Why We Buy (20 page)

And it's not just for big-ticket items like cars, stereo speakers or designer suits that we need to build our confidence. We performed a study of a newsstand design meant to accommodate a refrigerated soft drink case. One plan hid the cooler discreetly under a counter, then allowed for a display of empty cans to show customers what was available. A very unconvincing scheme, we soon learned—people don't believe the sodas are cold unless they can see the frost on them. The need for proof here (as elsewhere) seems almost instinctual. Once the cases were placed where customers could see inside them, lots of very cold sodas were sold. Convenience stores excel at this—they taught supermarkets that shoppers prefer to buy their soda or beer cold, even if they're not planning to down it on the spot. Warm beer just
feels
unnatural.

A great deal of our firsthand (ha!) experience of the world comes
to us via shopping. Where do we go with the specific intention of closely examining objects? To museums, of course, but don't try touching anything that's not in the gift shop—a retail environment. Stores alone abound with chances for tactile and sensory exploration. Even if we didn't need to buy things, we'd need to get out and touch and taste them once in a while.

The purest example of human shopping I know of can be seen by watching a child go through life touching absolutely
everything.
You're watching that child shop for information, for understanding, for knowledge, for experience, for sensation. Especially for sensation, otherwise why would he have to touch or smell or taste or hear anything twice? Keep looking—watch a dog. Watch a bird. Watch a bug. You might say that ant is searching for food. I say he is shopping.

If you still don't believe all this, go to the home of a product fairly unconcerned with matters of smell, touch or any other sensual experience—a bookstore. There you'll be treated to the sight of shoppers stroking, rubbing, hefting and otherwise experiencing the physical nature of a product where no physical attribute (aside maybe from typeface size) has anything to do with enjoyment. Still, helplessly, we touch. We are beasts like any other, and despite all our powers of imagination and conceptualization and intellectualization and cerebration and visualization, we physical creatures experience the world only via our five senses (and maybe, if you're so inclined, our sixth sense—the Übersense, the metasense, the sense that senses that which cannot be sensed). The world and everything in it reaches out to us and stimulates us through our senses, and we react. So fundamental is our ability to sense and our need to do so that even when we come upon something we can't know via our senses, we speak of it as though we can.

Do you see what I mean? Does this sound right? Do you feel that I'm making sense? Or does my reasoning stink?

Here's a final reason touch is so important. When does a shopper actually possess something? Technically, of course, it happens at the instant that the item is exchanged for money—at the register. But the register is the least pleasing part of the store; nobody is savoring the joy of possession at that moment. In fact, all that is experienced is loss (of
money) and pain (of waiting in line, of waiting for credit card approval, of waiting for the clerk to get the thing into the bag so you can leave). So where does possession take place? Clearly, it's an emotional and spiritual moment, not a technical one. Possession begins when the shopper's senses begin to latch on to the object. It begins in the eyes and then in the touch. Once the thing is in your hand, or on your back, or in your mouth, you can be said to have begun the process of taking it. Paying for it is a mere technicality, and so the sooner a thing is placed in the shopper's hand, the easier it is made for the shopper to try it or sip it or drive it around the block, the more easily it will change ownership, from the seller to the buyer.

That's shopping.

 

So, then, the principle seems simple enough: Shoppers want to experience merchandise before buying it. Therefore, the main function of a store is to foster shopper-merchandise contact. Stores should be begging shoppers to touch or try things, though frequently they make it as difficult as possible instead. I don't care if we're talking about computer keyboards, shower massagers or a new flavor of Jell-O. If a product does something, it should do it in the store. If it has a taste, shoppers should be able to taste it. If it has a smell, shoppers should be able to smell it. In fact, even if its smell has nothing to do with its purpose, we should be permitted to smell it, for there are times when a product's primary use has absolutely nothing to do with how it will be experienced.

For instance: What do air conditioners promise to do?

