Inside the Mind of the Shopper The Science of Retailing

by Sorensen, Herb

• ISBN13: 9780137126859
• ISBN10: 0137126859
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-05-06
• Publisher: Ft Pr

Summary

What do you really do when you shop? The answers are fascinating and, for retailers, they're cash in the bank. InInside the Mind of the Shopper, world-renowned retail consultant Dr. Herb Sorensen, Ph.D. uncovers the truth about the retail shopper and rips away the myths and mistakes that lead retailers to miss their greatest opportunities. Every year, says Sorensen, shoppers will spend a quadrillion seconds in supermarkets and they'll waste 80% of that time. Drawing on Sorensen's breakthrough second-by-second analysis of millions of shopping trips, this book reveals how consumers actually behave, move, and make buying decisions as they move through supermarkets and other retail stores. Sorensen presents powerful, tested strategies for designing more effective stores, improving merchandising, and driving double-digit sales increases. He identifies simple interventions that can have dramatic sales effects, and shows why many common strategies simply don't work. You'll learn how to appeal to the "quick trip" shopper; make the most of all three "moments of truth"; understand consumers'powerful in-store migration patterns; improve collaboration between manufacturers and retailers; learn the lessons of Stew Leonard's and other innovators; and much more. Then, in Part II, Sorensen presents revealing interviews with several leading in-store retail experts, including crucial insights on using technology and retailing to multicultural communities.

Author Biography

Herb Sorensen is a preeminent authority on observing and measuring shopping behavior and attitudes within the four walls of the store. He has worked with Fortune 100 retailers and consumer packaged-goods manufacturers for more than 35 years, studying shopper behavior, motivations, and perceptions at the point of purchase. Sorensen’s patented shopper-tracking technology PathTracker® is helping to revolutionize retail marketing strategies from a traditional “product-centric” perspective to a new “shopper-centric” focus. As Baseline magazine commented, “Herb Sorensen and Paco Underhill are the yin and yang of observational research.”

 

Herb has conducted studies in North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America. His research has been published in AMA’s Marketing Research, The Journal of Advertising Research, FMI Advantage Magazine, Progressive Grocer, and Chain Drug Review, and he has been utilized as an expert source for The Wall Street Journal, Supermarket News, and BusinessWeek. Additionally, he is currently a panelist of Retail Wire’s “Brain Trust.”

 

Herb was named one of the top 50 innovators of 2004 by Fast Company Magazine, and shared the American Marketing Association’s 2007 EXPLOR Award for technological applications that advance research, with Peter Fader and his group at the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania. Herb has a Ph.D. in Biochemistry.

 

