Shocking Shopping
Book Review:
Siemon Scamell-Katz, "The Art of Shopping: How we shop and why we buy", LID Publishing, 2012.
The title of this book is somewhat misleading, as it might lead one to think that the book is about how to shop -- until one reads the subtitle and blurb on the back cover. The book is actually about the world of shopper research agencies and the methodologies they use to help retailers sell more. As someone who works in marketing, I find this a relevant and interesting topic, but I also think that people who normally care little about business can find some useful nuggets in The Art of Shopping. After all, "everybody is a shopper", as the back cover reads.
That said, I have mixed feelings about this book. On the positive side, the book is an easy read both because of its length (under 200 pages) and its clear language. It is also occasionally funny, for example when the author Siemon Scamell-Katz writes "nobody has ever adequately explained to me what happens in the three per cent of households that don't buy toilet rolls in the UK" (p. 110) and "[France is] home to the world's best cooking and a mecca to seekers of 'haute cuisine'. It is also a country where 3,000 of its restaurants are closing every year, while McDonald's is opening 70 new outlets each year" (p. 151). As you can tell, there are numerous curious tidbits to be found in the book, but before I summarize the contents I shall briefly explain why I gave The Art of Shopping only 3/5 stars on Goodreads.
Among its flaws is the apparent lack of proofreading. There are examples of odd punctuation (like run-on sentences), missing spaces (like "seena" instead of "seen a"), needless repetition (like "does it match up to expectations?" and then three sentences later, "does it match my expectations?"), mixing up homophones (like "complemented" instead of "complimented"), opening brackets that are never closed, and just strange constructions ("The conference was organized by an energetic and passionate expert, should be Rafal Ohme, now owner of ...").
In addition, the structure of the text is not as clear as it could have been, because the chapters make no use of headings or subheadings. There are also no diagrams or illustrations. Thus, the reader may sometimes get a "wall-of-text" feeling. Finally, the book has no index, and while there is a bibliography, Scamell-Katz does not use in-text citations or footnotes. Fortunately, citations are perhaps less important in this case, because The Art of Shopping reads a bit like an autobiography in that it mostly relates the research done by the author and his own agency during some 20 years of consulting. While this is not inherently bad, I would still count it as a downside for readers who hoped that the book would provide an overview of the fields of shopper behavior and/or neuromarketing. I am also tempted to subtract points for boasting, since Scamell-Katz spends much of the introduction talking about how revolutionary his own business was, as if he's of the same caliber as Kahneman and Tversky.
Putting these weaknesses aside, The Art of Shopping reveals a lot of fascinating findings which makes it worth reading. In the introduction, Scamell-Katz writes about how his work at a retail design firm led him to look for ways to measure what shoppers really do in stores. The question of how we really shop is important because investments of millions of dollars go into store designs, yet the sales function of stores is often subordinated to good looks. Furthermore, most new product launches fail, and the cost of this gets passed down to consumers. According to the author, part of the reason for this is that brand managers fail to understand shoppers' true motivations (why we buy) and behaviors (how we shop). More specifically, the industry focuses too much on making products look appealing in advertisements, and not enough on making products choosable in-store. Hence, Siemon Scamell-Katz and his colleagues at ID Magasin and later TNS started using video recordings of shoppers, eye-tracking technology, virtual reality (VR) stores, and even fMRI to pioneer the field of shopper research.
The rest of the book comprises eleven chapters, which roughly follow this structure: what do retailers do to make us buy? -- how do people go shopping? -- what happens when we arrive at a store? -- how do people navigate stores? -- where does our attention go when we shop? -- how do we actually choose what to buy? -- what do habits mean for shopper behavior? -- how are shopping decisions made? -- what is the role of consumption experiences? -- how do marketers create appeal? -- and what is the future of shopping?
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Chapter 1 states from the get-go that retailers are great at organizing their supply chains to get products to market, but not great at getting shoppers to buy those products. Thus, there is no secret tactic that manipulates people into buying things they don't want to. What can help, though, is successful marketing, which understands that people often pay for the idea of a product and the self-image it creates. It also uses the scientific method and statistical analysis to understand how people actually shop within a retail space, how they process reality and how they feel. However, this approach has only emerged in the past twenty years (or thirty years taking into account the date the book was published), and many brands still focus too much on outdated linear models of advertising, for instance AIDA (attention --> interest --> desire --> action), rather than on helping people buy. Why? As Scamell-Katz writes:
"This is because many of the principles of retailing have evolved from unquestioned practices and been compounded by rumour and myth. This is only topped up by shoppers who when interviewed, give a partial, post-event rationalization for their actions." (p. 26)In fact, as we shall see later on, most marketing is unsuccessful. Fortunately for retailers, they seem to be catching on.
