26 WHY WE BUY

As a result, the most important medium for transmitting messages and closing sales is now the store and the aisle. That building, that place, has become a great big three-dimensional advertisement for itself. Sign- age, shelf position, display space and special fixtures all make it either more or less likely that a shopper will buy a particular item (or any item at all). The science of shopping is meant to tell us how to make use of all those tools: how to design signs that shoppers will actually read and how to make sure each message is in the appropriate place. How to fashion displays that shoppers can examine comfortably and easily. How to ensure that shoppers can reach, and want to reach, every part of a store. It's a very long list-enough to fill a book, in my opinion.

Finally, our studies prove that in general, the longer a shopper re- mains in a store, the more he or she will buy. And the amount of time a shopper spends in a store.depends on how comfortable and enjoyable the experience is. Just as Holly Whyte's labors improved urban parks and plazas, the science of shopping creates better retail environments- ultimately, I would argue we're providing a form of consumer advocacy that benefits our clients as well.

When I started work 01\ this book in 1997, Envfrosell was a pioneer in the world of stores and commercial. environments. Ten years later, the term "science of shopping" is part of the vocabulary of any merchant or marketer. And a lot of firms now claim to do what we do. After all, observation is a seminal form of how human beings learn, so why not start an observation business? To every company that has copied what we do, I welcome you to the community of people dedicated to making our lives work better. At the same time, there are other interlopers who have truly muddied the waters.

The first? Technology companies that have streamlined. data collec- tion. They have software packages that can hook up to a facility's sur- veillance cameras and count bodies, one after another. How relevant is it to measure the number of people passing a sign or a display? Does that mean they've looked, read or shopped? As I sit at my desk on the corner of Twenti'eth Street and Broadway in New York City, I have a stream of

A Science Is Born 27

technology companies coming in to showcase their latest cutting-edge products. How many times have I heard the expression "This is going to transform retail"? Most of it is what I call techriology in search of an ap- plic;ation. It can do this and gather this piece of information, and there's bound to be someone out there willing to pay for it.

Or I·get a call from someone begging me for an hour and I agree to meet them, but before we do there arrives a seventeen-page nondisclo- sure agreement, or NDA. I have to explain that if someone hires me I'm happy to sign documents left and right, but to call me out of the blue and expect me to review a seventeen-page legal document borders on the obnoxious. Over the years I've come up with a good plan. I'll meet for an hour with anyone who wants to show me something and I'll give that person my honestresponse-if he, she or the company gives a $750 donation to the charity of my choice. I've raised tens of thousands of dollars for halfway houses for homeless women in New York.

Some of the stuff I get is outright silly, like a software package de- signed to track tank movements from spy satellites. Put enough cameras with wide-angle lenses into your ceiling and voihl!-instant science of shopping. Quite a few of these companies are backed by serious venture capital money and propelled by slick presentations, expensive Las Vegas dinners at the appropriate conventions and lots and lots of promises. The venture capital firms see them not as research or consulting firms but as software ventures. Once in place, the output is automated; you sign a two-year contract that promises you weekly reports. The only problem is that two months later, you look up from yet another weekly report and ask, what in the world do we do with this? We have a number of clients who defected from us and bought a fancy software package only to return to us two years later. We were happy to have them back.

The other objection I have is with what we around the office call En- vir6sell Lite, where untrained and inexperienced people are sent into the field to do the same work we do: observe what is seen, what is touched, what is read. Simple as it sounds, these terms have to be defined care- fully or what you get out the other side of the process is gobbledygook. We now have a number of competitors who sell a lower-priced version of what we do. You get what you pay for.

TWO

What Retailers and Marketers Don't Know

·1 t might be useful right about now to pause and look at the sd- ence of shopping from the perspective not of the scientist but of the practitioner-that is, the retailer and marketer. He or she is certainly part of the equation we're studying, the provider of product services and shopping experiences, as it were. The retailer is also the one who's expected to absorb all our lessons and then apply the principles of what we've learned. The marketer needs to understand how his or her prod- uct or category of goods is shopped and bought. And since it's his or her own store we study, it's fair to ask: How much doesn't the retailer' already know?

Well, more than you might think. For example, it's a testament to the until-recently uncharted state of the untamed retail environment that an extremely intelligent and able man, a senior executive in a mul- tibillion-dollar chain, could be so very wrong when asked this simple

question: , How many of the people who walk into your stores buy something? You'd know that, wouldn't you, if you were he? You'd think so, and

28

What Retailers and Marketers Don't Know 29

trust me, this fellow is no slouch in the knowing department. He knows quite a bit that goes on in his chain's thousands of stores, and he Jearns

more on a daily basis-genuinely important things like total tickets (the number of transactions and their dollar value), and average sale amO\ll1t,

and sales in any given store compared to sales on the same day the year before, and sales within the various regions, and profitability by item

and category and store and maybe even phase of the moon.

He knows all that. When I asked how many of the people who walk into his stores buy

something, his answer was: all of them, pretty damn near. And when I say it was his answer, I mean it was also the answer of the huge, PC-net-

worked, data-chewing, number-crunching, cipher-loving organization at his command. Everybody there agreed: What we call the conversion

rate-the percentage of shoppers who become buyers-was around 100 percent. After all, this corporation reasoned, their outlets were destina- tion stores, so people didn't go there unless they had some very specific

purchase in mind. Hence, they believed, the only time shoppers didn't buy was when their selection was out of stock.

In fact, the very concept of conversion rate, implying as it does that

shoppers need to be somehow transfor~ed:-" converted" -into buyers, was alien to this man and this corporation (as it still is to many other successful companies and executives).

I was asking the question because we had just performed a large-

scale study of this chain's s.tores~ And I knew the conversion rate, based on our having spent hundreds of hours counting, among other things, the number of shoppers who entered and the number who made pur-

chases. It was a very good conversion rate for stores of this kind. But it was about ,half of what this man thought it was. To be precise, 48 per-

cent of shoppers bought something. The man, because he believes in the value of information, was taken

aback but eager to hear more. Some in his organization, though, were

incredulous, outraged, insulted: and certain that we had made a terrible miscalculation. So they performed their own homegrown version of our study, standing at the door of a store or two, counting the number

of people who went in and the number who emerged holding bags.

