Why We Buy (8 page)

Then they either leave or they go to the condiments. You can place promotional materials over the condiment bar, though it's pointless to advertise burgers there—too late. But it's a good opportunity to tell diners something about dessert. This is a lesson in the logical sequencing of signs and fixtures. There's no point in telling shoppers about something when it's too late for them to act on it. For instance, it's a good idea to position signs for shoppers standing in line to pay, but it's a bad idea if those signs promote merchandise that's kept in the rear of the store.

After the condiment bar, diners go to their tables to eat. A few years ago, there was a move in the fast-food business to banish all dining area clutter—the hanging signs, mobiles, posters and “table tents” (those three-sided cardboard things that keep the salt and pepper company). That was a mistake, it turned out, one that was made because the store planners failed to notice what was going on in their own restaurants, specifically the social composition of the typical fast-food meal.

We tested table tents in two types of restaurants—the “family” restaurant, like Applebee's or Olive Garden, and the fast-food establishment. In the family place, the table tents were read by 2 percent of diners.

At the fast-food joints, 25 percent of diners read them.

The reason for that dramatic difference was simple: At family restaurants, people usually eat in twos, threes or fours (or families!). They're too busy talking to notice the signs. But the typical fast-food customer is eating alone. He's dying for some distraction. Give him a tray liner with lots of print and he'll read that. Give him the first chapter of the forthcoming Stephen King novel, and he'll read
that.
One of our clients, Subway, was printing napkins boasting of how much healthier their sandwiches were than burgers. Go a step further, we advised—print the napkins with a chart comparing grams of fat. In the seating area of a fast-food restaurant you can practically guarantee that customers will read messages that would be ignored anywhere else. There's an obvious role model: the back of the cereal box.

You can see, then, how a fast-food restaurant is zoned: The deeper in you are, the longer the message can be. Two or three words at the door;
a napkin filled with small type at the tables. I passed a fast-food place the other day with a perfect window sign. It bore this eloquent phrase: big burger. Only when you entered the place did you come upon another sign explaining the details of the teaser. (They were selling…big burgers.) That's smart sign design—breaking the message into two or three parts, and communicating it a little at a time, as the customer gets farther into the store. Thinking that every sign must stand on its own and contain an entire message is not only unimaginative, it's ignorant of how human brains operate. It even takes the fun out of signs—I can remember the Burma-Shave (an early shaving cream brand) billboards on the way to my grandfather's farm. It was the sequencing of the billboards that made them such icons of American humor.

Another lesson in sign language comes courtesy of the United States Postal Service, for which we performed a huge study to help design the post office of today, complete with a self-service postal store and easy-to-use weighing and packaging stations.

In one of the prototype stores we studied, hanging behind the cashiers were large banners promoting various services. Fourteen percent of customers read those banners, our researchers found, for an average of 5.4 seconds each. There were also posters pushing stamp collecting hung on the walls to either side of the cashiers. Fourteen percent of customers read those, too, for an average of 4.4 seconds each.

Which is pretty good in the sign world. And not unexpected, because when you're in line at the post office, what else is there to do? The area behind or to the side of the cashiers is almost always the hottest signage real estate.

The post office also hung signs and installed electronic menu boards
meant to be seen by customers using the writing tables. Those signs were read by just 4 percent of customers, for an average of 1.5 seconds each. Mobiles hanging over the weighing stations were read by just 1 percent of customers, for an average of 3.3 seconds each. Which was no surprise—when you're writing or weighing, you're not reading. Those signs were as good as nonexistent.

Banks also expend a lot of energy trying to figure out which signs work and which don't. Banks, fast-food restaurants and the post office have this in common: lots of customers standing still and facing the same direction—ideal opportunities for communication. The difference is that banks are some of the worst offenders in the art and science of sign placement. I can take you to branches of the world's biggest and most sophisticated financial institutions where placement of merchandising and informational materials is laughably inept. There are church bake sales and kiddie lemonade stands that exhibit better signage sense than some banks I can name. Five minutes from my office is a branch of Citibank where you can find this merchandising innovation: a cheap card table covered by the cheapest blue plastic tablecloth you've ever seen, atop which someone tossed some brochures for car loans and mortgages, joined by a TV monitor, once intended perhaps for showing in-branch videos but now unused and completely covered by a blanket of dust. The table is jammed into a corner in the front of the bank, just a few feet from the customer service desk. It's so bad that it's funny. A lot of bank signage can claim that distinction.

A California bank client decided—correctly—that it would be smart to promote its new free checking policy by hanging outdoor banners visible from the heavily traveled road beyond its door. And then it decided—incorrectly—that the banners should say please come in and ask a friendly banker to explain our wonderful new free checking policy or something to that effect. Drivers would have had to pull over to read the sign, it was so verbose. On a highway, two words—maybe something catchy, like free checking—must be made to suffice.

We did a study for a Canadian bank that had just installed some very sophisticated backlit displays on the customer writing tables. These
exhibits detailed the various services and investments the bank offered.

They were quite beautiful. Nobody read them.

Again, when you're filling out a deposit slip or endorsing checks, you're concentrating too hard to think about anything else. And once you've filled out the paperwork, you race to get into line.

We delivered our sad findings, and the bank's president said, “God, you just saved us from wasting about a million bucks on those damn things.” He still spent the million bucks on in-branch media, of course—but on things that would make a difference.