Make rooms cool. How do we know if they can keep that promise? Oh, ask your friends, or read
Consumer Reports,
or rely on the salesclerk's opinion. You can't tell by looking, or even by turning it on in the air-conditioned store. So, in the absence of hard evidence, you buy the brand you always bought, or the brand that's on sale. But there's another issue here: How does that air conditioner sound? Precisely because cool air
is
cool air does this matter. In the final analysis, sound is one of the few things that distinguish one air conditioner from another. The unit is going to be humming (or clattering) away in your house for
a number of years, after all. In a typical summer, I'll bet I have three or four conversations about air conditioner decibel levels. That's what actual human beings care about when it comes to air conditioners, but you'd never know it when you're shopping for one. The manufacturers and retailers are missing an opportunity here: Maybe if the salesperson were encouraged to flip a few switches to show you how they sound—this one like a prop airplane, that one like a busted blender, this other, more expensive one like a very small kitten purring in its sleep—you'd have some new basis for choosing one over another.

The same holds true, to some extent, for all major appliances—refrigerators and dishwashers and vacuum cleaners and washers and dryers—and even some minor ones, like coffee grinders, food processors and can openers. We can stare at the box and see at a glance if it's the thing we want. We can read the spec sheet to know more or less what it will do. But then we can at least
hear
it in action.

Here's another way that stores miss the point about how we wish to experience products. Judging by how bed linens are packaged, you'd think the most important issue is something called “thread count.” What is thread count? Damned if most people know, but it is posted on nearly every sheet and pillowcase package you see. Bed connoisseurs know thread count. Normal human beings, however, judge a sheet by this measure: How does it feel? The problem is that most sheets are sold in plastic bags, which allow you to look but not touch. So you tear open the bag with your nail and furtively rub the fabric. Now if you decide to buy, you'll choose another package, because who wants one that's been damaged (even if
you
did the damaging)? And either way, you still don't know how that sheet will feel, due to what is known as the “sizing.” What exactly is sizing? Again, damned if anybody knows, but you have to wash it out of new sheets or they'll be stiff and scratchy. So why, then, are shoppers made to touch sheets at their absolute worst? There's a huge bed and bath emporium near my office where display sheets have all been laundered once to pillowy perfection, then hung from hooks so shoppers can know what the linens will feel like once you get them home. Which is all that anybody cares about.

Perhaps the most obvious arena for touch and trial is in clothing.
Today, it's a rare clothes store where shoppers can't touch and fondle and stroke all the goods, whether it's $3 sweat socks or $1,500 designer suits. You still can't go into the Museum of Modern Art and rub a Picasso, but you can walk over to the Calvin Klein or Armani store on Madison Avenue and have your way with masterpieces of ready-to-wear apparel. For the most part, the men and women who design clothing stores do everything possible to allow us to touch all that's for sale. But then, when it's time to design the dressing rooms, they show how completely they misunderstand what happens inside that store.

Where do they go wrong? They think of dressing rooms as bathrooms without the plumbing. They see them as booths where shoppers can strip, don the garment in question, emerge for a quick, dutiful glance into a mirror and then switch clothes again. They design dressing rooms with all the romance and glamour of changing stalls at public pools. It's the most misguided aspect of store architecture and design, a trade that at its best isn't terribly responsive to retailers or shoppers. They skimp on dressing rooms, I believe, because they don't want to “waste” space by making these rooms too large. They don't want to blow too much of the budget on rooms that will never be photographed by the fancier design magazines.

In fact, the dressing room may be more important than the floor of the store. It's a truism that improving the quality of dressing rooms increases sales. It never fails. A dressing room isn't just a convenience—it's a selling tool, like a display or a window or advertising. It sells more effectively than all of those combined, if it's properly used. I am an incurable dressing room visitor—I'll make a special trip into a store's dressing room if I'm anywhere in the vicinity. If the coast is clear, I'll even ask if I can look in on women's dressing rooms. The truth is that I could write an entire book about dressing rooms—there's that much to say. Here's a formula we've recognized after studying a great many clothing stores: Not only does shopper conversion rate increase by half when there is staff-initiated contact, it jumps by 100 percent when there is staff-initiated contact
and
use of the dressing room. In other words, a shopper who talks to a salesperson and tries something on is twice as likely to buy as a shopper who does neither.