Chapter 2 introduces the important concept of a shopping mission. When people choose where to shop, the most important factor is not price but lifestyle -- in other words, the location of the store (how close is it to home or work?) and the time pressure (would a convenience store or supermarket be more efficient?). Therefore, a busy yuppie in London and a suburban housewife may have rather different shopping missions. You can visit a store for various reasons: to research the options, to do a weekly "main shop", to buy additional items in a "top up" trip, to buy one product for a special occasion, and so on. Scamell-Katz and his colleagues found that top-up shopping trips are the most common by combining interviews with footage from some 120 cameras they placed in a supermarket's ceiling. But there are many other kinds of missions, and the implications are that retailers need to cater to different kinds of customers and design an environment that serves the missions that shoppers are trying to accomplish. When shopping missions are not considered in retail strategy, some pretty bizarre consequences may result. From the author:
"It means that incredibly, one in ten shoppers who enter a fashion store intending to buy a product walk out because they couldn't find it -- even though it was there!" (p. 47)Thus, it is important to ask questions like: how do shoppers on different missions look at products and how can they be motivated to pick those products up? What is the impact of signage when people arrive at a shop?
In Chapter 3, the focus is on window shopping, since it has traditionally been assumed that a good window display facing the street will boost sales. Scamell-Katz et al. went out to test this belief by equipping subjects with special glasses that come with eye-tracking technology. This way they could see what the shoppers looked at frame-by-frame, although it takes "around ten hours to watch one person shopping for four to five minutes" (p. 52). The team found that shoppers can only see windows from an angle due to the way people walk alongside the storefront, and moreover the majority of shoppers focus on the doorway rather than the windows. Most shoppers could not recall any details of the window display. More amazingly, in the exit interviews a third of the shoppers claimed that they looked at the window before entering, even though they didn't! The author again:
"People may not be able to remember what they have done but crucially, they have a perception of how they shop. This means that when they are asked about their shopping behaviour they post-rationalize their experience instead, and say what they expect they have done. This is the source of many of the myths of retailing." (p. 54)This is reminiscent of Eliezer Yudkowsky's concept of cached thoughts sprinkled with a bit of self-deception. Scamell-Katz also suggests that elements of self-fulfilling prophecy are at play. In any case, point-of-sale window dressings can sometimes be removed without any negative effect on sales. Despite the observation that shoppers do not read signs, most retailers simply do nothing about it.
When shoppers enter a store, it is not a good idea to overload their senses with stimuli. People often don't notice things like baskets because they are busy performing a "reconnaissance scan". To a large degree this is unconscious, as explained in Chapter 4. Our brains are actually quite good at memorizing the layout of and journey through a familiar store, which the author calls cognitive mapping. It is thanks to cognitive mapping that we tend to operate in autopilot mode and pay less attention to the journey. But this also means that when retailers move things around in the store, people get frustrated. Once again, a good layout allows customers to accomplish their missions efficiently. Retailers often put important categories (e.g. bread, milk, sandwiches and soft drinks) at the back of the store in the hope that people will buy additional impulse items on the way; this generally doesn't work because shoppers won't consider these other categories until they've completed the planned task. A more efficient layout that resonates with customers' cognitive maps might lead to less time spent in-store, but better loyalty in the form of frequent visits and higher spend per trip.
Scamell-Katz uses an interesting analogy: supermarkets are not selling spaces, but warehouses where people come to pick up products "in much the same way that a warehouse worker will pick goods from an order form" (p. 67). Going up and down every aisle is inefficient. Rather than walking through corridors looking for signs, people prefer to use the products themselves to navigate. In grocery stores, people use signpost brands (e.g. Coca-Cola for soft drinks, Evian for bottled water, Guinness for stout) to identify different categories. Signpost brands have been found, in fMRI studies, to activate parts of the brain associated with anticipated reward. The importance of signposts has implications for online shopping websites, which are often designed with little understanding of how people shop. Scamell-Katz claims that 3D virtual stores are the future of online shopping.
Chapter 5 further explores the impact of attention. This is relevant because the typical person receives about 3000 brand messages a day (in the form of advertisements, packaging and logos). But how many of these messages do people actually remember? The answer, according to the author's research, is just one. This is due to something called inattentional blindness: we do not really "see" everything that is in front of us, because our brains do not process most visual information. Furthermore, the way we process information depends on the task we are preoccupied with; thus, if you instruct subjects to count how many times a basketball gets passed back and forth, the majority will fail to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking by! This has implications for advertisements, as the author notes:
"The amount of time spent in a store choosing and deciding what brand to buy in negligible. Despite this, some advertisers seem to imagine that seeing the product in-store will somehow stimulate the advert to play in the shoppers' heads and remind them of why they should buy it." (p. 90)When Scamell-Katz and his team performed more eye-tracking experiments, they found that shoppers predominantly use simple visual cues like color and shape (together called colourshape) to recognize brands they regularly buy. For most everyday categories, we don't read complex information -- we recognize basic learned patterns. This explains why some brand redesigns flopped: the new design didn't match the old design's colorshape cues. The author also claims that around 80% of point-of-sale (POS) expenditures are a waste of money. One example of this comes from a retailer that installed 55 large televisions inside a superstore, suspended from the ceiling for the purpose of in-store advertisements. Scamell-Katz interviewed shoppers leaving the store and found that only two shoppers (out of 300) could recall possibly seeing a television screen. Even posters on hypermarket floors can fail when their content is too complex. Generally, shopping missions are time-constrained and shoppers are focused on the task ahead: finding products on the shelves.