Table of Contents

Author's Notes and Acknowledgments	p. xv
About the Author	p. xxi
Preface	p. 1
Introduction Twenty Million Opportunities to Buy	p. 5
Twenty Million Seconds: Shopper Time Is Mostly Wasted	p. 8
Time Is Money: Shopper Seconds per Dollar	p. 10
Leaving Money in the Aisles: The $80 Million Question	p. 11
Planning Our Trip	p. 13
Shopping Serengeti	p. 20
Endnotes	p. 22
Active Retailing	p. 23
The Quick Trip: Eighty Percent of Shopper Time Is Wasted	p. 25
Three Shoppers: Quick Trip, Fill-In, and Stock-Up	p. 26
Rise of the Small Store	p. 29
Perils of Promotion	p. 30
The Big Head and Long Tail	p. 31
Heads You Win	p. 34
The Communal Pantry	p. 36
Layered Merchandising	p. 38
The Right Paths for the Right Shoppers	p. 39
Purchase Models and Selection Paradigm	p. 41
Spending Faster	p. 41
Conclusion: Dual Chaos	p. 43
Endnotes	p. 45
Three Moments of Truth and Three Currencies	p. 47
Moments of Truth	p. 48
Seeing the Truth: Eyes Are Windows to the Shopper	p. 50
Reach: Impressions and Exposures	p. 53
Stopping Power (and Holding Power)	p. 59
Closing Power	p. 60
Three Currencies of Shopping: Money, Time, and Angst	p. 62
A Complex Optimization	p. 66
Endnotes	p. 67
In-Store Migration Patterns: Where Shoppers Go and What They Do	p. 69
If You Stock It, They Will Come	p. 70
Understanding Shopper Behavior	p. 73
First Impressions: The Entrance	p. 75
Shopper Direction: Elephant Herds	p. 76
The Checkout Magnet	p. 79
Products Hardly Ever Dictate Shopper Traffic-Open Space Does	p. 79
Managing the Two Stores	p. 88
Five Store Designs	p. 90
Where the Rubber Meets the Linoleum	p. 94
Endnotes	p. 95
Active Retailing: Putting Products into the Path of Shoppers	p. 97
Active Retailing	p. 99
Put the Right Products in the Path of Customers	p. 100
Double ConversionTM: Converting Visitors to Shoppers to Buyers	p. 100
Packaging Must Play the Starring Role	p. 102
Holding Power-How Long Is Long Enough?	p. 105
Stopping and Closing Power: VitalQuadrantTM Analysis	p. 106
Playing the Niche	p. 109
Good Is the Enemy of the Great	p. 111
Endnotes	p. 111
Brands, Retailers, and Shoppers: Why the Long Tail Is Wagging the Dog	p. 113
Where the Money Is in Retail	p. 114
Massive Amounts of Data	p. 115
Shifting Relationships	p. 117
A Refreshing Change: Working Together to Sweeten Sales	p. 118
Beyond Category Management	p. 120
A New Era of Active Retailing: Total Store Management	p. 121
Pitching a Category's Emotional Tone More Precisely	p. 126
Retailers Control Reach	p. 127
The Urgent Need for Retailing Evolution	p. 128
Endnotes	p. 130
Going Deeper into the Shopper's Mind	p. 131
The Quick-Trip Paradox: An Interview with Unilever's Mike Twitty	p. 133
Endnotes	p. 145
Integrating Online and Offline Retailing: An Interview with Professors Peter Fader (The Wharton School) and Wendy Moe (University of Maryland)	p. 147
Endnotes	p. 159
Multicultural Retailing: An Interview with Emil Morales, Executive Vice President of TNS Multicultural	p. 161
Endnotes	p. 177
Insights into Action: A Retailer Responds: An Interview with Mark Heckman of Marsh Supermarkets	p. 179
Conclusions	p. 189
The Internet Goes Shopping	p. 191
Entering the VideoCart Age	p. 192
Cell Phone Invasion	p. 193
Implications for Retailers and Brand Owners	p. 194
The Power of Model Makers	p. 195
The Model Business	p. 196
A Fivefold Increase	p. 196
Endnotes	p. 197
Game-Changing Retail: A Manifesto	p. 199
Appendix	p. 205
Appendix: Views on the World of Shoppers, Retailers, and Brands	p. 207
Excerpts from "Views from the Hills of Kentucky" by	p. 207
Index	p. 213
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Rethinking Retail Preface Rethinking Retail "When you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind." Lord KelvinThe supermarket is my laboratory. After earning my Ph.D. in biochemistry and working for a brief period in the food industry, I traded a lab bench for the aisles of the supermarket. At that time, the supermarket was a black box. Manufacturers and retailers were concerned about how to get shoppers into the door and make them aware of products before their trips, but they assumed that they understood what happened when the shopper was inside. Our research, discussed in this book, shows that in many cases they were wrong.In the early 1970s, I left my practice as a board-certified clinical chemist and started a small laboratory providing a range of services, primarily to the agricultural and consumer packaged goods industries. One of the services that we provided was sensory evaluationconsumer taste test surveys. Following the example of universities, our "tasters" were college and university students. I initially started doing in-store research because a client said that he didn't think the opinions of college students, with their well-known penchant for pizza and ramen noodles, were very representative of typical supermarket shoppers.Being a scientist, rather than a market researcher, it never occurred to me not to interview supermarket shoppers. I approached the manager of a local supermarket, and he readily gave me permission to interview his shoppers. Remember, this was more than 30 years ago, and the local Albertsons manager had an amazing degree of autonomy. When we were in the store, we found that there were many other interesting questions to study.I pursued the in-store research nichefirst as a solo consultant and then as the founder and president of Sorensen Associates, "The In-store Research Companyreg;," and more recently, as Global Scientific Director, Retail and Shopper Insights at TNS, a global research and information services firm. We are now a part of the even larger conglomerate WPP, with a focus on advertising and communications. Although most of our experience is with supermarkets and brand manufacturers of fast-moving consumer packaged goods, we have found our core insights hold for work with supercenters, drugstores, convenience stores, auto parts retailers, building centers, consumer electronics, phone stores, and many other retailers or products. We have completed studies in a variety of channels on every continent except Africa and Antarctica, and the paradigm, metrics, and insights are as relevant elsewhere as in the U.S. (with some differences, as we will examine later). Over the years, we came to appreciate the value of conducting research in the store environment, rather than just doing research about the store, products, and shoppers.We decided to study what shoppers actually did in the store, what they looked at, how they moved through the store, and what they bought. We examined strategies that could be used to increase sales, testing these approaches in the laboratory of real stores with actual shoppers. We traveled with customers down thousands of miles of supermarket aisles and analyzed millions of hours of shopping to help retailers create more effectiv