Outside the Box

Published on this site: November 1st, 2006 - See more articles from this month

Understanding psychology and human behavior can come in handy for the
marketer, particularly those who operate at the retail level. There are a few tricks retailers use that play on your unconscious to relax you, or change your in-store behavior.

Think about babies for a moment. Are you relaxed now? Some stores add baby powder scent to their air conditioning to make people think about newborns. This is supposed to relax them. What do you call a relaxed shopper? A buyer.

Retailers often use other canned smells to make you a more active shopper. Some supermarkets pump the smell of baking bread into their air conditioning all day long. This gives the impression that they are always baking something.

Men present a unique problem to retailers. They tend to walk directly to the item they want, pick it up and walk back the way they came to the register. The "Boomerang Effect", as it is called, is not good shopping behavior. To maximize shopper and product contact time, retailers place their major items and brands in the middle of aisles to make sure you have to walk the furthest to reach them. Or, often retailers locate men's items upstairs to keep them in the store longer. This is an idea that was stolen from groceries, which long ago learned to place bread, milk and eggs at the back to make you walk through everything else to get your staples.

In the aisles with more expensive items, groceries often place smaller tiles on the floor. When the shopping cart passes over the smaller tiles the wheels click faster. So, it seems like you are going really fast and you will slow down and spend more time in that aisle. Also, department stores use the transition between carpet and tile to steer customers where they want them to go.

Vanity thy name is shopper. Stores use mirrors to slow you down because you can't pass one without checking yourself out.

The color purple, not the Oprah movie, the real color is most likely to make you feel like spending money. Restaurants use red to make you excitable, causing you to eat and drink more and faster.

Have you ever noticed how few windows usually can be seen from inside a store? This is to remove the shopper from contact with outside stimuli. If it is going dark outside, retailers don't want you to hurry home to beat the night.

Are there ways to use psychology in your business to affect consumer behavior? Here's a resource with more information on consumer psychology - www.consumerpsychologist.com

Harry Hoover - is managing principal of Hoover ink PR -
http://www.hoover-ink.com. He has 30 years of experience in crafting and delivering bottom line messages that ensure success for serious businesses like Bank of Commerce, The Bray Law Firm, Brent Dees Financial Planning, Focus Four, Levolor, New World Mortgage, North Carolina Tourism, TeamHeidi, Ty Boyd Executive Learning Systems, VELUX, and Verbatim.