It was also at a bank that we discovered one of our easiest and most effective fixes ever. We were hired to study all aspects of a bank branch, including the large rack that held brochures describing the money market funds, certificates of deposit, car loans and other services and investments offered. The rack was hung on the wall to the left of the entrance, so you'd pass it on your way in.

Everyone passed within inches of it. No one touched it.

Again, the reason seems obvious: You enter a bank because you have an important task to perform. Nobody goes into a bank to browse. And until you perform that task, you're not interested in reading or hearing about anything else. The fact that the rack was to the left side of the doorway, when most people walk to the right, only made it worse.

We took that rack and moved it inside, so that customers would pass it as they exited rather than entered, and we had a tracker stand there and watch. With no other change, the number of people who actually saw the rack increased fourfold, and the number of brochures taken increased dramatically.

Banks aren't the only places where task-oriented behavior must be reckoned with. We enter a drugstore intent on seeing the pharmacist and turning over our prescription, and we don't notice a single sign or display we pass until that mission is accomplished. Then we've got some time to kill, only we're in the rear of the store, and all the signs and fixtures are positioned to face shoppers approaching from the front. Or we've gone to the post office for a roll of stamps, and we're not slowing down until we've secured our position in line. Or we're at the convenience store, hot on the trail of barbecue starter fluid, and
until we're sure they have it, we won't be distracted by anything else. In all those instances, it's futile to try to tell shoppers anything until after they've completed their tasks. So in that drugstore, for instance, two separate signage strategies must be mapped out—one for shoppers walking front to back, and the other for shoppers walking back to front, from the pharmacist to the front.

At a bank client's branch we studied there was a standing rack of brochures located in the general vicinity of the teller lines. But it was positioned a little too far away—customers standing behind the ropes could barely read the brochure titles, let alone grab them.

“Whose job is it to set up the ropes and stanchions and the brochure rack?” we asked the branch manager.

“Well,” he said, “the cleaning woman mops up every night, and when she's through she puts all that stuff back on the floor.” And sure enough, that cleaning crew didn't know squat about signage.

 

There's one arena of American life where sign design and placement isn't just a somewhat important issue, it's a matter of life or death. I'm speaking about our roads, especially our interstate highway system. There, signs are almost as important as surface and lighting to maintaining safe, well-ordered conditions. As a result, engineers make sure to get the signage right. The principles seem simple enough: no extra words; the right sign at the right place; enough signs so that drivers don't feel ignored or underinformed; not so many signs that there's clutter or confusion. The fact that you can be driving in a place you've never been and know for sure that you're heading in the right direction—without stopping for directions or even slowing down to read a message—is a testament to the power of a smart system of signs. Having driven all over the world, I can say that the American highway sign system is one of the best. The only one that might be a little better is the Swiss one. At least the Swiss do a better job of trimming the brush on the highway so you can read what's up there.

Look at the most common road signs in the United States: stop and one way. A big red octagon with bold white capital letters—what
else could it mean? If you couldn't read it, you'd still stop. one way is a perfect marriage of words and symbol—you catch it from the corner of your eye and you know what it means. The arrow keeps you going in the right direction without forcing you to slow down or even pause to read it. On the road we use a vocabulary of icons, the universal language that tells us what we need to know without words. When you see a sign with a gas pump, or a fork and spoon, or a wheelchair, you understand at a glance. That's the best way to deliver information to people in motion. Also on road signs, the technical aspects are usually perfect—the color combination provides enough contrast, the lettering is large, the lighting is good, and the positioning is just so.

Back in my urban geographer days I took part in a study of the directional signs in the underground concourse at Rockefeller Plaza in New York City. Down there you have no bearings except for what the signs provide, so they're very important. On film, we saw how people moved along until they began to worry that they were getting lost, or until they saw a fork up ahead where they'd have to choose a direction. Then you'd see their heads begin to swivel and their pace begin to slow. Just before that spot, then, was the logical place for a directional sign—something to head off their confusion and worry.

We also saw that their main concern was not to bump into other people while walking. So if they had to really scour the area for a sign, or if the type was so small that they had to get really close to read it, or the sign was small or badly placed, walkers would be torn between looking at the sign and watching where they were going. Any time pedestrians had to slow down or stop, we concluded, it was because the signs had failed to do their job. That's what really taught me the similarity between people walking and drivers driving—the best sign in either case is one you can read fast and is positioned so you can read it while moving. And the only way to achieve that, in most instances, is to break the information down into pieces and lay them out one at a time, in a logical, orderly sequence.

Of course, the only way we discovered all that was by watching lots and lots of pedestrians move through the space. Otherwise, all the signage decisions would have been made by the concourse planners
themselves—the only people in the world who
didn't
need signs to find their way around down there.

 

I'm still trapped in this conference room.

So if I can't get out, I'll make life for this sign as difficult as possible. I'll put it on the floor, leaning against the wall, then I'll take ten paces away and see how it looks. I'll stand practically alongside it and see if it catches my eye. I'll stride by it at my normal pace and see if it registers. I'll turn down the lights. If the sign doesn't work in an imperfect world, it doesn't work. Believe me, real life is even tougher on signs than I am.

We're now arriving at a state of communication overload, and most of the problem is due to commercial messages. Little advertising stickers stuck to your apples and pears are either the cleverest thing ever or the most obnoxious defacement of God's bounty, depending on your point of view. There are too many words telling us too many things, and people are getting mad as hell and they're not going to read it anymore. Even as some opportunities for communication are being missed, many are being cluttered with so many messages that none stands out. One display or sign too many and you've created a black hole where no communication manages to get through.