Chapter Fourteen. The great big theater of shop

The Stew Leonard’s case study featured some great big dripping chunks of retail theater—an idea that’s so critical to creating great customer experiences. Theater. Hmm, we love a bit of Shakespeare and all that ... I’m not talking about that sort of theater. Well, I am actually, but not in the same way: retail theater is about animating the store, making it live and breathe. Telling stories with color, sound, movement, and even smells and tastes.

“What for?” is the reasonable question. The answer is: Bringing the store to life brings your customers to life too. Your biggest challenge is to get customers to pick up stuff and interact with it and with staff—get that happening and you sell more things. If that interaction is done inside a great, animated, and exciting store, then you get the Stew Leonard effect: A humble dairy becomes a sales machine and customers love it.

When I talked about customer experiences in the customer service quality bit earlier, this is the part I was building up to—the part where everything you are and do comes to life.

Us, the moles, and the bats

We have a challenge in-store: Human sight is really, really poor when compared to most other mammals’—in particular, our low-resolution eyes coupled to our face-pattern-recognizing and motion-obsessed brains make seeing static things difficult. It is physiologically hard for people to pick out one thing from another if those things are static: like, say, cans of food on a fixture or a row of TVs on display or books packed in on shelves.

Let me put on the lab coat and explain: What we think we see is actually the image after it’s been messed around with by our brain. Our brain applies two visual processes in particular that are great for survival of the species but pointless for retailing. The first relates to faces: Our big juicy brains are constantly looking to recognize faces so we can either defend ourselves from a competitive human or mate with a willing one. So aggressively does our brain look for faces that it’ll make them out of almost anything: patterns in wallpaper, shapes made by shadows, a gravy stain on a shirt. This process is exactly why people report seeing the face of Michael Jackson in slices of toast or dead relatives in the shape of clouds. The more challenging process is the one that refuses to concentrate on static things and instead scans peripheral vision for movement, because in the past, bigger things were often trying to eat us and they tended to do so successfully by sneaking up without being noticed until it was too late.

Let’s talk about that in a retail situation: You’ll have experienced what I’m about to describe—we all have. You’re standing in the soup aisle in a supermarket facing the hundreds of cans of soup. You want chicken noodle and you’re staring and staring but you just can’t see the one you want. And then, suddenly, “BANG!” you finally spot the can and it’s been right in front of you all the time. You didn’t see it at first because your brain was paying attention to somebody on your left moving something down off the shelf, to a shopping cart being pushed along to your right, and to a sign moving in the air-conditioning breeze above you. You found the chicken noodle in the end because your brain kicked in a different process called “reading,” forcing you to read labels, which is slower than looking for pictures and patterns.

Movement

Applying one part of retail theater can solve these issues at a stroke—picking stuff up, moving it around attracts customers” attention. You pick up a can of soup and wave it about and suddenly it’s the easiest thing in the world to see—everyone in that aisle can pick it out. Now, maybe that’s not practical in Tesco, but it is most everywhere else. Let me give you an example and a case study.

Impulse cakes

The example is one you can observe for yourself and it involves the express line in a typical urban supermarket. If you’re there and you see a member of staff re-stocking the racks of small cakes and treats that are usually stationed at the point where the line-guide turns ... watch what happens ... of the next ten people in the line, eight of them will at least pick up a cake and of those most will buy it. Then contrast that with the rest of the time when the fixture isn’t being re-stocked: You’ll see maybe one in ten customers picking up a cake. I’m not exaggerating these numbers—observe it for yourself and think about an area of your store that might be boosted by movement, by taking something out of stasis and giving it energy.

All of the above is retail theater: movement, visual interest. Go to a good hair salon and you’ll find instinctive performers delivering theatrical experiences there: the smell of product, the noise of the music and the dryers, the performance of stylists cutting, the colors, the action. You’ll find great theater at AllSaints (UK), Les Néréides (France), Lush (UK), McDonald’s (U.S.), Bloomingdale’s (U.S.), Printemps (France), Kiehl’s (U.S.), and Bic Camera (Japan). You’ll see it at great independents such as Rough Trade East (London, UK), Powell’s City of Books (Portland, Oregon) and Robert Moy’s Tuscan Pots (Oxford, UK—tiny store but the best indi-retailer I know, anywhere. Awesome place, go visit).

Fundamentals of retail theater

For our next journey into retail theater, we’re going happily out onto the street—we’ll maybe even learn about other parts of the puzzle too. That’s because the best lesson on the fundamentals of retail you could ever have is to be found at traditional street markets. In particular, the fruit and vegetablee-table stalls on those markets. Right there is where you will see the most efficient, simple, and effective principles all in action—not because somebody has an MBA but instead because those principles have been passed down over the generations. From father to son, from mother to daughter—because they work.

Seriously, I can’t recommend strongly enough that you go and quietly observe the dynamics of a busy street market. While you’re there, take a look at these two.

