Chapter 12

The Shopping Brain and In-Store Marketing

In This Chapter

Understanding why and how we shop

Exploring the multisensory nature of shopping

Identifying different shopping styles based on personality traits and gender

Discovering ways to design the shopping environment for maximum impact

The impact of brands, products, and advertising all come together at the point of sale in the shopping experience. In this chapter, we look at what brain science and neuromarketing have to tell us about the shopping brain in its “natural” habitat, the physical store. In the next chapter, we look at shopping in the online, “virtual” world, where some things remain the same, but others are quite different.

Understanding the Mind of the Shopper

Shopping is a complex experience for the human mind. It begins with conscious goals and expectations. These goals and expectations are derived from two sources:

Actual personal experience with products and brands

Learned associations acquired through advertising, marketing, and the experiences of others

In the real world (as compared to the virtual world, which we cover in the next chapter), shopping is a physical experience that requires physical movement to accomplish. This seemingly obvious fact is important because the human brain is, in many ways, optimized by evolution to be good at navigating through space to acquire objects in its environment that meet the body’s basic needs (like food and shelter). Not only are we good at it, but we’re motivationally driven to do it, and we draw intense satisfaction from seeking out and finding the things we want and need.

Shopping is the modern equivalent of hunting and gathering. Although it’s directed by conscious goals, it utilizes the same nonconscious processes that were selected in our ancestors’ brains and passed down to our modern minds: the ability to notice novelty and familiarity in our environment, the motivation to approach things that appear good for us and avoid things that don’t, the tenacity to pursue our goals in the face of obstacles and interruptions, and the ability to choose rapidly among alternatives that involve uncertainty and risk.

Shopping: A multisensory experience

We shop in the same way our ancestors hunted and gathered — by searching through physical space using environmental cues flowing into our brains through all our sensory pathways to guide us toward achieving our goals.

Retail stores and other shopping environments (for example, showrooms) trigger all a shopper’s senses and impact the shopping experience through those triggers. These sensory experiences may be deliberately activated by the retailer or may occur by chance, but every experience is absorbed by the shopper’s brain, either consciously or nonconsciously, and has the potential to increase or decrease the likelihood of purchases being made.

Neuromarketing research has begun to focus on these sensory aspects of shopping. Neuromarketing firms have arisen that specialize in testing sensory effects and advising retailers on sensory best practices. Here are some results and implications across the five basic senses:

Sight is critically important to shoppers in a retail environment. Package or product design, displays, signage, colors, typestyles, and other visual elements can be used to attract attention, prime the shopper, fast-track a decision, create positive emotional connections, or aid rapid recognition and ease of processing.

Touch is particularly important when people are shopping for items that come in contact with the body, such as towels, clothes, and health and beauty products, as well as products that are carried around or held, like umbrellas, briefcases, handbags, or wallets. Researchers have found that touch can have surprising priming effects. For example, the weight, texture, and hardness of touched objects can impact our later judgment of people (or brands or products) as being more serious (heavy), difficult (rough), or rigid (hard).

Taste is important with foods and beverages, especially when the purchase can be challenged by high cost or lack of familiarity. In-store taste testing is a proven way to reduce risk and activate goals, which may lead to a trial purchase. Both the display and the person managing the taste testing have been found to prime the consumer, creating positive or negative expectations that can significantly impact the taste experience.

Smell is increasingly exploited by retailers using piped-in fragrances to trigger associations and activate goals related to a purchase. For example, a supermarket may dispense the smell of freshly baked bread, an infant apparel store may disperse baby powder through the air ducts, and a department store may use scents to trigger associations for specific product categories, such as a beach smell in the swimwear section. Scent marketing has become a big business, with specialized agencies claiming clients across a wide range of environments, including banks, auto showrooms, fitness centers, movie theaters, hotels, grocery stores, medical offices, cruise ships, and airplanes.

