Why We Buy Read Online Free PDF

high on the wall that the kids had to stand on their toes and crane their necks to see what exactly was at the top of the chart. We suggested to the manager that the chart be lowered, and a week later he called to say that sales of 45s had gone up by 20 percent. Just like that! Lower the chart! It worked!
    We spent a lot of time that weekend watching people in line to pay at what the retail industry calls cash/wraps. Regardless of what store designers and merchandise managers think, in many ways the cash/ wrap area is the most important part of any store. If the transactions aren’t crisp, if the organization isn’t clear at a glance, shoppers get frustrated or turned off. Many times they won’t even enter a store if the line to pay looks long or chaotic.
    At this store, there were several big displays of new releases as soon as you walked in, just a few feet from the cashier. This was fine as long as the store was empty, but if customers were in line, their bodies completely hid the displays. Put up a stanchion and a velvet rope to keep the line off to one side, we suggested, and again, our advice had an instant effect—sales of records from the displays went up immediately.
    Doesn’t all this sound just the least bit obvious? It does to us, too, especially after we’ve spent so much time watching and filming and timing and interviewing and so on. Until then, however, these were the kinds of problems that had remained hidden in plain view.
    While watching the record store customers, we noticed an oddpattern: The LP section (this was pre-CD, remember) was always more crowded than cassettes, but sales were split evenly between the two formats. Following customers, the reason became clear: Because the LP covers were bigger, it was easier to read the song lists and see the photos, so cassette shoppers would browse in LPs, make up their minds, and then go to the tapes section to find their choices. Our suggestion was to make the aisles wider in LPs so that shoppers wouldn’t feel crushed and rushed, a definite sales killer. Also, we thought the store should invest in more durable carpet for the sections that got significantly more traffic.
    My final memory from that study comes from a video clip I still show to audiences: a young man shoplifting classical music tapes. Only after watching him take the tapes over and over on the film did I notice that the bag he slipped them into was from a chain that had no location at that mall. I passed this tidbit on to the client’s security executive and told him that they should be watchful whenever such “wrong” bags were spotted in their stores (remember, this was before security tagging). I got back a note saying that they had prevented several thousands of dollars in theft using that method of detection.
    And thusly, a science was born.
    Â 
    Before the science of shopping existed, there were at least two other ways to measure what took place in a store. The most common way of viewing a store is to simply examine “the tape”—the information that comes from the cash registers, which tells what was bought, when and how much of it. This is how virtually every retail undertaking, from the largest, most sophisticated multinational chain to the corner newsstand, does it. It’s a fine way to see how the store as a whole has performed this quarter, or this year, or on any given day, or even time of day, and is, in the end, the measure of a store’s overall health and growth (or decline) that counts. But as a diagnostic tool, or as a way of figuring out what happens in the store and how, it is not very useful. Sales research records your victories; what it does not do is look at where you are losing. What hurts is when you get the shopper in the door, down theaisle and in front of the product, and for whatever reason, they don’t buy. When businesspeople attempt to infer too much from sales data, it can be downright misleading.