Look at the most common road signs in the United States: stop and one way. A big red octagon with bold white capital letters—what 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 motion. 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 before 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 pedestrians had to slow down or stop, we concluded, it was because the signs had failed to do their job. That’s what really taught me the similarity between 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 themselves—the only people in the world who didn’t need signs to find their way around 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 stickers 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 words telling us too many things, and people are getting mad as hell and they’re not going to read it anymore. 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 turn off any public TV set, but every time I tried to log on to the site, it was down). Even when I’m the only person in the lounge, it must remain on. And so I quietly burn and vow never to watch CNN again. But there is a place in airports where even the busiest traveler stands around dumbly waiting rather than working: Near the baggage carousel, praying for luggage. There, before the suitcases begin to roll, we’re all grateful to get a little Wolf Blitzer.
In general, the state of commercial messages is haphazard. Half of all signs that are shipped to stores, banks and restaurants never even make it onto the floor, according to one study. All over America, retail managers end long, tiring days by sitting in storage rooms, unloading huge cartons of signs and other point-of-purchase materials sent by a merchandising manager who may never even have seen their particular store. Believe me, those tired, overworked store managers aren’t agonizing for too long over which sign goes where.
Once I went to a sales meeting of one of the world’s largest manufacturers of carbonated beverages at which they ran a competition between different display manufacturers: How fast could they set up their point-of-purchase display designed for the front aisle of a supermarket? It was pretty comical. The teams were a bunch of twentysomethings clad in Ralph Lauren chinos and oxford shirts with the name of the company embroidered across their chests. The fastest time clocked was about three minutes. When asked for my commentary, I suggested they run the same competition at midnight, when the same teams had been working for twelve hours straight—oh, and it had to happen in a crowded back room under the lousiest possible lighting.
Conversely, once some signs make it onto the floor, it’s hell getting rid of them. Every February I make a game of seeing how many liquor store windows still bear holiday-themed displays and signs. It’s always quite a few. We once studied a major New York bank branch where bits and pieces of twenty-seven different promotions were all still evident. In a car dealership’s window, we once found a sign announcing the arrival of new cars—the previous year’s new cars.
Some signs are perfectly fine, except they’re in places they were never intended to go. You’ll pass a drugstore display window and see a stack of cough syrup boxes with a tiny sign showing the sale price, a sign that was obviously meant to go on the shelves, where shoppers are a foot or so away, not in a window facing a busy street. Often, retailers simply ask too much of a sign—more than any sign can deliver. A fast-food chain tested a sign system explaining one version of its “meal deals,” then tried to make the signs clearer, then tested them again and fixed them again until they realized that it wasn’t the signs that were bad—the meal deals were just too complicated to be explained. The deals were changed and the signs worked just fine. We did a study for a department store in the South that blanketed the place with signs announcing big discounts. The only problem was that you practically had to be a mathematician to figure out what you’d save. Even the sales clerks had trouble keeping all the percentages straight. That store didn’t need signs to explain the discounts, it needed university textbooks.
The world of signs today is actually enjoying something of a renaissance. Just look at what’s happened to billboards. Thirty years ago, Lady Bird Johnson was going to outlaw them as part of her American beautification scheme. Today, even in postliterate America, they’re our most visually exciting, inventive and clever form of commercial expression. They’re more stylish than print ads, hipper than TV commercials and more fluent in the language of imagery and graphics than anything you’ll find on the web. Both the iPod and the Mini Cooper have used the billboard to their advantage. Billboards are to print ads what YouTube is to the Internet—the edge of the envelope, the lab for experimenting with new ideas in communication. Technology has given us three-part shifting billboards, video JumboTrons, rotating sports arena message boards and digital menu boards featuring flying french fries. At a fast-food restaurant we studied, a moving digital menu board panel was read by 48 percent of customers, compared to 17 percent for the same menu board—a nonmoving version—tested earlier. Those numbers have held up over many tests we’ve done co
mparing moving and nonmoving signs. But there’s an underside to this data: While an “activated” sign attracts more than twice the number of eyeballs as a static sign, the amount of time people look at the thing stays the same.