30 WHY WE BUY

Their result was identical to ours. Which, in the end, was very posi- tive news for them. It meant that a good company could change some very specific things and become even better. If you talk to the executive, he'll say that our study brought about "a fundamental change in so~e . of the long-held beliefs and opinions of this company." At any rate, they've begun to do some things differently in store layout, display, mer- chandising and staffing, and I have no doubt ~at they'll improve their conversion rate and make more money as a result.

Our findings were also important to that companis big picture. We showed that meaningful growth-which Wall Street demands and everybody else is pretty fond of, too-can be stimulated at the store level, without having to expand the empire, an expensive strategy that always runs out of gas sooner or later. In 2007, same-store sales are the bellwether for a chain's good health.

The marketer was equally in the dark through the end of the twen- tieth century. Until the past decade, there was sales data or the com-

, pilation of register tapes. Today, however, almost all major consumer product companies have shopper- and consumer-insight groups. They often fiercely debate the difference between what happens to people in the store (shoppers) and what happens once they get their products

home (consumers). All in all, insight groups have been a positive change. Yet for the marketers sitting in their suburban campuses, there are often some pretty striking disconnects. In 2008, it is easier to collect data than to figure out what it means, much less map out what you can or should do about it. Since the science of shopping was invented, there are now a lot of companies talking about the scale of their databases-we tracked a million shoppers with security cameras and so on-yet, in the end, what does it mean? To me, ten years after I wrote the first edition of this book, the rightful evolution of the science of shopping is for a corpora- tion to look at what they do with this information and, based on what- ever measure they use, ask themselves: Did it make or save us money?

Let's go back t() the basics. Conversion rates vary wildly depending on what kind of store or product we're talking ;tbout. In some sections of the supermarket, the conversion rate probably is around 100 percent (I'm thinking of 'dairy or toilet paper here). In an art gallery or high-end

What Retailers and Marketers Don't Know 31

jewelry store full of big-ticket items, maybe one shopper in a hundred will buy something, and that's plenty. Whatever's being sold, though, I think. it's impossible to dispute that conversion rate is a critically impor- tant measure of performance. Marketing, advertising, promotion and location can bring shoppers in, but then it's the job of the merchandise, the employees and the store itself to turn them into buyers. Conversion rate measures what you make of what you have-it shows how well (or how poorly) the entire enterprise is functioning where it counts most: in the store. Conversion rate is to retail what batting average is to base- ball-without knowing it, you can say that somebody had a hundred hits last season, but you don't know whether he had three hundred at- b~ts or a thousand. Without conversion rate, you don't know if you're Mickey Mande or Mickey Mouse.

Yet conversion in its Simplest form has its limits. In the past ten years a number of companies have rigged up electronic counters on the doorways of stores, then hooked them up to the register. Voila-instant ongoing conversion rates. Yet the real story is often hiding in the details. What's the difference between men and women? What happens when you add a kid to the process, or an African- or Latino-American? That counter at the door counts bodies, and that's all it counts, never mind the fact that it's unlikely a family of four Wili walk out of a store lugging four big-screen TVs, one per person. Yes, some of the more upscale

ones can calculate body mass and get some gauge on people's gender, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it. We get a lot of calls from companies that installed counting systems, and three months into the daily stream of data, they're still wondering how they can turn that information into an ongoing, proactive, workable tool. For store managers it can be frustrating when the home office fires off numbers, and they respond, "Well, of course we have lower conversion numbers, because we get more casual, time-killing people in the door; as you might notice, we're located neXt to a kitchenware store and thus attract an entire army of exiled male spouses."

Still, a great many businesspeople don't know from conversion rate. It's not one of the ways of measuring a busin~ss that business schools emphasize. It's not about profit margins or return on investment or

32 WHY WE BU-Y

money supply or any of that. It's all about what happens within the four' walls of the store.

I can think of other underutilized ways to measure what happens inside a store. Once I asked a major cosmetics executive how much time

women actually spent shopping for makeup per store visit. "Oh, abo¥t ten minutes," he said.

"Hmm," I replied, knowing from the study we had just completed for hiin that the average shopper spent two minutes in the cosmetics section. The average shopper who bought something spent only thirty seconds more. Putting it into broader context, the average supermarket· visit is about twenty-five minutes, including checkout. The average time

spent in a hypermarket, or multidepartment store-whether a'Wal-Mart

Supercenter in the U.S., a European Carrefour, or a Pick n Pay in Cape Town, South Africa-is about thirty minutes. That's stopwatch time.

But if you ask someone how long he or she spent in a store, that person will often double that number. In any commercial setting, time comes in three forms. There's real time, there's perceived time and then there's

a combination of the two.

Now, the amount of minutes a shopper spends in a store (assuming .. he or she is shopping, not waiting in a line) is again an importantfactor

in determining how much she or he will buy. Over and over again, our

studies have shown a direct relationship between these numbers. If the customer is walking through the entire store (or most of it, at least) and

is considering lots of merchandise (meaning he or she is actually look- ing and touching and thinking), a fair amount of time is required. In an electronics store we studied, nonbuyers spent five minutes and six sec-

onds in the store, compared to nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds

for buyers. In a toy store, buyers spent over seventeen minutes, com- pared to ten for nonbuyers. In some stores buyers spend three or four

times as much time as nonbuyers. A great many factors contribute, one

way or the other, to the length of a shopping trip, and studying them is most of what we do. The majority of the advice we give to retailers in-

volves ways of getting shoppers to shop longer. But you've got to know how long people spend shopping your store or your product before you can know how to increase it.

What Retailers and Marketers Don't Know 33

The flip side of that measure is what we call the confusion index, or the number of people walking around stores completely at sea. Re-

member that time is relative, so if the ten minutes you spend at a Target or Wal-Mart is spent walking in circles, iell feel like you've been in there

, for a half hour. And in the end, while you may stumblt: on something

good, if you can't find what you came in for, what's the point? One of

the major victories we have won in the past ten years has been with of-

fice product superstores. In 1997, whenever Staples, OfficeMax or Office Depot opened a new location, they used a warehouse format. Shelving

'ran twelve to fifteen feet in the air-making it a challenge, to say the

least, for customers who didn't shop the store every week to find stuff. In many aisles, a third of the people there weren't shopping for anything in that aisle. They were brOWSing, or killing time, or, far more often,

they were utterly clueless as to where the computer paper was stacked.

