Paco Underhill is the founder and managing director of
Envirosell Inc., a New York City-based research consulting company
that studies the interaction between customers and their
environment. If Dalai Lama is right that "shopping is the
museum of the 20th century," then Underhill is the curator.
Part cultural anthropologist and part spy, Underhill has innovated
commercial research with his scientific studies of purchasing
behaviors. When he talks, everyone interested in consumer spending
habits listens. Especially during an economic downturn, when
it's ever more critical to persuade customers to spend money
despite widespread budget-tightening.
His 150 clients worldwide include retailers such as The Gap and
CVS Drug Stores as well as Fortune 500 banks, restaurants and
product manufacturers, including Citibank, Coca-Cola, Estée
Lauder, Hewlett-Packard and McDonald's. Plus, any business
owner can benefit from the ideas Underhill expounds in his
bestselling book, Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping
(Simon & Schuster).
Underhill's ideas aren't purely theory; he and his
"trackers" have closely watched shoppers (currently
50,000 to 70,000 of them per year) for more than two decades. In
addition to discreetly following shoppers around stores,
Underhill's staff studies thousands of hours of footage from
in-store video cameras for each project. Underhill's research
yields conclusions you won't find with traditional consumer
focus groups, because when people know they're being studied,
they tell researchers what they think the researchers want to
know.
"People want
something more from the shopping experience than simply an exchange
of money and merchandise."
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Understanding consumers' shopping habits has become
increasingly critical, as the amount of selling space per U.S.
shopper has more than doubled in the past 25 years. Meanwhile, the
average time per visit a person spends at a shopping mall is down
to about an hour, the lowest ever recorded. Purchasers, Underhill
has found, spend an average of 11.27 minutes in a store, nonbuyers
2.36. Converting browsers into spenders greatly depends on store
design and displays, because 60 to 70 percent of purchases are
unplanned.
But that's just at the store level. Consumers are bombarded
with thousands of marketing messages daily. How do you get them to
respond, especially during troubled economic times? Underhill
recently agreed to let us shop his brain for a few of the
answers.
How do retailers get people who see the
store to come in?
Paco Underhill: Look at all the sightlines. Do a 180-degree
tramp around to see the exposures, what someone might see at an
angle and a distance. There's a difference in being in a strip
mall, in a shopping center or on an urban street.
A store window needs to communicate beyond the people
immediately in front of it. Windows should have one message, not
15. They need to change no less than every two weeks to get people
coming back. People should look forward to window displays as a
place to have fun. MTV has shown us the importance of focusing on
icons rather than words, using visual puns and symbols of having a
good time.
What are the rules once customers step
inside?
Underhill: [Someone] should greet everyone, but don't
ask if they need help because that provides an opportunity to say
no. In the entrance of any retail environment, you have a
decompression zone where the shopper is in transition and not
inclined to take in much information. Asking questions is an
intrusion at that point.
You also don't want to stack people up there interfering
with traffic into the store. This isn't a place for a lot of
messaging or browsing. Also think about the zone in terms of
exiting customers.
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