But a sign need not be on the cutting edge of technology to leave an impression. Not long ago I entered the elevator of a hotel in the financial district in New York. On the wall was a mirror, below which were these words: you look famished. And below that were the names and brief descriptions of the hotel’s restaurants. I guarantee that sign gets close to 100 percent exposure and that everyone who sees it smiles, then checks in with their stomachs to see if they really are famished. A good sign.
SIX
Shoppers Move Like People
Anatomically speaking, the most crucial aspect of shopping is the one that looks the simplest—the matter of how exactly human beings move. Mainly, how we walk.
Now, people move pretty much as their bodies allow them to move, as is most natural and comfortable. This gets tricky only when you realize that a good store is by definition one that exposes the greatest portion of its goods to the greatest number of its shoppers for the longest period of time—the store, in other words, that puts its merchandise in our path and our field of vision in a way that invites consideration. It’s fairly simple to measure whether a store accomplishes this or not: We simply chart the paths of shoppers and then determine which parts of the store are going undervisited. We routinely perform an hourly “plot” of a store—on the hour, a tracker quickly breezes through every part of the store, counting how many shoppers are in each. If a store’s flow is good, if it offers no obstacles or blind spots, then people will find their way to every nook and cranny. If there’s a problem with flow, some flaw in the design or the layout, then we’ll find some lonesome corners. The smart store, then, is designed in accordance with how we walk and where we look. It understands our habits of movement and takes advantage of them, rather than ignoring them or, even worse, trying to change them.
Here’s a simple example: People slow down when they see reflective surfaces. And they speed up when they see banks.
The reasons are understandable: Bank windows are boring, and nobody much likes visiting a bank anyway, so let’s get past it quickly; mirrors, on the other hand, are never dull. Armed with this information, what do you do? Well, never open a store next to a financial institution, for when pedestrians reach you they’ll still be moving at a speedy clip—too fast for window-shopping. Or, if you can’t help being next to a bank, you can make sure to have a mirror or two on your facade or in your windows, to slow shoppers down.
Here’s another fact about how people move (in retail environments but also everywhere else): They invariably walk toward the right. You don’t notice this unless you’re looking for it, but it’s true—when people enter a store they head rightward. Not a sharp turn, mind you; more like a drift.
One of the questions I’m asked a lot when I travel is, how much of this right-hand bias is based on how we drive? Do people in Japan, Britain and Australia, much less India, have this same drift-to-the-right tendency? Yes, there’s a local effect. Go to the Tate Britain art gallery in London. The people circulating clockwise are locals and the people circulating counterclockwise are visitors. Say what you will about the English love of order, but to my eye an English store such as Selfridges or Harrods functions more schizophrenically than any store in New York City, where walking manners are important. All the bad ethnic jokes point to Brits having a history of crimes against nature. However, my British colleagues who teach environmental psychology tell me that if you yell “Fire!” in a dark movie theater, in Britain people will head automatically toward the door on the right. Generally, in retail, the traffic patterns in England mimic how they drive.
Japan? A case unto itself. People from Osaka walk differently than people from Tokyo. In Osaka people waft toward the right, in Tokyo they waft toward the left. My friend Kaz Toyota, who comes from Nara, a suburb of Osaka, explains the difference this way: In Tokyo people are overcivilized, while the folks in his hometown are more natural and free.
This right-leaning bias is a profound truth about how most humans make their way through the world, and it has applications everywhere, in all walks of life. It took us a while to see this pattern, and ever since we’ve collected data that bears it out (though not in Japan, apparently). But how can a retail environment respond?
