|
What Shoppers Want
By Paco Underhill
The inside scoop on why customers
do the things they do
It was toward
the end of 1996 that we first encountered Paco Underhill.
He was the leading character in an article by Malcolm Gladwell
in The New Yorker called "The Science of Shopping."
Underhill started out as an urban geographer and invented
the field of retail anthropology. After many thousands of
hours of observing, tracking, filming, and taping shoppers,
he had their--our--behavior pretty well figured out. Our offices
were abuzz with Underhill's findings because they were so...us.
Here's one:
if you're going to open a retail store, don't put it next
to a bank. That's because pedestrians walk right by banks,
maybe even picking up speed as they do so. Since what Underhill
called the "human downshift period" can be a distance of up
to 25 feet, potential shoppers sail right by the store next
to the bank as well. Here's another: most people turn to the
right when they enter a store. So airports put gift stores
on the right and food outlets on the left--people will go
against their natural rightward bent in order to grab a bite
to eat.
As Underhill
points out in the introduction to his book, Why We Buy:
"We are now dangerously overretailed--too much is for
sale, through too many outlets....As the competition gets
heated, there is a need for an edge--a science, if you will....The
science of shopping is meant to tell us how to make use of
all these tools: How to design signs that shoppers will actually
read, and how to make sure each message is in the appropriate
place. How to fashion displays that shoppers can examine comfortably
and easily. How to ensure that shoppers can reach, and want
to reach, every part of a store." In an excerpt from his book
that follows, Underhill, who, according to The New
Yorker, "probably knows more about the strange habits
and quirks of the species Emptor americanus than anyone
else alive," explains that new science. --The editors
How much does
a retailer not know?
More than you
might think. For example, it's a testament to the still vastly
uncharted state of the retail environment that an extremely
intelligent and able man--a senior executive in a multibillion-dollar
chain--could be so very wrong when I asked him this simple
question: How many of the people who walk into your stores
buy something?
You'd know the
answer, wouldn't you, if you were that executive? You might
think so, but trust me, this fellow is no slouch in the knowing
department. He knows quite a bit that goes on in his chain's
thousands of stores, and on a daily basis he learns more--genuinely
important things like total tickets (the number of transactions
and their dollar value); average sale amount; sales within
the various regions; profitability by item, category, and
store; and maybe even the phase of the moon.
He knows all
of that.
But when I asked
him how many of the people who walked into his stores bought
something, his answer was: "All of them, pretty damn near."
And when I say it was his answer, I mean it was also the answer
of the huge, PC-networked, data-chewing, number-crunching,
cipher-loving organization at his command. Everybody there
agreed: what we call the conversion, or closure, rate--the
percentage of shoppers who become buyers--was around 100%.
After all, the corporation reasoned, its outlets were destination
stores, so people didn't go there unless they had some very
specific purchase in mind. Hence, the company believed, the
only time shoppers didn't buy was when what they wanted
was out of stock.
In fact, the
very concept of conversion rate, implying as it does that
shoppers need to be somehow transformed--"converted"--into
buyers, was alien to this man and this corporation (as it
still is to many other successful companies and executives).
MORE
Pages: 1, 2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7
|
