Why We Buy

C
LICK
H
ERE
T
O
S
IGN
U
P

For some of you, the book you hold in your hands may be an old friend—given as a gift, bought in an airport, secured through Amazon or assigned at a school or training progam. Thanks for picking it up again. Most volumes stocked in the business section of a bookstore have a short shelf life. They zoom and crash and are forgotten within a year. This book has lasted ten years and is available in twenty-seven foreign editions. I had no idea when pen first went to paper back in 1997 that my story would appeal to so many readers.

From Russia to Japan, from Spain to Thailand, I've had visits and e-mails from readers just wanting to say hi, many looking for a job and not a few telling me their own stories. University professors from China, a Marxist minister in the Bengali provincial government, a jewelry designer from Spain—the list goes on. My favorite pieces of correspondence came from a man who ran a septic tank cleaning business in Missouri. The letter was handwritten on lined paper. I don't know how many letters that man writes a year, but I know I was privileged to get one of them. He'd read the book and wanted my advice on what color to paint his truck.

In 2007, I reread
Why We Buy
and realized that parts of the story had progressed and that some of the examples I'd used were dated. The book needed freshening and that's what it's gotten. If you liked it the first time, you'll like it even better the second. If you're picking it up for the first time, whether you love or hate shopping, this is a good, entertaining read, and you'll never look at the world of shopping and consumption the same way again.

Paco Underhill
January 2009

I
INSTEAD OF SAMOA, STORES:
THE SCIENCE OF SHOPPING

1. A Science is Born

2. What Retailers and Marketers Don't Know

II
WALK LIKE AN EGYPTIAN:
THE MECHANICS OF SHOPPING

3. The Twilight Zone

4. You Need Hands

5. How to Read a Sign

6. Shoppers Move Like People

7. Dynamic

III
MEN ARE FROM HOME DEPOT,
WOMEN ARE FROM BLOOMINGDALE'S:
THE DEMOGRAPHICS OF SHOPPING

8. Shop Like a Man

9. What Women Want

10. If You Can Read This You're Too Young

11. Kids

IV
SEE ME, FEEL ME, TOUCH ME, BUY ME:
THE DYNAMICS OF SHOPPING

12. The Sensual Shopper

13. The Big Three

14. Time

15. Cash/Wrap Blues

16. Magic Acts

V
SCREEN SAVERS, JET LAG AND WHIRLING DERVISHES:
THE CULTURE OF SHOPPING

17. The Internet

18. Come Fly with Me

19. Windows of the World

20. Final Thoughts

Acknowledgments

O
kay, stroll, stroll, stroll…
stop.

Shhh. Stay behind that potted palm. Get out your clipboard and pen.

Our subject is the fortyish woman in the tan trench coat and blue skirt. She's in the bath section. She's touching towels. Mark this down—she's petting one, two, three, four of them so far. She just checked the price tag on one. Mark that down, too. Careful—don't get too close—you don't want her to see you. She picked up two towels from the tabletop display and is leaving the section with them. Mark the time. Now, tail her into the aisle and on to her next stop.

Thus begins another day in the vineyards of science, specifically the science of shopping. But let's start by addressing a fundamental question: Since when does such a scholarly discipline even exist?

Well, if, say, anthropology had devoted a branch of itself to the study of shoppers in situ (a fancy Latin way of saying shoppers out shopping), interacting with retail environments (stores, but also banks and restaurants), the actual, physical premises, including but not limited to every
rack, shelf, counter and table display of merchandise, every sign, banner, brochure, directional aid and computerized interactive informational fixture, the entrances and exits, the windows and walls, the elevators and escalators and stairs and ramps, the cashier lines and teller lines and counter lines and restroom lines, and every inch of every aisle—in short, every nook and cranny from the farthest reach of the parking lot to the deepest penetration of the store itself,
if
anthropology had already been studying all that…and not simply studying the store, of course, but what, exactly and precisely—scientifically—human beings do in it, where they go and don't go, and by what path they go there; what they see and fail to see, or read and decline to read; and how they deal with the objects they come upon, how they
shop,
you might say—the precise anatomical mechanics and behavioral psychology of how they pull a sweater from a rack to examine it, or read a box of heartburn pills or a fast-food restaurant menu, or grab a shopping basket, or react to the sight of a line at the ATMs…again, as I say,
if
anthropology had been paying attention, and not just paying attention but then collecting, collating, digesting, tabulating and cross-referencing every little bit of data, from the extremely broad (How many people enter this store on a typical Saturday morning, broken down by age, sex and size of shopper group?) to the extremely narrow (Do more male supermarket shoppers under thirty-five who read the nutritional information on the side panel of a cereal box actually buy the cereal compared to those who just look at the picture on the front?), well, then, we wouldn't have had to invent the science of shopping. In 1997, when this volume was originally written, the academic world knew more about the marketplace in Papua New Guinea than what happened at your local supermarket or shopping mall. Twentieth-century anthropology wasn't about what happened in your backyard.

