Obviously, that sign could be rehung in an hour and the problem would be solved. Windows can easily accommodate how people approach 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 accommodated 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 exposing 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 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 approach 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 display 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 effective way to display goods so they’ll be seen. It’s called chevroning—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 chevroning 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 effectiveness 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 ensure 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 display fixtures, such as a sign reading five pre-washed 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 care not to place merchandise so that it cuts them off. This happens all the time: A freestanding display is placed in front of wall shelves, blocking 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 examine 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 the 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 supermarket shelf. There’s a reliable zone in which shoppers will probably see merchandise. It goes from slightly above eye level down to about knee level. Much above that or below and they probably won’t see it unless they happen to be looking intently. 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 slightly, 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 happened. This also has implications in stores where merchandise is stored on the selling floor instead of in stockrooms. I’m thinking here of computers, telephones, personal stereos and other consumer electronics that are sometimes stacked from the floor to over one’s head. The boxes 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 fundamentals of packaging and how that affects the brand. In business school, you can take courses in global brand strategy, Internet marketing, category management and so on, but to my knowledge there’s no major business school in the world that teaches a course in twenty-first-century printing. Not IMD in Lausanne, not the IESE in Barcelona, not the London Business School—and certainly not Wharton. What we can do with printing presses in 2008 makes what we could do ten years ago seem quaint. Split runs and 360-degree color for starters. Today’s technology makes it possible to customize packages for individual stores in different parts of the country. But a digitally-controlled printing press is only as sophisticated as the person making the order. While the graphic designers and the printers themselves know the score, that young gung-ho MBA commissioning the work usually doesn’t.
Getting back to the floor, another matter of concern is something we call the boomerang rate. This is the measure of how many times shoppers fail to walk completely through an aisle, from one end to the other. It looks at how many times a shopper starts down an aisle, selects something, and then, instead of proceeding, turns around and retraces her or his steps. We’ll call it a half boomerang, say, when the shopper makes it halfway down an aisle before turning back. Typically, he or she heads down the aisle in search of one or two things, finds them, and then heads back without even looking around (or, if she looks, she doesn’t see anything worth stopping for). What do you do about that? The obvious answer for retailers is to position the most popular goods halfway down the aisle. Manufacturers should attempt to do just the opposite—to keep their products as near to the end of the aisle as possible.
But there are also ways to try to keep shoppers interested. One of the newest and most effective of these requires the presence of kids, which is why it’s been used so well in the cereal aisles, where Mom and Dad typically want to grab and run. There, we’ve seen a floor graphic of a hopscotch game work extremely well to nail shoppers down for a while. In one store we studied, the average time kids played on the hopscotch graphic was almost fourteen seconds—a long time to be standing in front of cereal without buying some.
There’s one aspect of how shoppers move that most people are familiar with: the quest to get us all the way to the back of a store. Everyone knows why supermarket dairy cases are usually against the back wall: Because almost every shopper needs milk, and so they’ll pass through (and shop) much more of the store on the way to and from the rear. That is pretty effective, too, or at least it was, but it also created a terrific opportunity for a competitor. In fact, the convenience store industry exists because of its ability to put milk and other staples into shoppers’ hands quickly, so they can run in, grab and go. Lots of new supermarkets now feature a “shallow loop”—a dairy case up near the front of the store, so shoppers can grab and go there, too.
Large chain drugstores use the pharmacy in the same way—that section is almost always on the back wall, so customers will be forced to visit the rest of the store, too. But a special accommodation must be made for those customers, lest the strategy backfire. When shoppers are headed for the pharmacy, they typically have a serious task at hand, and so they’re not interested in browsing the shelves of the store on their way back. Therefore, drugstores must be merchandised from the rear as well as from the front—at least some signs, displays and fixtures must be positioned so they are visible to shoppers walking from the back of the store to the front. It’s almost like planning two different stores on the same site, but it must be done because the pharmacy is so effective at pulling shoppers through the store.
In the opening chapter, I mentioned a drugstore that was the location of choice for young mall employees who needed a quick soda during their breaks. To take advantage, the store placed the coolers in the rear, which forced the kids to race in, hurry to the sodas and race back out so they could enjoy their fifteen minutes off. And in fact, those teenagers were never going to buy shampoo or alarm clocks or talcum on their soda runs. So the store humanely decided to move the coolers up front, as a favor to loyal soda drinkers who might have found another, more convenient place to fuel up on breaks.
Still, getting shoppers to the back wall of any store is usually a challenge. The Gap, Aéropostale and Anthropologie—all apparel store chains—put their discount sale products in the back left-hand corner of the store. They’ve trained their most veteran shoppers to visit the remotest corner of the store. Once they’ve gotten them to the back, their challenge is to make sure the pathway back to the front of the store is well merchandised and that at least some of the signage is facing the customer going back-to-front.