Sound is also receiving more attention as a means of activating positive associations that prime a purchase. For example, a supermarket in the United Kingdom placed four French and four German wines, matched for wine style and price, on its shelves. A tape deck on top of the shelving unit played French music on even days and German music on odd ones. On French music days, 77 percent of the wine purchased was French; on German music days, 73 percent of the wine purchased was German. Background music marketing appears to face more resistance among shoppers than scent marketing, in part because it’s often consciously perceived as invasive and inappropriate.

These examples highlight the wide variety of ways that sensory inputs can impact retail shopping environments. Neuromarketing testing is particularly well suited to evaluating these sensory effects on the shopping experience because many of them occur below the level of conscious awareness.

Shopping and goal pursuit

As we discuss in Chapter 7, people can pursue goals without knowing they’re pursuing them. They do so with exactly the same set of accompanying behaviors that are observed in conscious goal pursuit. Nonconscious goals operate over time, persist in the face of obstacles, are quickly resumed when interrupted, and impact later moods and behavior, just as conscious goals do.

Shopping pursuits can be broadly classified into two categories, represented by the common phrases doing the shopping (which captures the idea of shopping as a chore) and going shopping (which captures the idea of shopping for pleasure). The goals are quite different for these two kinds of shopping, as is the balance between conscious and nonconscious goals in each experience.

When doing the shopping, the consumer typically wants to minimize the time, money, and effort he or she needs to spend to acquire the needed items. Doing the shopping is a repetitive task, with the consumer habitually going to the same retail outlet and buying the same brands and products. In these instances, the shopper is likely pursuing his or her goals — to minimize time, money, and effort spent — largely nonconsciously. In this shopping mind-set, habit is in charge and vigilance is low. The shopper is less susceptible to explicit marketing messages and has little interest in variety seeking or complex choice tasks. In-store marketing and priming are less likely to change the habitual shopping patterns that characterize doing the shopping.

When going shopping, the shopper is more likely to pursue conscious goals. The reason is anticipation: The shopper is looking forward to the shopping trip and is ready to be stimulated and excited by new offers and ideas. He or she is more likely to engage in variety seeking and welcome the idea of choosing among alternative options. In this mind-set, vigilance is high. The shopper is actively seeking out relevant marketing messages and environmental cues that stimulate, prolong, and heighten the shopping experience.

The same shopper is likely to engage in both going shopping and doing the shopping, but on different occasions and often in different types of stores. What’s engaging when going shopping may be irritating when doing the shopping. Research suggests that some retail categories, such as supermarkets, retail banks, and gas stations, typically fall into the doing the shopping category, while fashion boutiques (for women), computer stores (for men), and specialty stores in general (such as bookshops and high-end furniture stores) are more likely to be going shopping destinations.

To be successful, retailers need to align their in-store marketing strategies with their consumers’ shopping goals. Supermarkets or convenience stores where people do the shopping need to focus on saving the consumer time, money, and effort. They need to make habitual shopping easier with good category management, consistent placement of products, highly visible special offers, and fast checkout. For a going shopping destination, a completely different strategy is likely to be successful, including elements like expert customer service, an unhurried atmosphere, and understated pricing tactics.

Efficiency and convenience are important to reinforce the typical habitual shopper’s goals, but these benefits generally don’t help to develop a strong emotional relationship with the shopper. As a result, loyalty tends to be low. If another retailer offers the consumer an opportunity to save even more time, money, or effort, the shopper may very well switch without a second thought.

Some retailers commonly associated with doing the shopping address this problem by integrating elements into their stores that deliver the emotional benefits typically offered by going shopping. For example, Aldi, an international grocery chain, now includes a “middle aisle” in its stores that offers extremely low prices on goods not typically found in supermarkets, introducing an element of shopping excitement into a store otherwise designed for convenience and efficiency. Costco similarly surprises shoppers with items that are available only occasionally. Essentially, these strategies create anticipation and, potentially, surprise and excitement. These emotional benefits balance the doing the shopping experience by offering some going shopping elements.