In 1997, I'd been fighting for what I knew was right for more than ten years—and since then, a whole lot has changed. Companies across the world are now employing anthropologists to staff what have been popularly titled shopper and consumer insight groups. Ethnologic studies (that is to say, a science that breaks down humans into races, cultures and their various obvious and not-so-obvious characteristics) are part
of mainstream market research. But when I first hung out my shingle, my academic colleagues thought I was selling out, and the marketers and merchants I sought to serve looked at me as an alien from a distant planet.

Down the hall from my office then and now is an equipment room with more than one hundred cameras. Eight-millimeter video cameras, direct to hard drive, digital, even a few ancient Super 8 time-lapse film cameras. To keep track of them, every camera is assigned a name—the video cameras are named after rock stars, the digital stills are signs of the zodiac. We find giving a camera a name rather than a number helps it last longer, and when Jimi Hendrix feels poorly, he gets to the shop faster than if he were camera number 26. In that same equipment room are piled cases of blank eight-millimeter videotapes, two hours per tape, five hundred tapes to a case. Across the world, we have now shot more than fifty thousand hours of tape per year. We also have dozens of handheld computers, or PDAs, on which we painstakingly jot down the answers from the thousands of shopper interviews we conduct; there are laptops in there, too, plus all manner of tripods, mounts, lenses and other camera accessories, including lots of duct tape. Oh, and many well-worn hard-shell cases for everything, because it all travels. A lot. The studio next to the equipment room has two complete digital editing suites and eleven stations at which to watch all those tapes—because everything we shoot, we look at. We have more than enough gear in that room to make broadcast-quality documentaries and, while we're at it, to equip a good-sized university's school of social anthropology or experimental psychology, assuming the university has a deserved reputation for generating tons of original research gathered from all over the globe.

Even with all that high-tech equipment, though, our most important research tool for the past thirty years remains the piece of paper we call the track sheet, in the hands of the individuals we call trackers. Trackers are the field researchers of the science of shopping, the scholars of shopping, or, more precisely, of
shoppers.
Essentially, trackers stealthily make their way through stores following shoppers and noting everything they do. Usually a tracker begins by loitering inconspicuously near
a store's entrance, waiting for a shopper to enter, at which point the “track” starts. The tracker will stick with the unsuspecting individual (or individuals) as long as he or she is in the store (excluding trips to the dressing room or the restroom) and will record on the track sheet virtually everything the shopper does.

Befitting a science that has grown up in the real world, meaning far from the ivory towers of academia, our trackers are not stamped from the usual researcher mold. In the beginning we hired graduate environmental psychology students, but we found they were often unsuited to the work—more often than not, they came to the job burdened with newly learned textbook theories they wished to prove or disprove. As a result, they didn't possess the patience necessary to watch many shoppers at great length to see what they actually do. Creative people, however—playwrights, artists, actors, novelists, a puppeteer—have proven to be perfect for this work. They have no theories to uphold or demolish, just open minds and boundless curiosity about what people do and how and why they do it. They are dispassionate yet avid observers with no agenda except for wanting to accurately document how human behavior plays out in the retail arena. They manage to see the forest, the trees and everything in between.

When we find someone with the temperament and the intelligence for this work, we first put them through a training session in our office. There's a lot to learn—how do I watch and simultaneously take notes, for instance, or how can I tell whether someone is reading a sign or just staring at the mirror next to it? We have to teach the most important tracker skill of all: How do I stand close enough to study someone without being noticed? Because it's crucial to our work that shoppers don't realize they're being observed. There's no other way to be sure that we're seeing natural behavior. Fact is, we're all still surprised by how close you can stand to someone in a store and still remain invisible. We find that positioning yourself behind the shopper is a bad idea—we all pick up on the sensation that we're being watched. But if you stand to the side of a shopper, his or her peripheral vision reads you as just another customer—harmless, in other words, and barely worth noticing. From that position you can get close enough to see exactly what
a shopper is doing. You can be sure that he's touched, say, nine golf gloves, not eight or ten. Then we throw the tracker-hopefuls out into the real world, into a store setting, to see them in action. Most of them wash out at this point—you can teach technique, but not the smarts or the slight case of fascination required to do this work well. It's weirdly addictive, and many of our trackers have been with us for a decade or more.