All too many shoppers found what was on their list and left. Staples was the first' superstore to make changes based on our suggestions. They developed what we call an "arena concept," where the aisles in the

middle of the store are low and get gradually higher as customers reach the perimeter. The change, I have to say, is pretty remarkable. You walk

in ... and even in a large store you see everything. The full monty. Al-

most no one walks down a particular aisle who doesn't want to be there.

OfficeMax and Office Depot have come up with their own versions of

an arena. In some cases, same-store sales are up 20 percent or higher. Do the new stores hold people longer? You bet, and the time customers spend there is considerably happier.

Here's another good way to judge a store: by its interception rate, meaning the percentage of customers who have some contact with 'an

employee: This is especially crucial today, !when many businesses are

cutting overhead by using fewer workers, fewer full-timers and more' minimum-wagers. All our research shows this direct relationship: The

more shopper-employee contacts that take place, the greater the aver-

age sale. Talking with an employee has a way of drawing a customer in closer. .

We studied a large clothing chain where the interception rate was 25 percent, meaning that three quarters of all shoppers never spoke a word

34 WHY WE B'UY

to a salesperson. That rate was dangerously low-it meant that in all probability customers were becoming frustrated, wandering the stores

lost or confused or just in need of information" trying (and trying) to find a clerk with an answer. It also meant that employe~s couldn't have been spending much time actively selling anything. They were stocking

the shelves and ringing up transactions and not finding time to do much

in between. This was practically a guarantee that the store was under- performing. It was also a telling clue as to why.

Across the world we, as a species, like to be recognized, but we also

value our privacy. One of our clients has a rule that if an employee gets within six feet of a customer, that employee has to say hello. I don't like

the rule because it takes the judgment out of the hands of the person

working the floor-:-but I do like the idea behind it.

Here's another measure, a real simple one: waiting time. This, as we

discuss elsewhere, is the single most important factor in cl,lstomer sat- isfaction. But few retailers realize that when shoppers are made to wait too long in line (or anywhere else), their impression of overall service plunges. Busy executives hate to wait for anything, but some don't real-

ize that normal people feel the same way. One housewares chain's vice president was startled when we showed him video in which a woman

who had just spent twenty-two minutes shopping in his store joined

a very long checkout line, stood there until it dawned on her that she was in cashier hell, and abandoned her full cart and exited the place. We weren't surprised-we see this happen all the time. We once did a job

for a bank that was about to institute a policy where customers made to wait five minutes or more would receive $5. After studying the teller

lines over the course of two days, we informed the client that this policy

would cost them about triple what they had set aside. They dropped the plan and went to work on shortening the wait ..

I

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

What Retailers and Marketers Don't Know 35

many tables for two and not enough tables for four, which caused head- aches 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 oHts floor space to counter seat- ing. 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 wantedto 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 inJapanese 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 as- sortment of suntan lotion was on prominent display-in October.

I I

Walk Like an Egyptian: The Mechanics of Shopping

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 o~ 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

39

40 WHY WE BUY

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 environ-

ments 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 en-

vironmental 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 hundrt;d 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 theworld, 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 expe-

rience. 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 physiol<;>gical and anatomical factors come into play simulta- neously, forming a complex matrix of behaviors that must be under-

stood if any environment is to adapt itself successfully to our animal

selves.

The overarching lesson t~at we've learned from the science of shop-

ping is this: Atnenability 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 chap-

ters that follow; we'll see how the most elemental issues-the holding

Walk Like an Egyptian 41

capacity of the human hand, the limits to what a being in motion can read, even the physical needs of the nonshopper-matter in determin- ing the shopping experience.

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

THREE

The Twilight Zone

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, exacdy, because of how the sunlight glares off

the glass. Or because it's dark out, and the lighting is too low. Most re- tailers don't change the lighting depending on whether it's day or night,

42

The Twilight Zone 43

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 makin~ 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. Mean- while, 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 a:r:e 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 exacdy 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, depend- ing 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

44 WHY WE BUY

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 riever

pick them up. Move them ten feet in and the fliers and baskets will dis-

appear. 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, ate 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

The Twilight Zone 45

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 hav- ing the entrance provide more of a thres~old 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 merchanCijsers 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 decompres- sion zone comes courtesy of a big, sophisticated company. In the c:!arly '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 ~e 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 en- . trance 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 lookmg for a door! And once they

foU?d 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 neve'r had a chance.

Another bad idea for the decompression zone was invented at an athletic goods chain where management de~reed 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·

46 WHY WE BUY

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 Estee 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 de- signed for Kmart by a division of IBM. It had a touch screen and a key- board, 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 litde glitch: .Few shoppers used the fixtures. The problem was that no one ad- mits, 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 shpplifting is to make sure staffers ac- knowledge the presence of every shopper witha 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.

The Twilight Zone 47

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 col- lege next Tuesday, the sweater of fall coming or the chilly weather in Maine, where you're planning a getaway weekend-and 10 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 Fllene'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 shop- pers 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 elabo- rate use of parking lots even in the worst weather, barbecuing and eat- ing 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

48 WHY WE BUY

merchandise out into the parking lot during summer; I visited one ata 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 situa-

tion in America, the fact that so much of the country has been turneCi 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 mc;>vie on the roof of one of their city's parking

garages. Also inJohannesburg, 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 com- puter 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, thou~, 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.

The Twilight Zone 49

Cosmetics and beauty product firms don't usually want to occupy the first counter inside the entrance of a department store's. makeup bazaar-they know that women, when reinventing themselves before a mirror, prefer a little privacy. That's not the only reason to wish for a little

peace and quiet. If you were one of the two major players in the home hair coloring market, you'd want the best position possible in drugstores. Now, young women tend to buy hair color as a fashion statement~

they've decided to go red for prom or they've been dreaming of that little extra glamour that being a platinum blonde creates. Older women, how- ever, buy it as a staple-they've been using a particular color for fifteen years now, and more gray is coming in every day, so it becomes as regular a purchase as soap. As a result of that difference, older shoppers just find their color, grab it and go, while younger ones need to study the rack and the packaging awhile before they buy. In one stl,ldy we performed for a shampoo maker, we found that older women shop for one third fewer products than their younger counterparts, 2.2 to 3.3. And so in a store where younger shoppers predOminate, hair color will do best away from the bustle and the crowding, which usually means away from the front of the store. If most shoppers are older women, however, closer to the entrance is better for hair color-these shoppers won't be browsing for long anyway.