There is a brain science principle behind this practice that retailers are probably not aware of. Studies of the reward circuitry in the human brain show that when pleasure is delivered in an unpredictable manner, it creates a greater sense of reward than when it’s delivered in a regular, predictable manner. So, the anticipation of something new and potentially rewarding that’s also surprising is more motivating that the same reward delivered with predictable regularity. Unlike predictable things, unpredictable things have the potential to tell us something new and different about the world. Because they serve as a signal that a big reward might be close by, they naturally command our attention. Retailers, by providing our pleasure-seeking brains with this possibility of unpredictable reward, are directly stimulating this powerful motivational circuitry in our brains.

The activation of both conscious and nonconscious goals is a critical part of any shopping experience. What goals are activated, with what consequences, is a function of the anticipations and expectations of the consumers, combined with the environmental cues provided by the retailer. If expectations and cues are in alignment, the shopping experience is likely to be positive for both the shopper and the store. If expectations and cues diverge, the results are likely to be disappointing for both.

Personality and shopping styles

An important aspect of shopping research is the impact of consumer personality, temperament, and behavioral style on shopping behavior and outcomes. Although most neuromarketing research focuses on how different marketing materials generate different consumer responses, some neuromarketers are beginning to look at the other side of the equation — how different types of consumers may respond to the same marketing materials.

In psychology, this is sometimes called the difference between trait and state explanations. Traits are relatively stable and long-term predispositions to act in certain ways. States are shorter-term responses to specific situations or events. Quickness to anger is a trait; getting angry at a rude salesperson is a state. Traits can be the basis of consumer segmentation models. Most segmentation models used in market research today are either demographic (based on factors like age, gender, and income) or psychographic (based on factors like attitudes, interests, and lifestyles). Neuromarketing opens up the possibility of brain-based segmentation, which might be called neurographic, the segmentation of consumers by trait propensities like extroversion or impulsiveness.

Neurographic segmentation is a relatively new specialty in neuromarketing. Its roots can be found in neurologically based predispositions that appear to significantly impact how people think and act as consumers. Here are three examples of trait propensities that have been found to differ among individuals and influence their general orientation toward shopping and marketing:

Behavioral inhibition system (BIS) versus behavioral activation system (BAS): People vary in terms of their overall approach-versus-avoidance orientation toward the world.

Behavioral activation and inhibition are orientations in individuals’ basic approach-avoidance makeup. High-BIS individuals are more likely to withdraw from highly stimulating experiences, while high-BAS individuals are more likely to seek out and enjoy such experiences. Researchers have found strong relationships between people’s BIS/BAS tendencies and their consumer-related activities. In general, people who score high on BIS are more attracted to offers that emphasize avoiding losses, while people who score high on BAS are more attracted to offers that emphasize achieving gains. High BAS has also been found to be associated with impulsive buying, overeating, and substance abuse, three consumer behaviors that have profound public policy and public health implications above and beyond marketing considerations.

Regulatory focus: People vary in how they approach problems and pursue goals, using either a promotion focus (emphasizing ideals and achieving desirable outcomes) or a prevention focus (emphasizing obligations and avoiding negative outcomes).

Research on regulatory focus has identified several ways in which matching a marketing message or shopping experience to a person’s preferred regulatory orientation — either promotion or prevention — improves motivation, heightens goal pursuit, and increases perceived value from a transaction or shopping experience. For example, people with a promotion orientation are more sensitive to the presence or absence of positive outcomes, so they’re more receptive to offers that stress ideal outcomes, outstanding opportunities, or unbeatable deals. People with a prevention orientation, in contrast, are more sensitive to the presence or absence of negative outcomes, so they’re more likely to be swayed by offers that include strong guarantees, other forms of loss protection, or offers that emphasize meeting obligations or fulfilling responsibilities.

Pain of paying: People vary in the extent to which they experience psychological pain when they part with money, resulting in a distinction between tightwads (people who experience high pain of paying) and spendthrifts (people who experience low pain of paying).