Still, we did a study for a major national apparel chain, one that has been extremely successful, where the dressing rooms were just dismal. Stark, cheesy little cubicles, a long corridor of them, with a single, badly illuminated mirror down at the end of the row. In the store we measured, customers who bought spent between one quarter and one third of their total shopping time inside the dressing rooms. In other words, they were captives in a very small space with nothing on their minds but the desire to buy something that will make them beautiful. In any other business, such a time would be avariciously thought of as “the close”—the critical moment when the buyer is vulnerable and ready to take the plunge. In a car dealership, which is itself no great shakes at the art of retailing, there are rooms set aside just to orchestrate this critical juncture. Here, however, there was absolutely no effort to make the rooms even minimally pleasant, or to make the area conducive to seeing the clothes in their best possible light. Neither was anyone viewing this as the moment for bringing all the charm and service of the sales force to bear on the situation. I mean simple things, too, like the clerk escorting the customer to the dressing room, then going out to find a few belts that might go nicely with the trousers, or a shirt, or a vest, knowing that many times the right accessory sells the garment. When the customer is in the dressing room, he or she is in a total buying mode. But instead of taking advantage of that, most stores squander it.

In fact, I visited the couture floor of a major department store in New York and saw what may have been the most horrible dressing rooms I've ever seen. Dirty, shabby, worn rugs. Harsh, unflattering lighting. The same wall hooks and seats you'd find in a low-rent discounter. Mirrors that distort the viewer's body, and not for the better. When I pointed this out a saleslady sardonically asked, “Doesn't
every
woman want bigger hips?” The furnishings there should be what you'd want in your dream boudoir. The lighting should make everybody look like a million bucks. In fact, the illumination should have several settings, so you could see what a color or fabric would look like in daylight, or under fluorescent lighting, or by candlelight. The mirrors should be large, plentiful and first-rate—they should be like the frame for a flattering portrait, not just a slab of glass hung by clips on a Sheetrock
wall. If there's space for a little anteroom outside the dressing rooms, so much the better. A shopper and his or her companion can really look the goods over out there. A shopper could actually see what it feels like to sit down wearing the garment, an important issue if it's to be worn at a special dinner, for instance. And there should be fresh flowers. Fresh flowers say that someone has paid attention to the room today, not yesterday, and that's the proper message.

Even outside the dressing rooms, apparel stores often mishandle something as simple as mirrors. Most commonly, there are too few of them, or they're placed badly. There should be a mirror anywhere there's merchandise that can be tried on or even just held up for inspection. If you pick up an item and can see in an instant how it looks on you, you might buy it. If you've got to search for a mirror, at least some of the time you'll decide it's not worth the trouble. If the hats are here, the hat mirror should be here, too—not five feet away. And I've seen more than one self-serve shoe department with no mirrors down at floor level. I've seen self-serve shoe sections with no chairs! This all seems so simple. Why is it ever wrong?

You need enough dressing rooms, and they must be clearly marked so they're easy to find, even from a distance. The farther the dressing rooms are from the clothes, the fewer shoppers will bother to make the trip. A truly determined shopper will always find the dressing room, but no store can survive only on the stouthearted. We've seen stores where you have to cross the entire selling floor and then go up or down a few steps to try something on. That's fatal. We did a study for a department store where our video cameras caught shoppers wandering uncertainly, garments in hand, searching (and searching) for the dressing rooms. There were enough of them, but they were hidden in corners, bare little doorways marked by inconspicuous signs. Finding a dressing room shouldn't be a challenge.