Finally, there's a famous (around Our offices) story about a very elaborate and costly supermarket display for chips and pretzels-a hand- some fixture featuring the cartoon character Chester Cheetah, who, aided by a motion-detector device, would say,· "If you're looking to feed your face, you're in the right place," every time a shopper walked past. Frito-Lay, the fixture's owner, paid a great deal of money to have the dis- plays stationed up front in supermarkets. They were effective-so much so that the greetings ran constantly, which soon maddened the cashiers who had to listen to .the drawling voice for eight hours straight. Before long, at least one market's employees solved the problem neatly-they

disconnected Chester, rende~g him instantly agreeable but forever mute.

FOUR

You Need Hands

I t's a chilly day and the shopper is a woman, What does that tell us) It says that at the very least she's carrying a handbag, and that she's

wearing a coat, which she'll probably want to remove once she's inside

the store, meaning she'll have to carry that, too. God gave her two good , . hands. But she's shopping with one.

If she selects something, the free hand carries it. Now she's down to

no hands. Maybe, if it's small and light, she can tuck the purchase under one arm. Perhaps she'll sling the handbag over a shoulder or forearm.

Then she'll have ... let's call i~ a hand and a quarter. If she picks one

more thing, though, she'll run out of hands. Only an extremely moti-

vated buyer will pers~vere. Human anatomy has just declared this shop- ping spree over.

This is. a classic moment in the science of shopping. The physical

fact (most shoppers have two hands) is fairly well known. But the im-

plications of that fact go unimagined, undetected, unconsidered, unac-

commodated, unacknowledged. Ignored.

The hand-allotment issue came up early in the science of shopping.

50

You Need Hands 51

It was the late '70s, and I got a chance to pitch what I do to' Eastern Newsstand, the largest operator of newsstands in North America. Boy-talk about a tough business. Long hours, early morning deliveries, plus a complicated system of returning all the papers and magazines that don't sell. My girlfriend at the time knew the wife of the boss, and I got my loafer inside the door as a cocktail-~arty favor, if memory serves. They treated me okay, but I remember ~ey started off pretty skeptical, and who can blame them?

I did the work as a freebie. Though I wasn't paid, the experience taught me plenty, and it also set me up with the Newspaper Association of America, or NAA, with whom I've had a rewarding relationship for

more than a decade. The site they assigned me was a newsstand at that great crossroads

of humanity, Grand Central Station in Nc:;~ York City. We pointed our cameras at the stand and watched it during the busiest times, the morn- ing and evening rush hours.

The success of the business depended on one crucial task-the newsstand's ability to process large numbers of transactions during the periods when everybody is in a hurry, either rushing from train to job in the morning or from job to train at night. Commuters on the run glance over at the newsstand to see how crowded it is. If it looks as though they can breeze in, buy a paper or magazine or cigarettes or gum and then be on their way, they'll stop. If i.t looks swamped with customers waiting to pay and nervously ~hecking their watches, they'll keep going. They'll say to themselves, "Too much of a hassle, I'll miss my train, it'll be faster to get it elsewhere."

The other related fact of newsstand life we noticed was that every customer had one hand already occupied, either with a briefcase or

a tote bag or a purse or a lunch. Almost no one goes to work empty- handed nowadays. When you think about it, it's a rare moment in the modern American's life when both hands are completely free. Yes, we

have backpacks and messenger bags, but those simply allow us to turn ourselves even more into pack animals. Add to the mix a mobile phone, a coffee cup or the occasional ice cream cone, and in most commercial settings, at least half the people you see are moving with only one hand

52 WHY WE BUY

free. I might even venture to say that finding yourself with both hands free is a little disconcerting, as we immediately think we've left some- thing behind.

The second (and kind of seminal) observation we made was pain- fully simple: Since 90 percent of us are right-handed, we use our left hand for carrying stuff, or our left shoulder for a shoulder bag-which frees up our right hand for grabbing. Pause for a minute. Let's .assume you're, reading this book while sitting in an airport waiting to board a plane. As you stare at the concourse, take a quick poll of right- versus left-handed luggage or briefcase carriers. It should be about six to one. The reasons why we might carry a bag in our right hand may be based on weight, size or some other environmental factor. Eliminate those, and the ratio might be even bigger. So whether you're selling news- papers, trying to get someone to pick up a brochure or designing the check-in de~k at an airport or rental car location, a right-handed bias has significant implications (apologies to all you southpaws out there).

The final factor in our study was the stand itself, which was oftypi- cal design-a low shelf where the day's newspapers went, above which were racks for magazines, above which were shelves holding candy and chewing gum and mints, and inside the circular structure, above it all,

the cashiers. Thanks to the videotape, we could break each transaction down

into its smallest components. Here's what we saw: Carrying your brief- case, you'd approach the stand, bend and pick up, say, .a newspaper. Then you'd straighten up and brandish the paper so the clerk could see your choice. At that point you'd either put your briefcase on the floor or you'd put the paper under your briefcase arm, and, with your free hand, you'd hold out the money. (If you were a last-minute type, you'd have to reach into your pocket, find the money, and hand it over.) You would then stand tilting slightly toward the clerk, waiting with free hand outstretched for your change. The change goes into the pocket and you pick up your briefcase-or.the paper goes from the briefcase armpit.to the free han,d-and then you turn and depart, squeezing through the rest of the throng trying to buy something.

The stand's designer obviously believed that the best possible

You Need Ha~ds 53

structure was the one that displayed the most merchandise. Maybe the stand's owner believed that, too. But from the cust,omer's point of view, the design was all wrong. There should have been a shelf at about elbow height-someplace where customers could rest their briefcases or purses or purchases while digging out their money and wai~g for change. A counter, in other words.

Instead, the only shelf was at about shin height, which displayed newspapers just fine but turned each transaction into an ayvkward ballet starring a tilted one-handed commuter. As a result, the typical purchase involved more steps than were needed and so required more time to complete-even split seconds add up-which in turn limited the num- ber of transactions possible during rush hour. Which cal'lsed congestion, scared away customers, and ultimat,ely cost the newsstand sales. A bet- ter design-one that took human anatomy into consideration-might have displayed less merchandise but accommodated more custOJl1ers.