Pain of paying has an established neurological basis in the surprising finding that paying for things activates the same centers in the brain that are activated by physical pain. Paying literally hurts, and it appears to naturally hurt some people more than others. Spendthrifts and tightwads exhibit very different consumer behaviors. Spendthrifts who use credit are three times as likely to carry debt as tightwads who use credit. They’re also twice as likely to have less than $10,000 in savings, while tightwads are twice as likely to have more than $250,000 in savings. Perhaps most interestingly, spending differences between tightwads and spendthrifts are five times greater among men than among women, implying that pain of paying has less of an influence on women’s buying behavior than on men’s buying behavior.

These are just three examples of ways in which people differ in terms of traits or predispositions that impact their shopping styles and preferences. There are many others.

If you’re a retailer or advertiser considering engaging a neuromarketing firm to perform a shopping study, be sure to ask if and how they use neurographic segmentation in their research, and how they would recommend segmenting your test participants in relation to the research topic you want to pursue.

Making Stores More Brain-Friendly

There are three basic tasks that any retail (or online) store must accomplish to make shopping more brain-friendly. All three can benefit from neuromarketing insights and can be assessed with neuromarketing methods:

Finding: Shoppers need to be able to find what they’re looking for, as well as discover new things that they may not have been looking for. How can retailers help shoppers navigate the store environment?

Choosing: Shoppers must be able to choose among alternatives. Choice can be made harder or easier, and many a sale can be lost if the choice task is too daunting. How can retailers enable not just any choice, but an optimal choice for both the shopper and the store?

Paying: Shoppers must be able to overcome the pain of paying. Some shoppers feel this pain more than others, but all shoppers feel it. How can retailers ease the pain of paying?

Providing a successful shopping experience that encompasses finding, choosing, and paying can be done only if the experience is aligned with the shopper’s goals, both conscious and nonconscious. As we illustrate earlier in this chapter, those goals may differ: A store serving a customer who seeks an efficient shopping trip may need to look very different from a store serving a customer who wants to explore and discover. From a neuromarketing perspective, the same principles apply in both cases — they’re just applied differently. For example, both types of retailers can apply neuromarketing concepts like framing, anchoring, and priming, but in different ways to meet different shopper goals.

The shopper and the retailer may not always have the same objectives. The shopper’s goal may be to have a highly efficient shopping trip, but the retailer’s goal may be to retain the shopper for longer, expose him or her to items he or she may not have intended to buy, or perhaps increase the likelihood of an impulse purchase. The retailer can select how to use neuromarketing in light of the underlying retail strategy.

Getting shoppers where they need to be

From the retailer’s point of view, the store is a series of subtle and not-so-subtle cues to help the shopper satisfy his or her explicit goals while, at the same time, triggering and fulfilling additional goals that benefit the retailer. The objective is to maximize dwell time (the amount of time customers stay in the store), because shoppers regularly change their minds after they enter a store.

Shopping researchers provide a number of ways to track consumers moving through a store. Using cellphone signals, stores can create a detailed map of individual and cumulative traffic. Using overhead cameras and facial recognition software, they can estimate demographic characteristics like gender and age breakdowns. Computer-tablet-equipped shopping carts provide another tool for guiding shoppers through the store.

As shoppers navigate the store, displays and imagery act as primes, influencing attention, emotional associations, and selection via the many nonconscious mechanisms we identify in this book. Much of store layout and product display is dedicated to priming. For example, at Whole Foods grocery stores, the idea of freshness is primed with displays of fresh flowers and product-on-ice displays, while the ideas of wholesome and local are primed using in-crate displays that look like they’re straight from the farm and simulated chalk-on-blackboard signage.

In line with the principles of nonconscious goal activation that we describe in Chapter 7, many sophisticated retailers focus on priming broader motivational goals. Nordstrom, for example, works hard to provide cues to shoppers that prime the idea of seeking luxury. Nordstrom’s fashionable settings, attentive service, classical music, and other factors all contribute to putting consumers into a pursuit-of-luxury mind-set as they shop. Coordinated environmental stimuli like these help activate nonconscious consumer goals and create mind-sets that carry over into purchase decisions.

