And shoppers are more pressed for time than ever. They’re not dawdling like they used to. They’ve grown accustomed to stores where everything for sale is on open display, and they expect all the information they need will be out in the open, too. Nobody wants to wait for a clerk to point him or her in the right direction or explain some new product. Nobody can find a clerk anyway. Once upon a time you went into a coffee shop and the only thing to read was the menu and the New York Post. Now you go into even the smallest Starbucks and there are eleven distinct signage positions communicating everything from the availability of nonfat eggnog to the tie-in with Paul McCartney’s latest album.
So you can’t just look around your store, see where there are empty spots on the walls, and put the signs there. You can’t simply clear a space on a counter and dump all your in-store media. Every store is a collection of zones, and you’ve got to map them out before you can place a single sign. You’ve got to get up and walk around, asking yourself with every step: What will shoppers be doing here? How about here? Where will their eyes be focused when they stand here? And what will they be thinking about over there? In this zone people will be walking fast, so a message has to be short and punchy—arresting. Over there, they’ll be browsing around, so you can deliver a little more detail. In this area they’ll be thinking about—oh, let’s say we’re standing near the motor oil shelf, so they’ll be thinking about their cars. So maybe it’s a good opportunity to tell them something about replacement windshield wipers. Over here by the registers they will be standing still for a minute and a half, a perfect window for a longer message. And then they’ll be on their way out of the store, but you can use the exit path to give them a thought for the road.
Each zone is right for one kind of message and wrong for all others. Putting a sign that requires twelve seconds to read in a place where customers spend four seconds is just slightly more effective than putting it in your garage.
I’m forever walking around and adding to my mental list of places shoppers stand around doing nothing, where some message might be appropriate. One struck me the other day: In a shoe department, you tell the clerk what you want and he or she goes off to find your size. At that point you’ve already examined all the shoes, so what do you do? It’s probably a good spot for a sign promoting other merchandise. You’d probably welcome something to read right then and there; maybe something about handbags.
One clever placement I’ve seen lately is the small signs tacked on the inside of bathroom stalls. It almost guarantees a 100 percent capture rate, and it’s a place where you can get really creative with the message.
Here’s another good spot for signs currently being neglected: escalators. That struck me as I ascended from the tracks on the Underground in London. There you spend a lot of time rising slowly past what used to be signs and are now flat screens. When someone asks me about a good application of digital signage I ask if they’ve ever ridden the Tube.
It isn’t enough simply to figure out the general vicinity where a sign should go. We once studied shoppers who came upon a banner hanging directly over the cash/wrap area of a store. Good placement, no? No. A very low percentage of shoppers even saw it. Nobody stands around in a store looking straight up in the air. We recommended that the banner be moved four feet away, and the number of people who saw it doubled. When it comes to positioning a sign, the difference between an ideal viewing spot and a terrible one is often just a few feet or a ten-degree angle. For maximum exposure, a sign should interrupt the existing natural sight lines in any given area. So you’ve got to stand in a spot and determine: Where am I looking? That’s where the sign goes. It’s no surprise that the number-one thing people look at is other people. That’s why some of the most effective signs in fast-food restaurants are the ones sitting atop the cash registers—more or less at the level of the cashiers’ faces. Smart sign placement simply tries to interrupt the shopper’s line of vision and intercept her gaze.
Sometimes, though, you’ve got to get creative with message placement. Lawn mower manufacturing company Toro made an in-store video to promote its automatic-mulching mower. Naturally, they were placing them in home and garden supply stores, but where? In the mower section, where shoppers would see the monitors going but then realize that they’d have to stand still for ten minutes to watch the whole thing, and not only that, but they’d have to stand in the middle of an aisle and quite possibly get mowed down (and mulched) by shoppers on their way to barbecue accessories?
Instead, the video went into repair department waiting areas, where it played before captive audiences grateful for even the slightest distraction. Everyone who visits the repair department of a home and garden supply store is going to buy a new mower someday. For some reason, we find that even retailers who pile on the signs elsewhere will fail to appreciate the possibilities for communication in waiting areas, where people tend to be bored to tears. We once studied a car dealership’s service area waiting room that offered not one word of reading material—not a single piece of promotional literature. Not an issue of Car and Driver or Road & Track. Not even an old Reader’s Digest.
It’s no secret that New Yorkers don’t like to wait—we want our egg and cheese on a roll almost instantaneously after we order it; if we have to wait any longer than that, we’re going to the deli across the street the next time. So I had to appreciate the popular upscale sandwich shop around the corner from my office, which cleverly offers the day’s New York Times and magazines for varied interests in order to placate the customers, who are often waiting more than five minutes for their made-to-order slow-roasted pork and pickled-pepper relish delicacy.
Nobody studies signs like the fast-food industry. Even if you don’t plan on owning a Burger God franchise, it’s instructive to see how they do it.
They realize that you can put an effective sign in a window or just inside a doorway, for example, but it has to be something a customer can read in an instant. Just two or three words. We’ve timed enough people to know that such signs get, on average, less than two seconds of exposure per customer.
I was once asked to evaluate a door sign that had ten words on it.
“How much can you read in a second and a half?” I asked the designer.
“Three or four words, I guess,” he admitted.
“Hmmm,” I replied.
Fast-food restaurants used to hang all kinds of signs and posters and dangling mobiles in and around doorways to catch customers’ attention fast, until studies showed that nobody read them. When you enter a restaurant, you are looking for one of two things: the counter or the bathroom.
There’s no point in placing a sign for people on their way to the bathroom to see. They’ve got more important things on their minds. But a sign facing people as they leave the bathroom works just fine.
As people approach the counter, they’re trying to decide what they’re going to order. In the fast-food arena, that means they’re looking for the big menu board. But they’re not going to read every word on it—they’re just going to scan until they see what they’re looking for. If they’re regular customers (as most customers are), they probably already know what they want and aren’t even looking at the menu.
If there’s a long line, customers will have lots of time to study the menu board and anything else that’s visible. After the order is placed, the menu board and counter-area signs still receive prolonged customer attention. McDonald’s found that 75 percent of customers read the menu board after they order, while they wait for their food—during the “meal prep” period, which averages around a minute and forty seconds. That’s a long time, and that’s when people will read almost anything—they’ve already paid and received their change, so they’re not preoccupied. That’s a perfect window for a longer message, something you want them to know for the next time they come. If we look at the aggregate of all menu board data, from fast food to deli counters in supermarkets, 61 percent of the total time someone spends looking at a menu b
oard 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, though it’s pointless to advertise burgers there—too late. But it’s a good opportunity to tell diners something about dessert. This is a lesson in the logical sequencing of signs and fixtures. There’s no point in telling shoppers about 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 eat. 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” restaurant, 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 restaurants, 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 napkins boasting of how much healthier their sandwiches were than burgers. Go a step further, we advised—print the napkins with a chart comparing 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; a napkin filled with small type at the tables. I 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 another 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 brand) billboards on the way to my grandfather’s farm. It was the sequencing of the billboards 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 cashiers 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 customers read those, too, for an average of 4.4 seconds each.
Which is pretty good in the sign world. And not unexpected, because 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 meant to be seen by customers using the writing tables. Those signs were read by just 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 office have this in common: lots of customers standing still and facing the same direction—ideal opportunities for communication. The difference 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 merchandising 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 service 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 customer writing tables. These 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 once 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 people 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 unt
il 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 until we’re sure 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 shoppers 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 little too far away—customers standing behind the ropes could barely read the brochure titles, 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 maintaining 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 directions 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 little 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.
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