Almost thirty years ago, when I presented that study to a bored audience of newsstand executives, I got back the blankest of stares. Sometimes I wonder today whether if I'd taken it several steps further and; done a calculation on lost revenue, or did .a simple sketch and proposed a test, I would have gotten any more traction. In retrospect, .one of th6 most important things to learn is this: How you present

I your ideas and information is just as-or more-important as the ideas themselves. Our present-day maps, charts, diagrams and Photoshopped pictures, along with video clips, help frame what we do and what we. think our clients can do with this information. I believe passionately in edutaiflment-whether in front of a business audience, a classroom of students or a crowd of parishioners at church. Laughter and knowledge combined make up one powerful cocktail, and if you can mix in some pictures and images, all the better.

We've done studies on fast-food restaurant drive-thrus and worked out the same. equation. The speed of transactions is especially.impor- tant at drive-thrus because the line of cars is so much more apparent to potential customers than the line inside the restaurant. Particularly iil North America, where the steering wheel is on the left, we use our left

hand to grab our burger and fries and pay at the p~yment and pickup

54 WHY WE BUY

window. A ten-second reduction in average transaction time during a busy lunch rush contributes almost immediately to the bottom line.

That woman I began this chapter by describing could have been shopping at a big discount drugstore like Walgreens. It was during a study we did for one such chain that we thought of one simple but very effective solution to the hand shortage.

The eureka moment came on a sultry August night in my office as I listened to the Yankees on the radio and watched videotape of people shopping in- the drugstore. I was viewing footage from the camera we had trained on the checkout line, witnessing a shopper trying to juggle several small botdes and boxes without dropping any. That's when it dawned on me: The poor guy needed a basket.

Why hadn't he taken one? The store had plenty of them, placed_ right inside the door. Maybe people don't associate drugstores with shopping baskets. Perhaps they come in thinking they need just one or two items and only later do they realize they should pick up a few more things. The biggest culprit, of course, was the c:lecompression zone~ the baskets were so close to the entrance that incoming shoppers blew right by without even seeing them down there. I immediately began to scan all three days' worth o~ checkout line video and saw that fewer than 10 percent of customers used baskets, meaning there were quite a few amateur jugglers shopping at the store. And I thought, If someone gave these people baskets, they'd probably buy more things! They wouldn't buy fewer items, that's certain. But here we were, allowing the arm and hand capacity of human beings to determine, ultimately, how much money they spent.

We suggested that all drugstore employees be trained to offer baskets to any customer seen holding three or more items. My drugstore client gave it a shot. And because people tend to be gracious when someone tries to help, shoppers almost unanimously accepted the baskets. And as basket use rose instandy, so did sales, just like that.

We've made a direct link over the years between the percentage of shoppers using a basket or a cart and the size of the average transaction. Want people to spend more money? Make sure more of them are using a shopping aid of some kind. For a while the merchant community got

You Need Hands 55

the message but didn't quite grasp the subtext. What happened is the carts got bigger. From Wal-Mart and Target to .Carrefourand Auchan in Europe, grocery carts swelled in size. In 2006, we noted that all across the world, whether in supermarkets, hypermarkets or mass merchant

stores, the number of I?eople using carts and baskets declined. ''I'm just running in for a few things," people told themselves. Not taking a cart or a basket became a way for the customer to define his or her mis- sion. And if customers were just running in for a few things, they didn't want to drive a Mack truck (read: large cart) up and down the aisles of the store. The problem was that shoppers picked up a few things, then found themselves face-to-face with the wine aisle, and look! there was their favorite pinot grigio on sale, two for one, and . . . now what do they do?

Our answer? Give customers a shopping aid strategy right at the' door, when they first come in. Ca~t or basket? Then place other shop- ping baskets at strategic locations throughout the store. If no one bites, try another location. (We also recommend getting away from those Little Red Riding Hood plastic baskets. A great basket is one that a customer wants to either buy or steal. In this case, neither ap- plies. Plastic baskets are clumsy and not very attractive, and for guys who don't see themselves making their way to Grandmother's house, they're almost an affront to masculinity. Plain and simple, we just need a better basket.) .

.. ' Quite a few malls and stores have added carts with definite kiddie clout. You get the basket on top, while your junior Dale Earnhardt gets to sit in a model racing car below.

Earlier this year I was reviewing a new prototype Spar store in a train station in Milan, Italy. Spar is a European convenience store chain, like 7-Eleven in the U.S. You find them throughout Europe and in many emerging markets that were once European colonies. I was there with the president of Spar Italy. It was a good store. All across Europe, food- shopping in commuter train stations has taken a massive turn for the better. While the food offerings at Grand Central Station in New York are impressive and very high-end, and the small farmers' markets that

have attached themselves to the BART stations in the East Bay of greater

56 WHY WE BUY

San Francisco are a step in the right direction, the food offerings at the Gare du Nord in Paris, Helsinki's Central Railway Station in Finland and

almost any train station inJ~pan put their North American c.ounterparts to shame. They're.good, affordable and generally fast. In a train station, however-unlike: an airport, where we shop because we're trapped- speed is critical. As a customer, your train is coming any minute, and you need to get in and out. But from the merchants' standpoint, what's important is to. build the ticket or transaction. Thus, anyone shopping without a shopping bag can only buy so much.

The president and I spent about an hour walking through the Milan Spar. As I slly, I liked the place a iot. It had great vegetables, a juicing operation and a small bakery. Problem was, all of the baskets were clus- tered by the front door: He asked me what the store could do to increase performance. "Watch me," I said. I grabbed three baskets and moved through the store. Each time I found someone with their arms full, I of- fered them a basket along with a nice smile. No one turned me doWn.

There are moments in this business when you see the lightbulb flick on in people's minds. You Can kick around simple ideas all you want, but watching one happen in real time brings it all home. I'd seen the presi- dent smile over the course of the hour we'd spent together. But at that

moment, for the first time I saw him grin. As the science of shopping evolves, my number-one worry is that as

we fall further in love with technology-with that sensor on the shop- ping card, with the software package that hooks up to a store's closed- circuit cameras-merchants get duped into believing that sitting behind a desk staring into a computer screen is an acceptable replacement to getting out on the floor and taking a good look.

In a very successful bookstore near my office, a pile of shopping bas- kets sits in the usual erroneous place-in a corner just inside the door. Judging by where the baskets are kept, you'd think that retailers think that shoppers enter bookstores saying to themselves, "Well, today I plan on buying four books, a box of arty greeting cards and a magazine, and so first thing I will take a basket to hold all my purchases." But common sense tells us that people don't work that way-more likely somebody walks in thinking about one book, finds it, then stumbles over another

You Need Hands 57

that looks worthwhile. In such moments the very heart of retailing lies. For many stores, add-on and impulse sales mean the difference between

black. ink. and red. 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 theri, 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 restock- ing a pile of baskets through the day, it's probably in a good place.