We performed a study for a department store where just to the right of the entrance was the menswear department. And by our count, the overwhelming majority of shoppers in the store was female. Having menswear there meant that women shoppers would simply sail through the section, barely looking at the merchandise, determined to get to their main destination—ladies’ clothing—first. In fact, because the front door was in the center of the store rather than to one side, our trackers charted lots of women who walked in, stepped right, looked around and saw that they were in menswear, then veered off sharply to the women’s apparel sections on the left side of the store—never again to return to the right side, even to the right rear, where the children’s clothing was displayed. Not coincidentally, our track sheets showed that children’s clothing was the least-visited section in the entire store; fully half of the main floor was going undervisited due to this error in planning—because female customers never even saw it! An obvious solution to this adjacency mix-up would be to place the children’s clothing section at the rear of the women’s apparel section, rather than beside the neckties and men’s bathrobes.
A similar situation held at an electronics store we studied. There, the cash/wrap was against the left-hand wall, near the front of the store. Shoppers would enter and head right, but then see the register and the clerks and turn sharply left so they could examine the merchandise there or ask where to find what they had come for. In some cases, those shoppers headed toward the rear to browse the displays there, but few of them ever made it back to the right half of the store. They were moving in a kind of question-mark track. To alter that, the register was moved to the right-hand wall and farther back, about halfway into the store. That then became the main hub of activity. A second area of high shopper interest, a telephone display, was installed on the right wall but closer to the front. The hope was that shoppers would enter, walk right toward the cash register area, and then visit the phone displays. Those adjustments shifted the store around to a configuration more natural to how people move, and instantly, the circulation patterns improved—more people saw more store. Because American shoppers automatically move to the right, the front-right of any store is its prime real estate. That’s where the most important goods should go, the make-or-break merchandise that needs 100 percent shopper exposure. That’s one way to take advantage of how people move.
Shoppers not only walk right, they reach right, too, most of them being right-handed. Imagine standing at a shelf, facing it—it’s easiest to grab items to the right of where you stand, rather than reaching your arm across your body to the left. In fact, as you reach, your hand may inadvertently brush a product to the right of the one you’re reaching for. So if a store wishes to place something into the hand of a shopper, it should be displayed just slightly to the right of where he or she will be standing. Planograms, the maps of which products are stocked where on a shelf, are determined with this in mind: If you’re stocking cookies, for instance, the most popular brand goes dead center—at the bull’s-eye—and the brand you’re trying to build goes just to the right of it. (Again, in Britain and Australia, the drive-left-reach-right rule creates conflicts in design that we do not have in North America.)
An even simpler aspect of how people move is the one that raises the greatest number of logistical issues for stores. In fact, this particular peculiarity of human ambulation can be said to render nearly every retail space seriously ill-suited to its purpose. It’s this: People face and walk forward.
The implications of this are enormous, only because the normal ret
ail environment is actually designed for those nonexistent beings who walk sideways—sidling like the figures drawn in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs—rather than place one foot in front of the other. Picture it: If you’re walking straight down a store aisle, you’re looking ahead. It requires an effort to turn your head to one side or the other to see the shelves or racks as you pass them. That effort even makes you vaguely uncomfortable, because it requires you to train your eyes somewhere other than where you’re walking. If it’s a familiar environment (say, your favorite supermarket) and the setting feels safe (wide aisles, no boxes or other obstacles on the floor to trip you up), then maybe you’ll turn your head as you walk and take in the merchandise. In a less familiar setting, you’ll see less—subconsciously, you’ve got your peripheral vision on the lookout so you don’t trip over a box or a small child and fall on your nose. If, as you walk, a display gets your attention, you may stop in your tracks and look upon it as it was meant to be seen, straight in the eye, as it were. But only then.
This issue is not limited to a store’s shelves. On the street, how do you approach a display window? In almost every instance, from an angle—as you’re walking toward the store from the left or the right. But most display windows are designed as though every viewer is just standing there staring into them head-on. Which is almost never the case. This comes up regarding outdoor signs, too. Near my office there’s a new restaurant that spent a lot of money on a very handsome hanging sign, but instead of positioning it perpendicular to the building, so it is visible to pedestrians approaching from either side, it hangs parallel to it, so it can be read only from directly across the street. Which is how maybe 5 or 10 percent of possible customers approach the facade.
Why We Buy Page 9