The theme of "autopilot" shopping continues in Chapter 6, which asks how stores convert shoppers into purchasers. At least in the fashion industry, stores are actually bad at this, because they make their merchandise hard to see and touch, and because salespeople do not initiate conversations at the right moments. But clothing is a relatively high-involvement category, and in other categories like milk, shoppers rely on simple cues rather than complex information. Such shortcuts lead to behavioral scripts, like repeatedly buying the same product. As Scamell-Katz writes: "Operating with the cognitive map of the geography of the store, coupled with the signpost brands triggering recognition of the categories, are often learnt scripts of behaviour [sic] associated with that category" (p. 107). This means that for the most part, people stick to their "usual choice". One tactic marketers can use to increase the odds that a consumer will switch brands is to place their brand close to the rival brand or the signpost brand on the shelf. As for pricing, its role is biggest when we first decide to buy a brand, but once the choice becomes habitual we tend not to keep a close eye on price.
Habituation is a force to be reckoned with, as Chapter 7 explains. We tend to buy the same brand regularly not because it is truly better, but because it "sort of does the job well enough" (especially for unimportant categories like salt, household cleaners, pet food, ketchup and so on). Shoppers don't walk through a five-stage decision tree every time they go shopping -- it would be inefficient to continually reevaluate a choice. However, for categories that are purchased less frequently and are more expensive, there is somewhat more active decision-making going on. Most customers are never 100% brand loyal, and there are always people who are less committed to a choice and more available for conversion. The author concludes that habituation is a more useful concept than loyalty. Brands need to compete in terms of mental availability (i.e. distinctive imagery) and physical availability (i.e. in-store presence) while presenting their products to groups of consumers with differing levels of commitment -- just like supermarkets need to cater to different shopping missions.
Chapter 8 opens with a bold declaration that "most marketing is largely unsuccessful". Scamell-Katz's reasoning for this claim is actually a summary of the book so far, so it would be apropos to reproduce it here:
"So far, we have seen how must of us shop regularly for groceries using familiar stores whose layouts we have come to learn. We have described the importance of the shopping mission when choosing which store to use, and how we often shop without a list but instead, use the store as a visual prompt to remind us of the things we need. The way that our brains work and the way we see have a huge impact on our ability to notice the things that the retailers and brand managers are trying to sell us. In fact, the mundane, routine task of finding the products that we want means we actually ignore most of what is around us. Instead, our visual search is guided by signpost brands that serve to introduce the category (such as soft drinks) and then stimulate a learnt behavioural script. We have discussed the importance of visual cues, notably a product's colour and shape, in helping us find the brand we want. Each category is shopped differently and our interaction is primarily driven by how much choice we need to make and how often we repeat this task in each particular category. We have also discussed how in many categories we tend to buy the same brands repeatedly." (p. 131)Brand managers waste money because they fail to understand how people really think. Most shopping is not on impulse but is planned. When a planned brand is not available, shoppers tend to buy a second acceptable brand rather than go to another store. In categories where there are always heavy promotions, shoppers learn to look for promotions rather than brands. Great marketing can persuade people, but only if it manages to establish positive emotionally-laden memories, because all decisions involve emotional filtering. Advertising should help people build an emotional packet of information about the brand (an idea the author says is inspired by Antonio Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis). A strong emotional packet can make a brand easier to recognize. Eye-tracking studies show that visibility on the shelf is still important. People look at the products rather than at signs, price tags or in-store ads. Therefore, a brand's packaging should be linked to external marketing.
Another element of the emotional packet is the actual consumption experience, as discussed in Chapter 9. When we do grocery shopping, we make purchase decisions on the basis of shortcuts like brand visibility, packaging cues, position on the shelf, and sometimes even price. For high-involvement products, such as mobile phones, we may seek information to learn about the product. In any case, our anticipated experience of using the product plays a crucial role. The product may deliver an emotional benefit (e.g. status or self-expression), engage our senses, and/or be ergonomically pleasing. All of these contribute to our memory of a brand, and hence its emotional packet. Even after we have chosen a product, a brand designer can still influence how frequently we use the product by making the packaging visible in our cupboard or fridge. (Scamell-Katz draws a distinction between a brand's "shopper face" and its "consumer face".)