The baskets themselves also need to be rethought. This booksto!e

uses shallow, hard plastic ones with hinged steel handles, the same as su- permarkets and convenience stores offer. They're perfect if you're buy- ing 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 us~ of baskets I've seen yet is at Old Navy on Seven-

teenth Stre.et in Manhattan. While the Old Navy chait.l has had its ups and downs, whoever manages this particular store does a great job.

58 WHY WE BUY

I take visiting retailers there-it's one of the liveliest, mo~t energetic shopping experiences in the city. As soon as you step inside there's a gre-

garious, 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

merchandi~ing wizard decided to place in front of it an even larger dis-

play 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. Whe~ we studied its stores, the dinnerware maker and retailer Pfaltz-

graff was already providing baskets as well as shopping carts to its cus- tomers. 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 acknowJedged. 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 Vin~on, 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.

You Need Hands 59

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 varid~s SeaWorlds across America. In the parks where we worked, the company had a sys-

. tern 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? Custom- ers 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 brows- ing 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 \Vant to lug their purchases a];ound 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 prc:>blem 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 Blooming-

60 WHY WE BUY

dale'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 custom-

ers, complete wirh attended restrooms, ATMs, a cafe, 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 bigg~r 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 super- market I visited. Like just about every retailer in America today, this

market had decided to Pt;lt in a coffee bar where shoppers could sit and dririk if they wished. This wasn't the first coffee shop I'd seen in a su-

permarket, 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 cof- fee, I'll bet.

'FIVE

How to Read a Sign

Well," he says to me, "what do you tIllnkl" And with that, the marketing executive unveils the sign that's about

to go into five hundred or sostor'es,

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 pap'er, which

has been exquisitely matted by professionals. There's a kind of hush all

over the room. "Gee," 1 answer, "I don't know what 1 think,"

Worried glances an' 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 1 try to explain. ,

1 start by saying that unless every customer is going to come upon

the sign, or more recendy a flat-screen television display, under the exact

same' conditions that 1 first saw it, it's impossible for me to know if it's

61

62 WHY WE BUY

the great~st 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, par- tially 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 abso- lute 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, be- hind 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 fotir 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

How to Read a Sign 63

communication". interacts with drculation 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

wa~ch it. There are companies that will measure sign readability by putting

subjects into high-tech helmets that measure the smallest eyeball move- ments 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 commerdal. 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 every-

thing'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 mer- chandise can do for them and when and how it c.an do it.

A great big three-dimensional walk-in TV commerdal. And just as if scripting and directing a TV commerdal, the job is to

figure out what to say and when and how to s~y 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

64 WHY WE BUY

them and they'll give up. If you confuse them, they'll ignore the mes- sage 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 dispos- able income to spend and open minds, and they're giving in to their impulses. The impact of brand"name marketing and traditional adver- tising 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 cof- fee shop and the only thing to read wa~ the menu and the New York Post. Now you go into even the smallest Starbucks and there are eleven dis- tinct 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 collec- tion 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 starid 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 op- portunity to tell them something about replacement windshield wipers. Over here by the registers they will be standing still for a minute and.

How to Read a Sign 65

a half, a perfect window for a lpnger message. And then they'll be on thei~ 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 cus- tomers 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 place~ 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 th~ 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: escala- tors. That struck me as I ascended from the tracks on the Underground in London. There you spend a lot of time risfug 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 vicini.ty 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 arid 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.

66 WHY WE BUY

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 shop- \:

per's line of vision and intercept her gaze. .

Sometimes, though, you've got to get creative with message place-

ment. Lawn mower manuf~cturing 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 playedbefore captive audiences grateful for even the slightest distrac-

tion. 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 appre- . ciate the possibilities for communication in waiting areas, wh~re 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.

How to Read a Sign 67

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 tha~ 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 de-

signer; "Three or four words, I guess," he admitted. "Hmmm," I replied. Fast-food restaurants used to hang all kinds of signs and posters and

d'angling mobiles in and around doorways to catch customers' atten- tion 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 look- ing 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 al- ready 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 boa~d 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 preoccu- . pied. 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,

;

68 WHY WE BUY

61 percent of the total time someone spends looking at a menu board is done after they've ordered. .

Then they either leave or they go to the condiments. You can place promotional materials over the condiment bar, ~hough it's pointless to advertise burgers there-too late. But it's a good opportunity to tell din- ers something about dessert. This is a lesson in the logical sequencing of signs and fixtUres. There's no point in telling shoppers abo~t something when it's too late for them to act on it. For instance, it's a good idea to position signs for shoppers standing in line to pay, but it's a bad idea if those signs promote merchandise that's kept in the rear of the store.

After the condiment bar, diners go to their tables to e~t. A few years ago, there was a move in the fast-food business to banish all dining area clutter-the hanging signs, mobiles, posters ,and "table tents" (those three-sided cardboard things that keep the salt and pepper company). That was a mistake, it turned out, one that was made because the store planners failed to notice what was going on in their own restaurants, 'specifically the social composition of the typical fast-food meal.

We tested table tents in two types of restaurants-the "family" res- taurant, like Applebee's or Olive Garden, and the fast~food establishment. In the family place, the table tents were read by 2 percent of diners.

At the fast-food joints, 25 percent of diners read them. The reason for that dramatic difference was simple: At family restau-

rants, people usually eat in twos, threes or fours (or families!). They're too busy talking to notice the signs. But the typical fast-food customer is eating alone. He's dying for some distraction. Give him a tray liner with lots of print and he'll read that. Give him the first chapter of the forthcoming Stephen King novel, and he'll read that. One of our clients, Subway, was printing napkn1s boasting of how much healthier their sandwiches were than burgers. Go a step further, we advised-print the nap1ctD.s with a chart cpmparing grams of fat. In the seating area of a fast-food restaurant you can practically guarantee that customers will read messages that would be ignored anywhere else. There's an obvious role model: the back of the cereal box.