Making choices easier

Once the consumer has found his or her way to the shelf, retailers want to encourage choice, not just browsing. All suppliers, of course, want to encourage choosing their products over the competition’s products. At this point in the shopping experience, many nonconscious and conscious factors come together to contribute to the eventual choice (or non-choice). Brain science offers many insights that retailers and shopping researchers can use to impact the consumer’s decision.

Habitual shoppers’ choices are the easiest to predict. Because they’re acting out behavioral routines without much thought, the retailer’s task is simply to make sure that their habitual patterns aren’t disrupted. As we discuss in Chapter 9, this means maintaining consistent triggers at the point of sale and avoiding any kind of novelty that may disrupt the habitual buying process.

For shoppers who are engaged in deliberate search and discovery, influences on choice are more varied and harder to control. This is because people often don’t know what draws their attention or how they truly feel about products. Also, as we discuss in Chapter 8, people may believe they have stable product or brand preferences, but these are largely constructed and, therefore, can be changed with the right situational cues.

Here are some strategies that brain science research, especially from the behavioral economics tradition, has identified to simplify choice in a shopping situation:

Minimize choice. The most important principle is the simplest — don’t overwhelm the consumer with too many choices. In a classic experiment, grocery store shoppers were offered the chance to taste a selection of either 24 jams or 6 jams. More shoppers stopped to sample the larger variety, but sales to the group that had fewer options were more than five times higher.

Play with pricing. Shoppers often don’t do math (processing fluency at work) and are attracted to “more.” In one experiment, a “50 percent bonus pack” sold 71 percent more than a “35 percent discount,” even though the latter is a slightly lower price per unit. Retailers have learned that clustering items (for example, ten for $10) leads people to buy more. Also, using a high-priced item to create an anchoring effect (see Chapter 8) can make lower-priced items appear less expensive.

Increase shopping momentum. Researchers have found that when people pick up inexpensive, easy-to-buy items displayed at the front of the store, they’re more likely to buy other, more expensive items deeper in the store. Buying one item, no matter how trivial, creates momentum to buy more.

Categorize. Categorization simplifies choice. Consumers in particular like unfamiliar products to be categorized — even if the categories are meaningless! In a study of different coffees, people were more satisfied with their choice if it came from a categorized selection, even when the categories were simply A, B, and C.

Provide decoy items. A $30 item that isn’t selling well by itself will sell better when it’s placed next to a similar item with a $90 price tag. This is sometimes called the five-patty burger principle — if you want to sell more three-patty burgers in your restaurant, put a five-patty burger on the menu next to it.

Decreasing the pain of paying

Every decision to buy something involves a trade-off between the anticipated benefit of possessing the item and the anticipated pain of paying for it. As noted in the discussion of tightwads and spendthrifts in the “Personality and shopping styles” section earlier in this chapter, these anticipations have observable signatures in distinct areas and networks in the brain. Retailers have discovered several tactics for minimizing the pain of paying:

Delay payment. The simplest tactic is to offer a way to delay payment. This moves the pain of paying into the future, where it weighs less heavily on the present choice deliberation. Layaway plans, no-payments-for-three-months plans, and other credit arrangements all encourage buying today by putting off paying until tomorrow. Credit in general operates on this principle. Knowing the bill won’t arrive until the end of the month makes it a lot easier to buy something today.

Offer a money-back guarantee. Immediate pain of paying can be eased by offering a way to undo the purchase later on. Although money-back guarantees are hardly ever invoked, they provide a psychological crutch that can help a consumer overcome pain of payment with the rationale that “I can always take it back.”

Tie the purchase to a rewards program. A rewards program provides another kind of rationale for making an immediate purchase. In this case, it isn’t offsetting the pain directly, but adding to the anticipated benefit of the purchase, thereby offsetting the pain indirectly.