A—Vocal promotion

B—Merchandising

A—Vocal promotion

Traders calling out to shoppers can be exhilarating to watch, especially when it’s done well. What you can learn from listening to these calls (it’s called “barking” apparently) is a sense of what really turns customers on. The lines shouted out have been passed down from trader to trader over generations. Traders still use them because they make customers react. Go beyond the old-time vocal theatricals and you can see some incredible promotional instinct at work. In particular, fruit and vegetable sellers do two things when they bark:

• They bark the promotions “two for one”

• But listen closely to the words they use when describing the produce—it’s not just “cherry, strawberry, apples, oranges, pineapples.” You’ll hear “Sweet cherry!,” “Lovely ripe strawberry!,” “Get your crunchy fresh apples!,” “Juicy golden pineapple!”

The adjectives—fresh, delicious, ripe, sweet, rosy-red, juicy—are part of the performance and they materially affect the way passing customers feel about what’s being sold. If you’re even vaguely thinking about a snack and you hear “Sweet and delicious red cherry!” you’ll start picturing them in your subconscious, and you’ll be imagining what they might taste like. There’s a chance that your mouth may even be watering. Incredible stuff!

You need to encourage your team to use adjectives like these whenever they’re talking about the products they rate highly.

• Awesome colors

• Fantastic fit

• Stunning design

• Superb taste

This does two things: It engages customers, but even better it also gives them the words they will use later to describe how pleased they are with whatever it is they’ve bought.

B—Merchandising

There are lessons to be learned on merchandising too—some subtle but very revealing. Fruit and vegetables on a stall tends to be laid out at an angle to the table, with orders being fulfilled from produce behind the angled crates. This arrangement makes it look like there is more food there than perhaps there really is—this is important because we animals are reassured when we see what we perceive to be “plenty.” You didn’t think we were influenced by that stuff, maybe? We are—all of us.

The colors of adjacent items are carefully selected too: Rather than blending harmoniously from red, to orange, to yellow, and so on, contrasting colors are put next to each other. This is to help our poor eyes pick one thing out from another and also because when you walk past this arrangement, it flickers in your peripheral vision. That flickering attracts and makes passers-by almost involuntarily glance over.

Managing perceptions is also an aspect of great retail theater—here again the fruit and vegetable sellers can do interesting things; when I wrote Smart Retail, I would often need to walk down Whitechapel Road and past the permanent street-market there. The market contains six greengrocers’ stalls, each offering similar products. One morning I noticed lychees had arrived; these are a big draw for the greengrocers there. On five of the stalls, lychees were all presented at the front in a sort of hot spot visible to all customers.

But on the sixth stall, they weren’t even on the table—this greengrocer hadn’t even had time to get his lychee stock onto a shelf because it was still all on his delivery cart and customers were clamoring over it. Next day the lychees were again right out front on their delivery cart ... something didn’t make sense.

I asked the stall-holder, Dinesh, why he did this. Dinesh said that customers who saw the lychees tended to believe the fruits were really fresh because they hadn’t been around long enough to be taken off the delivery cart. “How fresh are they?” I asked.

“Three days, these ones.”

“Do your customers really believe your lychees are fresher than everyone else’s because you’ve not even been able to get them onto the stall?”

“Yeah, they do.”

Suspending disbelief, helping customers to feel a positive thing—these are theatrical tools and you’ll find ways to apply them to your business too.

The theater of demonstration—why shopping channel presenters are unheralded geniuses

One easy way to get a bit of performance and movement into the store is to do lots of demonstrations. Again, watch market stallholders: They handle the product constantly, rotating stock, shifting clothes, rearranging sizes or colors, juggling sweets, playing music, sparking up toys, cooking spices on their hotplates. Almost every trader you see will hold a bag of product in his hand as he barks out the deal on that item—a tiny detail, but again it’s done because it’s useful in attracting customers.

Another great training ground for learning demonstration skills, and I am serious, is the shopping channels on TV. Watch the guest presenters especially. These are the people from the product manufacturers who get to come on and plug their wares. These men and women are brilliant instinctive performers who talk and demonstrate benefit after benefit. Now, I’m like everyone else who gets a bit annoyed when these presenters are talking up something obviously shoddy, but the techniques are still valid—imagine applying it to your best stuff, to product you genuinely believe to be great.

What I’m suggesting you do here is to tap into the power of everyday performance. The demonstrating and playing with stock. Customers really are drawn to products when they see life and action around them. Helping customers to more easily imagine your product actually working for them is very powerful.

Making it stick

Over and over we have talked about how the best of retailing is down to common sense, and to passion and gut feel. Out on the streets, on the market stalls, these components of success are in plentiful supply. They can be seen in the way stallholders price, merchandise, promote, and demonstrate. All of the lessons on display can be learned and applied to your store, whether that is a hole-in-the-wall grocer’s or a 25,000 sqare foot Currys.