John has been doing fieldwork for my company, Envirosell, for more than ten years, in between working as a kindergarten teacher. Trained to monitor five-year-olds, does he have patience? Oh, yeah. He also just completed his two-hundredth fieldwork assignment. He's of medium height, with brown hair, a spare build, crinkles in the corners of his eyes and big broad feet. He has no trouble standing all day. In our tracker pool, we also have rookies who are still getting twenty trips under their belts, intermediate-level trackers, master trackers, team leaders…and Noah, who, after thirteen years of tracking and team leading, now directs the forty-plus members of our tracking staff based out of our home office in New York City. We found Noah in Nashville. He was a last-minute replacement, a struggling music student who three hours into the job had found his calling. The first time he walked into my office he was dripping with nervous sweat (he'd never been to New York before). Thirteen years later, I still can't break him of the habit of calling me Mr. Paco.

In addition to measuring and counting every significant motion of a single shopping trip, our trackers also have to contribute incisive field notes describing the nuances of customer behavior and make good inferences based on what they've observed. These notes add up to yet another, this time anecdotal, layer of information about a particular environment and how people use it. Our trackers crisscross this continent, as well as the globe. As of 2008, we have offices in Mexico City, São Paulo, Milan, Bangalore, Moscow and Tokyo, and each office has its own tracker pool. All across the world, Envirosell trackers spend more time in stores in a month than most people do in several years. They visit every kind of retail business imaginable, from banks to fast-food restaurants to high-end fashion boutiques to hangar-sized discounters.
Since 1997, we've worked hard to expand our repertoire of field sites, adding concert halls, stadiums, train stations and airports as well as libraries, museums, hotels and websites (more about those later). But our sweet spot remains what we've always done. Of the world's fifty largest merchants, we've worked with approximately half, and in the U.S. alone, our clients include more than a third of
Fortune
magazine's top one hundred corporations.

As for the forms our trackers use? They're also marvels of data gathering. They have evolved constantly over the three decades we've been doing this research and are, without a doubt, the key to the entire enterprise, a great achievement, if I may say so, in the art of information storage and retrieval, nondigital division. We have tried scanning systems, exotic software packages…and we keep going back to the same old system. It works, it's flexible, and thanks to Wite-Out and a copy machine, it can be changed on a dime and on the fly. Our ability to react to what and whom we find walking through the door of wherever location we go is critical to our success. I'd guess that at least one third of the time we go on location, we end up finding something very different than what our client told us we'd find. The store has six aisles and not seven, the shelf layout has been mysteriously reversed or that interactive machine we were hired to study arrived at the store nearly a month ago and hasn't worked since.

Our earliest track sheets were able to record maybe ten different variables of shopper behavior. Today we're up to around forty. The form is reinvented for every research project we undertake, but typically it starts with a detailed map depicting the premises we're about to study, whether it's a store, a bank branch, a parking lot (for a drive-thru project) or just a single section—even just one aisle—of a store. The map shows every doorway and aisle, every display, every shelf and rack and table and counter. Also on the form is space for information about the shopper (sex, race, estimate of age, description of attire) and what he or she does in the store. Using the system of shorthand notation we've developed over the years, a combination of symbols, letters and hash marks, a tracker can record, for instance, that a bald, bearded man in a red sweater and blue jeans entered a department store on a
Saturday at 11:07 a.m., walked directly to a first-floor display of wallets, picked up or otherwise touched a total of twelve of them, checked the price tag on four, then chose one, and moved at 11:16 to a nearby tie rack, stroked seven ties, read the contents tags on all seven, read the price on two, then bought none and went directly to the cashier to pay. Oh, wait, he paused for a moment at a mannequin and examined the price tag on the jacket it wore. We'd mark that down, too, just as we'd note that he (the man, not the mannequin) entered the cashier line at 11:23 and exited the store at 11:30. Depending on the size of the store and the length of the typical shopper's stay, a tracker can study up to fifty shoppers a day. Usually we'll have several trackers at a site, and a single project may involve the simultaneous study of three or four locations. For huge stores like a home improvement center or a mass merchandiser, we may put ten or twelve trackers on the floor.

By the end of a job, an incredible amount of information has been crammed onto those sheets. They come back to the office, where an experienced clerk spends another day or so typing all the information, every single notation on every track sheet, into a computerized database. Over the years, we've spent tens of thousands of dollars and countless frustrating hours with computer programmers, trying to come up with a database that could handle the kind of work we do. The big problem is that while we crunch the same numbers in the same ways from job to job, each project usually requires us to do something a little differently—to collect different kinds of data or to devise new comparisons of facts we just uncovered. We've hired fancy consultants who spend six months at a crack with us, trying to build us a computer system. They ask us to list everything we want our program to do, but every week we add six new things to the list that negate all their work from the previous month. And of course, our turnaround time has to be swift, so there's no time to change the system completely for each job—we may need to do one new comparison for a project today and then not have to perform that function again for seven months.