Using Neuromarketing to Test Shopping Environments

Unlike consumer responses to marketing messages or product consumption experiences, both of which result in a mental state that marketers and researchers want to measure (such as liking, approach motivation, familiarity, surprise, and so on), the outcome of interest in shopping is an observable behavior — what the consumer buys, where, when, and for how much. There are lots of intervening mental-state variables that researchers want to measure as well, such as perceived ease of finding products, overall impressions of the store, likelihood to return, and so on, but the ultimate outcome of interest is buying behavior. This simple fact has a big impact on how neuromarketing can be applied most effectively to the measurement of shopping experience.

If buying behavior is the chief outcome variable of shopping research, what shoppers see (and touch, taste, smell, and hear) is the chief input variable. In fact, all the shopping research questions we may imagine can be boiled down to one question: How did that shopper get from everything he or she saw to that one thing he or she bought?

This leads to two important implications for neuromarketing research aimed at shopping.

Behavioral testing — such as presenting consumers with choice scenarios in which situational factors like price and shelf position are varied — is likely to be more useful than measuring mental states alone.

Eye tracking — to measure where consumers are looking in the aisle, at the shelf, and when examining individual products — is likely to be an integrated part of any useful neuromarketing solution.

Challenges in tracking the free-range shopper

Attempting to track the mental states of a shopper in a natural shopping environment poses a number of challenges, and these challenges increase as the data collection technology becomes more sophisticated and sensitive.

Electroencephalography (EEG), for example, which provides very sensitive measures of electrical activity in the brain (see Chapter 16), is also very sensitive to muscle movement. Measuring EEG while a person is naturally walking through a store, turning his or her head, moving his or her eyes, and activating other muscles, is compromised by these other signals, which must be removed from the data stream before the EEG signals can be properly analyzed and interpreted. Similar “noisy signal” problems exist for other sensor-based technologies, such as biometric measures of emotional arousal or attention.

Free-roaming shoppers pose many additional challenges for experimental designs and controls that try to measure mental states, regardless of the measurement technology used. In scientific experimentation, there is always a trade-off between the naturalness of an experimental setting and the ability to draw confident conclusions about causes and effects. When people are measured in a natural setting, like taking a real shopping trip to a real store, their mental states are more naturally induced, but there are often too many things happening at once to determine with confidence what situational factors are influencing what mental states.

Neuromarketing researchers have developed a number of alternatives to in-store testing that provide needed controls while maintaining enough realism to simulate, if not perfectly re-create, a natural shopping experience.

Neuromarketing alternatives to testing in-store

Behavioral testing of choice scenarios in a lab setting has been found to translate well to real-world settings because the same deep nonconscious heuristics and biases are activated in each case.

Using eye tracking with static images of shelf sets (called planograms) yields useful insights into how consumers visually search a shelf to find and select products. Combined with neurometric or biometric measures and explicit choice tasks, such studies can provide a wealth of practical information about the impact of different shelf configurations on product search and selection.

A good compromise between naturalness and control can be achieved by having consumers watch video depictions of shopping environments and experiences in the lab. Participants are exposed to the same video, which increases control, and are able to remain stationary, which decreases signal noise. Much as our brains can easily become immersed in a movie (see Chapter 14), researchers have found that viewing video shopping experiences can closely replicate the mental states and behavioral responses we would experience in a real-world shopping situation.

Simulating the shopping experience

The next step beyond passively watching an imaginary stroll down a videotaped store aisle is to engage in an interactive virtual reality (VR) shopping experience. Not only do VR shopping environments represent large cost savings compared to designing and constructing physical test stores, but they also provide an even better balance between naturalness and control than can be achieved with in-lab video experiences. The consumer can

Be surrounded by a very realistic store environment

Move through that environment voluntarily (without having to move physically)

Be measured precisely during the experience

Be exposed to identical shopping scenarios so situational variables can be properly controlled

Several research vendors are beginning to provide very detailed and interactive VR offerings, including full 3-D immersive environments. We expect to see this approach growing as a neuromarketing research tool over the next few years.