The final factor influencing the emotional packet is pre-store marketing. In Chapter 10, the author mentions how neuromarketing is being used to understand the effects of advertising. In 20th-century linear models of advertising, people "have been assuming a level of rigour, objectivity and understanding in the minds of consumers that is simply not there" (p. 162) and newer research highlights the role of unconscious and emotional decision-making. For instance, Tim Ambler has argued that memory, affect and cognition (MAC) combine to form a consumer's brand experience, which partly explains purchase intentions. Under this model, most decisions involve only memory and affect. According to Robert Heath, our brains can unconsciously learn colors, shapes and sounds when we watch advertisements in a low-attention state. Even if we do not necessarily recall the information, it may help us recognize a familiar brand. Nevertheless, advertising is just one factor influencing the emotional packet, and ad expenditure that is not tied to the shopper's journey may potentially be wasted.
In the last chapter of The Art of Shopping, Siemon Scamell-Katz looks toward the future of shopper research. Of course, he believes that brands and retailers will operate with his team's findings in mind:
"In particular, they will consider the level of habituation, depth of commitment to brands at the fixture, the established search and selection processes for habitual and available shoppers, shopping styles at the fixture, established behavioural scripts, signpost brand responses and use of cognitive maps and, perhaps most importantly, the colourshapes of brands." (p. 173)He warns brands against ending up in a spiral of ever-deeper promotions, or developing an excessive number of new product line extensions. Instead, brands should strive to become truly differentiated with meaningful values. Moreover, brick-and-mortar stores should be made differently from online stores. For example, retailers could design stores to be more efficient and entertaining, while offering exclusive new products, customized offers, and space for social activities. In other words, stores will be less like warehouses, and more "enlightened".
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In addition to the above summary, there are a couple of interesting tidbits throughout the book that I thought were worth sharing:
- Most retail profits come not from selling products but from promotions paid for by the manufacturers.
- Marketing has existed for as long as there has been the need to persuade people to exchange. The agricultural revolution and subsequent specialization of labor were key events in making this a norm.
- About 8 out of 10 people do their groceries at the same store, and the majority of shoppers at a supermarket are usually familiar with that store.
- During interviews, shoppers will often say that a store is "fantastic", yet films of them journeying the store indicate that they experienced inconvenience.
- Loyalty cards are more about collecting data than about loyalty. In fact, the average European shopper with loyalty cards will often buy from other stores anyway.
- Eye-tracking studies show that people do not look at the fascia board (i.e. signage) where a store's name is displayed. The most important part of the exterior is the view through the door.
- Half of the people inside a store are unable to recall the name of the store!
- About a quarter of shoppers will claim that they have shopped through the whole store, when in fact film footage of them shows that they rarely cover more than half the store.
- When department stores use a so-called "racetrack" walkway with a strong visual and sensory separation from the rest of the floor, shoppers seem to get "stuck" on the racetrack, as they unconsciously keep their feet from crossing the line and stretch to reach products.
- People learn the colorshape of promotional materials, such that they often do not read what the promotion is. Thus, shoppers are often unaware that their purchases are promotions, or pick up just one product when there is a "buy one get one free" offer!
- Drinks company Diageo managed to sell more and save millions at the same time by removing ineffective POS materials at their bar outlets.
- Less than 20 per cent of shoppers in fashion stores actually buy anything.
- In the tea and coffee category, shoppers spend an average of just 12 seconds in the category -- this rises to 16 seconds for deodorants. (Incidentally, some people test the roll-on deodorant in the store!)
- The most valuable shelves are not exactly at eye level, but about 15 to 30 degrees downward.
- The average British household repeatedly rotates just eight meals.
- Simply knowing that a drink is Coca-Cola (and not Pepsi) can increase perceived enjoyment and increase activation of brain areas related to reward as detected via fMRI.
- By reducing the assortment of yogurts by 40 percent, an Italian retailer actually increased their sales because most shoppers didn't notice anything different except that the range became more visible. This relates to Barry Schwartz's paradox of choice.
- False memories can be a problem for brands; in an advert for Skoda, the car was confused for a Citroën.
- Single female cat owners in the U.S. are willing to pay for luxury packaged food for their cats while skimping on the quality of their own prepackaged meals.
- Among poor families in India, OMO-brand washing powder is used not to wash clothes, but to be displayed as a status symbol!
There are a number of related books, although I have not yet read any of them and so cannot vouch for them:
- Paco Underhill, "Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping", Simon & Schuster.
- Herb Sorensen, "Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing", Pearson.
- Martin Lindstrom, "Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy", Crown Business/Broadway Books.
- Phil Barden, "Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy", John Wiley & Sons.
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