Why theatre?

Because 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’s effect: a humble dairy becomes a sales machine and customers love it.

Us, the moles and the bats

Human sight is really poor when compared to many other mammals. In particular, our low-resolution eyes coupled to our face-pattern-recognising 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, such as cans of food on a fixture, a row of TVs on display or books packed in on shelves.

Worse, we don’t even see colour in our peripheral vision (something to do with the angle at which light enters and then hits the retina) and what we think we’re seeing isn’t real time. That second is a gigantic head scrambler – there’s quite a substantial delay in processing terms between a thing we are watching and our brain registering and dealing with seeing it. Gets crazy when you consider a task such as catching a ball where your brain applies an automatic compensation in its instructions to your arms for the fact that the ball you think you are seeing is actually physically closer to you than your eyes suggest. That’s exactly why I dropped the one catching chance I ever got when playing for my brother’s village cricket team. At least that’s my story.

Let me put on the lab coat and explain. What we think we see is, in reality, the image after it’s been mucked about with by our brain. Our brain applies two visual processes in particular that are great for survival of the species but rubbish for retailing. The first relates to faces: our big juicy brains are constantly looking to recognise 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 or a gravy stain on a shirt. This process is exactly why people report seeing the face of Bowie 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 in the periphery 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 as we all have. You’re standing in the soup aisle in a supermarket facing the dozens 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 tin 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 taking a can down off the shelf, and to a trolley 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 two different processes. First pattern and shape recognition and then 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 theatre can solve these issues at a stroke. Picking stuff up and moving it around attracts customers’ attention. You pick up a tin 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 almost 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 queue in a typical urban M&S Simply Food. 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 queue-guide turns … watch what happens … of the next ten people in the queue, 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 1 in 30 customers picking up a cake. I’m not exaggerating these numbers. Observe it for yourself and have a think about an area of your store that might be boosted by movement, by taking something out of stasis and giving it energy.

A round-up of great theatre

I’ve picked the following examples as a great cross-section of retail theatre. I’m not suggesting that each of these retailers is exploiting everything possible but there are elements of best practice that are worth using for inspiration. Or stealing wholesale, you decide.

Digging out the moments

A good way to introduce theatre into your store is to break down everything you do into small “ceremonies”, little routines that create a bit of difference, done with a flourish. It can be something as simple as presenting the bag in a particular way at the end of a sale, the way your people greet customers, the steps in a demonstration, and so on. Any routine element of the customer journey can be made into a ceremony, from attracting attention to taking the money.

At hotel chain Malmaison, it packs these theatrical ceremonies into everything. Look at the way it deals with a dinner order for a glass of port. Instead of bringing you a glass of port, they bring a clean, empty glass and their port decanter. Your glass is checked, given a little extra polish, placed down and the port is poured there in front of you. It’s a process that adds very little to the time it takes to serve a glass of port, but it looks fantastic to the customer – the lovely liquid appetisingly pouring out, the gently pleasing glass-filling sound and the rich colour of a generously filled decanter, the delicious odour rising as molecules are jumbled into the glass – expectation and anticipation go through the roof. There’s very little efficiency cost to this, either. The port would still need pouring and the waiter would still need to have come to the table and returned back to the kitchen.

Lovely boutique French jewellery brand Les Néréides fills its sales journey with lots of ceremonies that add up to a deliciously satisfying customer experience. It starts with a visually reinforcing store layout: everything is fresh, collections are given room to breathe and staff are dressed in sweet summery clothes that match well with the design ethos of the jewellery. That’s theatre too – it’s the equivalent of great set and costumes. As soon as customers interact with the habitually happy and approachable staff, the ceremonies kick in. Lots of drawers of product are removed and placed upon the counter, but in a set way so that only the items that are currently “in play” are visible.

You’ll see women, buying for themselves, given mirrors and encouraging comment, and you’ll see assistants trying on necklaces to help people buy gifts for female partners. It’s incredibly human and involving. Then purchases are wrapped in paper and the paper sprayed with the house scent, then dropped with a deliberate flourish into nicely designed gift bags that seem modern and classic all at the same time (much like the jewellery) and, finally, the bag is tied ostentatiously with a pretty bow. The whole process is full of ceremonies and it makes the experience feel very special indeed, especially given this is costume jewellery selling at a very reasonable price.

Fundamentals of retail theatre

For our next journey into retail theatre we’re going out on to 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. I don’t mean the cool new-wave artisan street markets either, but the honest cut-throat ones. In particular, the fruit and veg stalls on those markets. Right there is where you will see the most efficient, simple and effective principles all in action – not because somebody spent a year studying at the London School of Economics 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.

Traders calling out to punters can be exhilarating to watch and listen to, especially when it’s done well. What you can learn from listening to these calls (called “barking”) is a sense of what really turns customers on. The lines shouted out have been passed down from trader to trader and adapted 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 veg sellers do two things when they bark:

• They bark the promotions: “two for a pound”.
• 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 fresh apples!” and “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 craving sugar and you hear “sweet and delicious red cherry!” you’ll start picturing them in your subconscious, you’ll be imagining what they might taste like. There’s a chance that your mouth may even be watering right now. Incredible stuff! Remember the Warby Parker example earlier – these words mean things, they’re important, they trigger a response and, when spoken, have a visceral effect on us.

As part of building theatre in-store (and when writing about product online), you need to encourage your team to use adjectives like these whenever they’re talking about the products they love: awesome colours, 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: “Yeah, I got these new jeans, they’re a fantastic fit.”

There are merchandising lessons there too

Fruit and veg on a stall tends to be laid out pitched at an angle up off the table, with orders then 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. We had a convenience store client in Kazakhstan once where fear of shortage had been directly passed down from the Soviet era to people born after independence. Retailers overfilled shelves and over-fronted everything as a direct result.

Look at the way colours are arranged on a fruit and veg stall too. Rather than blending harmoniously from red to orange to yellow and so on, contrasting colours are put next to each other. This is to help our poor eyes pick one thing out from another but also because, when you walk past this arrangement, it flickers in your peripheral vision where you are seeing it in high-contrast monochrome. That flickering attracts our attention and makes passers-by almost involuntarily glance over.

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 colours, juggling sweets, playing music, sparking up toys, cooking spices on their hotplates. If a stall is momentarily quiet, the stallholder will do their equivalent of my crazy remote control flourish, fishing for customers until they get a new bite. 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 telly. 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 often 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. Online, these are the people you need making product videos for you. Have a look at AO.com from the UK for its benefit-driven videos and at the superb review videos at US motorcycle retailer RevZilla. This one is a good example: https://goo.gl/1PJzos. I should mention that the jacket he’s rightly cheering on there is made by our family business and it’s brilliant. Buy one!

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.