Wisely, most retailers don’t sell their bread-and-butter merchandise from the back wall. Still, every square foot of selling space is equally expensive to rent, heat and light. A store that flows interestingly and smoothly from one section to another will automatically draw shoppers to the farthest reaches. If, from the front of the store, shoppers perceive that something interesting is going on in back, they’ll make their way there at least once. A simple solution is to have what amounts to a mandala (like the statue at the far end of a Buddhist temple, meant to entice you further in) hanging on the rear wall, a large graphic, for instance, or better yet, something back there that makes some visual noise, that gives shoppers the sense that something interesting is going on. They may not head there the second they enter, but they’ll drift that way, as if drawn by a magnet. Anything is better than the sense you get in most large stores—that the rear wall is the dead zone.
The front of a store has utmost importance in determining who enters. When RadioShack decided to increase the percentage of women shoppers, it did so in great part by devoting itself to the telephone business. But it made sure to display those phones near the front of its stores, in order to lure those women in most effectively. In fact, we advise some clients to change the front-of-store merchandising several times in the course of a day, to attract the different shoppers passing by. At a mall bookstore, for instance, we realized that in the morning most shoppers were stay-at-home mothers with baby strollers. So we told our client to position books on child care, fitness and family up front. (We also advised that there be enough room for all those strollers to maneuver.) In the afternoon, kids getting out of school ran wild in the mall, so there should be books on sports, pop music, TV and other adolescent subjects. After five p.m. was when the work crowd streamed through, so there should be books on business and computers. And because the mall was used very early in the morning by senior citizens getting their walking exercise, we told our client that before the store closed for the night its windows should be stocked with books on retirement, finance and travel. In fact, the store bought large, cylindrical display fixtures that could be turned around depending on the time of day and which books needed to be shown. Supermarkets are jam-packed up front from Friday to Sunday, and so the space is designed to handle the crush. On Monday and Tuesday, though, it’s mellow up there. We’ve advised clients to turn the area just before the registers into a new selling zone, kind of a small bazaar of impulse items rather than just the usual rack or two.
How often shoppers move through your store is also something to be accommodated. If the average customer comes every two weeks, then your windows and displays need to be changed that often, so they’ll always seem fresh and interesting. Here’s another example of how design and merchandising must work hand in hand: If windows are made so they are easy for employees to get into, the displays will be changed more often than if it’s a pain in the neck. If something about the design makes carrying merchandise into the window a burden, or if display racks block access to the windows, they’ll suffer from a lack of attention, I guarantee.
Some facts of shopper movement can’t be turned into universal principles, but they certainly have had their impact in specific environments we’ve studied. We did a study of a branch of a major family restaurant chain with a location on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. By day the fact that its restrooms were just inside the front door seemed to be perfectly sensible. By night, however, when the street outside came alive with, among other things, the trade of some friendly neighborhood streetwalkers, the ladies’ room location was a definite liability. It became a kind of hookers’ lounge, a place they could wash, put their feet up and chat a spell between engagements. Not the greatest thing for the rest of the diners.
Some Hallmark card stores feature custom-printed stationery departments, places where brides-to-be can go for invitations and so on. The design of the department, a writing table with shelves for the large stationery sample books, was perfectly adequate. But in one busy New Jersey mall, the station was located in the front of the store, just beyond the cash register, perhaps the noisiest, most populated part of the room. The sole person using it was filling out a job application.
SEVEN
Dynamic
Stand over here. Behind the underwear.
What do you see? A couple? How old? Sixties? Anything special? Just your average slightly tubby mom and pop out on the town, at Target or some such place, about to splurge on new briefs for the old guy, am I right?
Hold on—what’s he saying?
“Now, where’s my size?”
What’s she saying?
“Over here.”
Now what’s he saying?
“I guess I’ll just get this three-pack.”
Fascinating. What did she just say?
“No, get the six…I can wear ’em, too.”
Whoa. What kind of weirdness is going on here? I can’t even bear to picture it, the two of them rolling around in only their—
Hey
, stop that. You just missed an invaluable lesson in the true dynamic nature of shopping and buying. You don’t even have to be a scientist of shopping to figure out what just happened, though if you’re a woman it might help, especially an overweight woman, especially an overweight woman whose choices in underwear are limited to styles with thin, biting elastic bands at the waist and the leg holes—an uncomfortable prospect, I can only imagine (reluctantly).
In 2004 I worked on underwear issues across the world—in North America, Europe and Japan. That summer I gave a keynote speech at a gathering of lingerie executives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I opened my lecture by saying that as a man who lives with a New England woman, I know much more about lingerie professionally than I do personally. A central global issue in this industry is the difference between underwear designed for sex and that designed for comfort. Most women do not parade around as if they were on this month’s cover of the Victoria’s Secret catalog. While some underwear for some women are items they put on so they get help taking them off, underwear for most people most of the time is about how good it feels and whether or not it complements what they’re wearing on top of what they’re wearing underneath. Underwear if you are eighteen is a fashion accessory, not unlike hair color. But comfort and fit are seminal drivers for most post-forty women, especially those carrying a few extra pounds.
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