You can see, then, how a fast-food restaurant is zoned: The deeper in you are, the longer the message can be. Two or three words at the door;

How to Read a Sign 69

a napkin filled with small type at the tables. J passed a fast-food place the other day.with a perfect window sign. It bore this eloquent phrase: BIG BURGER. Only when you entered the place did you come upon an- other sign explaining the details of the teaser. (They were selling . . . big burgers.) That's smart sign design-breaking the message into two or three parts, and communicating it a little at a time, as the customer gets farther into the store. Thinking that every sign must stand on its own and contain an entire message is not only unimaginative, it's ignorant of how human brains operate. It even takes the fun out of signs-I can remember the Burma-Shave (an early shaving cream brandY billboards on the way to my grandfather's farm. It was the sequencing of the bill- boards that made them such icons of American humor ..

This Shave Is Like

. A Parachute

There Isn't Any Substitute Burma-Shave

Another lesson in sign language comes courtesy of the United States Postal Service, for which we performed a huge study to help design the

. post office of today, complete with a self-service postal store and easy- to-use weighing and packaging stations.

In one of the prototype stores we studied, hanging behind the cash- iers were large banners promoting various services. Fourteen percent of customers read those banners, our researchers found, for an average of 5.4 seconds each. There were also posters pushing stamp collecting hung on the walls to either side of the cashiers. Fourteen percent of cus- tomers read those, too, for an average of 4.4 seconds each.

Which is pretty good in the sign world. And not unexpected, be- cause when you're in line at the post office, what else is there to do? The area behind or to the side of the cashiers is almost always the hottest signage real estate.

The post office also hung signs and installed electronic menu boards

70 WHY WE BUY

meant to be seen by customers using the writing tables. Those signs were read by jl,lst 4 percent of customers, for an average of 1.5 seconds

each. Mobiles hanging over the weighing stations were read by just 1

percent of customers, for an average of 3.3 seconds each. Which was no surprise-when you're writing or weighing, you're not reading. Those

signs were as good as nonexistent.

Banks also expend a lot of energy trying to figure out which signs work and which don't. Banks, fast-food restaurants and the post of-

fice have this in common: lots of customers standing,still and faCing the same direction-ideal opportunities for communication. The dif- ference is that banks are some of the worst offenders in the art and

science of sign placement. I can take you to branches of the world's

biggest and most sophisticated financial institutions where placement

of merchandising and informational materials is laughably inept.

There are church bake sales and kiddie lemonade stands that exhibit better signage sense than some banks I can name. Five minutes· from my office is a branch of Citibank where you can find this merchan-

dising innovation: a cheap card table covered by the cheapest blue plastic tablecloth you've ever seen, atop which someone tossed some

brochures for car loans and mortgages, joined by a TV monitor, once

intended perhaps for showing in-branch videos but now unused and completely covered by a blanket of dust. The table is jammed into a corner in the front of the bank, just a few feet from the customer ser-

vice desk. It's so bad that it's funny. A lot of bank signage can claim that distinction.

A California bank client decided-correctly-that it would be smart

to promote its new free checking policy by hanging outdoor banners visible from the heavily traveled road beyond its door. And then it

decided-incorrectly-that the banners should say PLEASE COME IN AND

ASK A FRIENDLY BANKER TO EXPLAIN OUR WONDERFUL NEW FREE CHECKING POLICY' or something to that effect. Drivers would have had to pull over

to read the sign, it was so verbose. On a highway, two words-maybe something catchy, like FREE CHECKING-must be made to suffice.

We did a study for a Canadian bank that had just installed some very

sophisticated backlit displays on the ~ustomer writing tables. These

How to Read a Sign 71

exhibits detailed the various services and investments the bank offered. They were quite beautiful. Nobody read them. Again, when you're filling out a deposit slip or endorsing cheCks,

you're concentrating too hard to think about anything else. And o~ce you've filled out the paperwork, you race to get into line.

We delivered our sad findings, and the bank's president said, "God, you just saved us from wasting about a million bucks on those damn things." He still spent the million bucks on in-branch media, of course- but on things that would make a difference.

It was also at a bank that we discovered one of our easiest and most effective fixes ever. We were hired to study all aspects of a bank branch, including the large rack that held brochures describing the money market funds, certificates of deposit,car loans and other services and investments offered. The rack was hung on the wall to the left of the entrance, so you'd pass it on your way in.

Everyone passed within inches of it. No one touched it. Again, the reason seems obvious: You enter a bank because you have

an important task to perform. Nobody goes into a bank to browse. And until you perform that task, you're not interested in reading or hearing about anything else. The fact that the rack was to the left side of the

. doorway, when most people walk to the right, only made it worse. We took that rack and moved it inside, so that customers would pass

it as they exited rather than entered, and we had a tracker stand there and watch. With no other change, the number of pebple who actually saw the rack increased fourfold, and the number of brochures taken increased dramatically.

Banks aren't the only places where task-oriented behavior must be reckoned·with. We enter a drugstore intent on seeing the pharmacist and turning over our prescription, and we don't notice a single sign or display we pass until that mission is accomplished. Then we've got some time to kill, only we're in the rear of the store, and all the signs and fixtures are positioned to face shoppers approaching from the front. Or we've gone to the post office for a roll of stamps, and we're not slowing down until we've. secured our position in line. Or we're at the convenience store, hot on the trail of barbecue starter fluid, and

72 WHY WE BUY

until we're ~ure they have it, we won't be distracted by anything else. In all those instances, it's futile to try to tell shoppers anything until after they've completed their tasks. So in that drugstore, for. instance,

two separate signage strategies must be mapped out-one for shop- pers walking front to back, and the other for shoppers walking back

to front, from the pharmacist to the front.

At a bank client's branch we studied there was a standing rack of brochures located in the general vicinity of the teller lines. But it was

positioned a litde too far away-customers standing behind the ropes could barely read the broChure tides, let alone grab them.

"Whose job is it to set up the ropes and stanchions and the brochure

rack?" we asked the branch manager.

"Well," he said, "the cleaning woman mops up every night, and when she's through she puts all that stuff back on the floor." And sure

enough, that cleaning crew didn't know squat about signage.

There's one arena of American life where sign design and placement isn't just a somewhat important issue, it's a matter of life or death. I'm

speaking about our roads, especially our interstate highway system .

. There, signs are almost as important as surface and lighting to maintain- ing safe, 'well-ordered conditions. As a result, engineers make sure to get

the signage right. The principles seem simple enough: no extra words; the right sign at the right place; enough signs so that drivers don't feel

ignored or underinformed; not so many signs that there's clutter or confusion: The fact that you can be driving in a place you've never been

• and . know for sure that you're heading in the right direction-without

stopping for dire~tions or even slOwing down to read a message-is a testament to the power of a smart system of signs. Having driven all over the world, I can say that the American highway sign system is one of the best. The only one that might be a litde better is the Swiss one. At

least the Swiss do .a better job of trimming the brush on the highway so you can read what's up there.

