What can you do with the decompression zone? You can greet customers—not necessarily to steer them anywhere but to say hello, remind them where they are, start the seduction. Security experts say that the easiest way to discourage shoplifting is to make sure staffers acknowledge the presence of every shopper with a simple hello. Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton’s homespun advice to retailers was that if you hire a sweet old lady just to say hello to incoming customers, none of them will dare steal.
You can offer a basket or a map or a coupon. There’s a fancy store in Manhattan, Takashimaya, where the uniformed doorman proffers a handsomely printed pocket-size store directory as he ushers you in. Just to the right of the entrance, within the transition zone, is the store’s flower department. As you enter, you see it from the corner of your eye, but you don’t usually stop in—instead, you think, “Hmm, flowers, good idea, I’ll get them on my way out.” Which makes perfect sense, because you wouldn’t want to shop the rest of the store carrying a bouquet of damp daisies.
Right inside the door of an H&M, Gap or Wal-Mart, there’s what’s known as a “power display”—a huge horizontal bank of sweaters, or jeans or cans of Coke, that acts as a barrier to slow shoppers down, kind of like a speed bump. It also functions as a huge billboard. It doesn’t say, “Shop me.” It says, “Just consider the idea.” It serves as a suggestion, plain and simple, and it also gets you in the mood for the rest of the store. You can catch up with the product later, at another time, typically in another section of the floor. Remember that more than 60 percent of what we buy wasn’t on our list. And no, this isn’t the same as an impulse purchase. It’s triggered by something proposing the question “Don’t you need this? If not now, then maybe in the near future?” The power display of beverages may remind you of who’s coming home from college next Tuesday, the sweater of fall coming or the chilly weather in Maine, where you’re planning a getaway weekend—and lo and behold, you leave the store with two six-packs of ginger ale and a new fleece.
Another solution to the decompression zone problem, which I saw at Filene’s Basement, is to totally break the rule. Not just break it, but smash it. There, just inside the entrance, they’ve placed a large bin of merchandise that’s been deeply discounted, a deal so good it stops shoppers in their tracks. That teaches us something about rules—you have to either follow them or break them with gusto. Just ignoring a rule, or bending it a little, is usually the worst thing you can do.
I’d love to see someone try this out-of-the-box strategy: Instead of pulling back from the entrance, push the store out beyond it—start the selling space out in the parking lot. After all, football fans make elaborate use of parking lots even in the worst weather, barbecuing and eating and drinking and socializing on asphalt. Drive-in movies everywhere are turned over to flea markets during daylight hours, proof that people will comfortably shop al fresco. Some supermarkets bring seasonal merchandise out into the parking lot during summer; I visited one at a seashore resort that had all barbecue supplies, beach toys, suntan lotion and rubber sandals in a tent outfitted with a clerk and a cash register—allowing beachgoers to pull up, grab a few necessities and drive away, all without having to drag their wet, sandy selves through the food aisles and long checkout lines.
Pushing the store outside also begins to address an interesting situation in America, the fact that so much of the country has been turned into parking lots. Buildings can be put to a variety of uses—a clothing store can sell electronics or groceries or even be converted into office space. But our vast plains of asphalt will require more imaginative thinking. A few years ago, I visited a shopping mall in Johannesburg, South Africa, where they put a drive-in movie on the roof of one of their city’s parking garages. Also in Johannesburg, I saw a display of Audis—every model car in every color an Audi can come in, some forty-seven cars in all, lined up in tight rows—and yeah, you bet, it was mobbed with people.
Our finding that being first isn’t necessarily best actually extends beyond the decompression zone and into the store proper. In any section of a store, the first product customers see isn’t always going to have an advantage. Sometimes just the opposite will happen. Allowing some space between the entrance of a store and a product actually gives it more time in the shopper’s eye as he or she approaches it. It builds a little visual anticipation. Someone making a study of, say, the computer printer section of a store is highly unlikely to stop at the very first model and buy it with no further comparisons. By the time he reaches the midpoint of the printer section, though, he may feel confident and informed enough to decide. At trade shows, the booths just inside the door may seem most desirable, but they’re pretty bad locations. Visitors zoom past them on their way into the hall, or, even worse, they arrange to meet friends by the entrance, thereby creating the (false) impression that there’s a crowd at the first booth and scaring off genuine clients. Besides, just inside the door is usually drafty. It feels as though you’re in the vestibule.
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, however, 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 study 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 handsome 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 displays 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, rendering him instantly agreeable but forever mute.
FOUR
You Need Hands
It’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 it a hand and a quarter. If she picks one more thing, though, she’ll run out of hands. Only an extremely motivated buyer will persevere. Human anatomy has just declared this shopping 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 implications of that fact go unimagined, undete
cted, unconsidered, unaccommodated, unacknowledged. Ignored.
The hand-allotment issue came up early in the science of shopping. 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-party favor, if memory serves. They treated me okay, but I remember they 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 New York City. We pointed our cameras at the stand and watched it during the busiest times, the morning 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 it looks swamped with customers waiting to pay and nervously checking 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 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 something behind.
The second (and kind of seminal) observation we made was painfully 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 newspapers, trying to get someone to pick up a brochure or designing the check-in desk 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 of typical 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 briefcase, 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 hand—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 structure was the one that displayed the most merchandise. Maybe the stand’s owner believed that, too. But from the customer’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 waiting 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 awkward 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 number of transactions possible during rush hour. Which caused congestion, scared away customers, and ultimately cost the newsstand sales. A better design—one that took human anatomy into consideration—might have displayed less merchandise but accommodated more customers.
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 the most important things to learn is this: How you present 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 edutainment—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 important at drive-thrus because the line of cars is so much more apparent to potential customers than the line inside the restaurant. Particularly in 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 payment and pickup 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 bottles 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 decompression 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 of 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 wer
e, 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 instantly, 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 the message but didn’t quite grasp the subtext. What happened is the carts got bigger. From Wal-Mart and Target to Carrefour and 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 people 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 mission. 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. Cart or basket? Then place other shopping 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 applies. 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.)
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