Look at the ~os.t common road signs in the United' States: STOP and ONE WAY. A big red octagon with bol4 white capital letters-what

How to Read a Sign 73

else could it mean? If you couldn't read it, you'd still stop. ONE WAY is a perfect marriage of words and symbol-you catch it from the corner of your eye and you know what it means. The arrow keeps you going in the right direction without forcing you to slow down or even pause to ' read it. On the road we use a vocabulary of icons, the universal language that tells us what we need to know without words. When you see a sign with a gas pump, or a fork and spoon, or a wheelchair, you understand at a glance. That's the best way to deliver information to people in mo- tion. Also on road signs, the technical aspects are usually perfect-the color combination provides enough contrast, the lettering is large, the lighting is good, and the positioning is just so.

Back in my urban geographer days I took part in a study of the . directional signs in the underground concourse at Rockefeller Plaza in New York City. Down there you have no bearings except for what the signs provide, so they're very important. On film; we saw how people moved along until they began to worry that they were getting lost, or until they saw a fork up ahead where they'd have to choose a direction. Then you'd see their heads begin to swivel and their pace begin to slow. Just befote that spot, then, was the logical place for a directional sign- something to head off their confusion and worry.

We also saw that their. main concern was not to bump into other people while walking. So if they had to really scour the area for a sign, or if the type was so small that they had to get really close to read it, or the sign was small or badly placed, walkers would be torn between looking at the sign and watching where they were going. Any time pe- destrians had to slow down or stop, we concluded, it was because the signs had failed to do their job. Theit's what really taught me the similar- ity be~een people walking and drivers driving-the best sign in either case is one you can read fast and is positioned so you can read it while moving. And the only way to achieve that, in most instances, is to break the information down into pieces and lay them out one at a time, in a

logical; orderly sequence. Of course, the only way we discovered all that was by watching

lots and lots of pedestrians move through the space. Otherwise, 'all the

signage decisions would have been made by the concourse planners

74 WHY WE BUY

themselves-the only people in the world who didn;t need signs to find their way arou~d down there.

I'm still trapped in this conference room. So if I can't get out, I'll make life for this sign as difficult as possible.

I'll put it on the floor, leaning against the wall, then I'll take ten paces away and see how it looks. I'll stand practically alongside it and see if it catches my eye. I'll stride by it at my normal pace and see if it registers. I'll turn down the lights. If the sign doesn't work in an imperfect world, it doesn't work. Believe me, real life is even tougher on signs than I am.

We're now arriving at a state of communication overload, and most of the problem is due to commercial messages. Little advertising stick- ers stuck to your apples and pears are either the cleverest thing ever or the most obnoxious defacement of God's bounty, depending on your point of view. There are too many ,word,s telling us too many things, and people are getting mad as hell and they're not going to read it any- more. Even as some opportunities for communication are being missed, many are being cluttered with so many messages that none stands out. One display or sign too many and you've created a black hole where no communication manages to get through.

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 tum off any pub- lic 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 bum 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 me~sages is haphazard. Half of

How to Read a Sign 75

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 agoniz- ing for too long over which sign goes where.

Once I went to a sales meeting of one of the world's largest manu- facturers of carbonated beverages at which they ran a competition be- tween 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

76 WHY WB BUY

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 n.eed signs to explain the

discounts, it needed university textbooks.

The world of signs today is actually enjoying something of a renais- sance. 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 cOmn1ercial expres-

sion. They're more stylish than print ads, hipper than TV comme'rcials

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 finan- cial district in New York. On the wall was a rrtirror, 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 th~ir stomachs to see if they really are famished. A good sign.

SIX

Shoppers Move like People

AatorrricoJly speaIcing, the most crucial aspect of shoppIDg ;, 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 real- ize that a good store is by definition one that exposes the greatest por- I tion 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 ina 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 eac:h. 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.

77

78 WHY WE BUY

The smart store, then, is de~igned 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 speeq up when they see banks.

The reasons are. understandable: Bank windows are boring, and ~obody 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 tw~ 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 rightwalid. 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, ha~e this same drift-to-the-right tendency? Yes, there's a local effect. Go to the Tate Britain art gallery in Lon40n. 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 au- tomatically 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 I Tokyo. In Osaka people waft toward the right, in Tokyo

Shoppers Move Like People 79

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]apan, apparendy). 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-Iadie.s' 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 cloth- ing was displayed. Not co~cidentally, our track sheets showed that chil- dren'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 bel!ide 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 examme 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 eyer made it Qack to the right half of the store. They were moving in a kind of question-mark track. To alter that, the register was

80 WHY WE BUY

tpoved to the right-hand wall and farther back, about halfway illto 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 shop- per, 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-Ieft-reach-right rule creates conflicts in design that we do not have in North America.)

An even simpler aspect of how people mqve is the one that raises the greatest number of logistical issues fo~ stores. In fact, this particular pe- culiarity 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 implication~ 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

Shoppers Move Like People 81

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 un~omfortable, 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 famil- iar 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. Bllt 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, fro:r:n 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 ap- proach 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 ac- commodated 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 expos- ing 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

82 WHY WE BUY

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 ap-

proach 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 disp~y 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 ef- fective way to display goods so they'll be seen. It's called chevr<;>ning- 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 chevr~>n­

ing 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 effective-

ness 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 en-

sure 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 dis- play fixtures, such as a sign reading FIVE PRE-WASHBD 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

Shoppers Move Like People 83

care not toO place merchandise so that it cuts them off. This happens all the time: A freestanding display is placed in front of wall shelves, block- ing 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 exam- ine 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 th°e 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 supermar- ket shelf. There's a reliable zone in which shoppers will probably see merchandise. It goes from slighdy above eye level down to about knee level. Much above that or below and they probably won't see it un- less they happen to be looking intendy. 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 slighdy, 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 hap-.

pened. This also has implications in stores where merchandise is stored on the selling floor instead of in stockrooms. I'm thinking here of com- puters, telephones, personal stereos and other consumer electronics that are sometimes stacked from the floor to over one's head. The boxes

84 WHY WE BUY

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.

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 fundam