Why We Buy

by Paco Underhill

  Making goods inaccessible hurts in other ways, too. We studied a jewelry store whose owner had recently scored a coup by hiring a designer well known for creating museum exhibitions to design some jewelry display cases. The result was beautiful but distancing—the guy was accustomed to making displays that allowed the public to see but kept them at arm’s length, exactly what you don’t want in a store where people are encouraged to take the goods home. The displays performed poorly compared to less exalted fixtures.

  Here’s how good stores do it. We were performing a study for RadioShack just when the chain had decided to try to become America’s favorite phone store. We watched countless shoppers approach the wall of telephones on display, look them all over, check out the prices, and then, almost without exception, pick up a phone and hold it up to an ear. What were they hoping for? Nothing, probably—it’s just a reflex action, I think. What else do you do with a phone? On what other basis do you compare phones but by how they feel in your hand and against your ear? Well, we reasoned, if the first principle of trial is to make it as lifelike as possible, you can complete the experience by putting a voice in that phone. We advised RadioShack to connect the phones to a recorded message that would be activated when the receiver was lifted. Once that happened, the stores were alive with shoppers picking up display phones, listening a moment, and then holding the receivers out for their companions to hear—which was a bonus, because that would provide some basis for discussing the purchase, which greatly increases the chance that something will be bought. (People in stores love to talk about whatever it is they’re shopping for.) This was also a good way for RadioShack to sneak in a commercial message. In another study, Sprint’s cell phone stores used a counter display so you could see and heft the various models, but each phone was also activated, which is the only way to do it—customers picked up the phones and dialed a spouse or friend to discuss the very gadget they were considering. The phones sold themselves, which is the whole point.

  Other stores, like Brookstone or the French beauty retailer Sephora, all understand the value of putting merchandise out there for shoppers to experience, damage be damned. If Brookstone displays a vibrating chair and after a few months it’s shabby from shopper use, that’s OK—they’ve no doubt sold more than enough chairs to cover the loss.

  Store displays can be remade to allow shoppers to touch and try the merchandise. But if product packaging doesn’t change as well, a great many opportunities will continue to be lost. In the health and beauty aisles, for instance, smell and touch are vitally important. What is skin lotion’s first responsibility if not to feel good when applied to skin? Why does anyone buy deodorant except for its scent? And while shampoo’s main job is to clean hair—something you can’t really test in a store—it also must leave that hair smelling like the rain forest on a good day, and that’s something you can investigate in the aisle, if only the manufacturer will permit it. Unfortunately, today’s tamper-proof packaging thwarts every respectful attempt to experience the product.

  Gillette made quite a splash with its clear gel deodorants for men—they come in a variety of scents, each with an evocative (yet manly) name. Somebody at Gillette was thinking correctly when they decided to give men more of a choice than Right Guard menthol or regular. But then the boys in packaging got their mitts on the idea. In the store you are faced with several varieties of deodorant, differing only in scent, and so naturally you wish to learn how they smell. You remove the lid from one and are confronted by a formidable strip of heavy-duty foil tape sealing the applicator. (Why? Can terrorists kill people through their armpits?) Now, if no one’s watching, you might peel that tape back some and give it a sniff. But that would be wrong. So what’s a shopper to do? If he’s not terribly motivated, he’ll put it back and walk away. If he is persistent, he’ll glance up and down the aisle and, if the coast is clear, rip back that tape and take a whiff. Of course, if he then decides against buying the Alpine Morning underarm experience—maybe he feels like more of an Arizona Twilight kind of guy—how will the next shopper who comes along feel when he discovers that the tamper-proof strip has been tampered with? A lot of perfectly good deodorant is going to be ruined that way, by package designers who refuse to acknowledge how human beings shop.

  One solution for this and all the rest would be for drugstores to create a sampling bar, a counter where new items can be freely auditioned. The tactile issues of body products are so important that resolving them would surely result in increased sales.

  The biggest struggle in this area has to do with how cosmetics are sold. Manufacturers and retailers want to sell the products in as clean and orderly a way as possible. Women don’t object to that, but understandably, they want to try before they buy, which is not always a clean and orderly impulse.

  In days of old, most cosmetics were sold by the same kindly druggist who doled out prescriptions and fountain sodas. You’d ask for foundation, say, and he’d go behind the counter, open a drawer and begin pulling out boxes until he found your brand. It was kind of arm’s-length, and no one would stand for that today, but it was efficient and neat. The world of cosmetics was liberated in large part by the Cover Girl brand, which was the first one to make wide use of the peg wall, allowing shoppers to touch makeup without an intermediary getting in the way. This was what moved cosmetics toward its future as a self-serve category. That also put a serious crimp in the prospects of another cosmetics tradition, the department store bazaar. There, even to this day, shoppers perch on stools at counters while Kabuki-faced representatives of makeup purveyors paint and daub them into perfection, the result of which is a small but costly shopping bag of makeup on the departing shopper’s arm.

  But even that method of selling cosmetics is passing from the scene—women are getting fed up, I think—and is being replaced by the open-sell layout. And so you have each manufacturer trying a different system that allows shoppers to look at cosmetics, and even, under controlled conditions, to try them. But not too much. And you have women who wish to undo those controls so they can test products as they please. The interests of seller and buyer shouldn’t be at odds, but they often are. Designers of cosmetics fixtures are sometimes culprits, too—they build displays without considering that shoppers need simple amenities like tissues, for instance, which would actually improve the overall neatness of cosmetics sections. Or they don’t put in enough mirrors, so women have to scramble around the store as they try out makeup. The designers of these sections never visit them at five p.m. on a Saturday afternoon, I can assure you, because if they did they’d design them differently, with more accommodation for the women who use them. Shopper-unfriendly packaging intended to prevent cosmetics trial is almost always a bad idea—bad because it discourages buying and because it encourages women to damage merchandise. In any product category, the best way to limit package destruction is to offer shoppers a way to try things without doing any damage.

  The advent of shrink-wrap has made it difficult to experience a great many products firsthand. In fact, many products seem to be overly packaged, which is a pain if you’re a hands-on shopper. We’ve come a long way from the simple listening booths once found in record stores. Today in the very troubled world of music, there are several rather complex electronic systems that try to make samples of recordings available to shoppers. Typically, these involve listening stations—headphones plugged into a board, and then a menu of CDs that can be dialed up. One problem is that you may be unfamiliar with these gizmos, and so you push the button for the disc you want, but then…nothing. In fact, there’s a wait while the song cues up, but no indicator on the machine tells you so. You give it a moment and either shrug and give up, or you assume you’ve chosen a nonworking channel and push another button, and then more buttons, ultimately sending the machine into meltdown.

  The best system is always the simplest and most direct one. There, a shopper just selects any CD from any rack and brings it to a listening bar, where a clerk opens the p
ackage and plays the disc. That’s it—no gizmos, no buttons, no menus, no waiting. Instead of spending money on complicated, unreliable song-sample-playing machines, the store buys one shrink-wrapping device to repackage whatever’s not purchased, and that’s that. And such a system must allow shoppers to listen to music as human nature intended—meaning, nobody listens to music standing still and staring at the floor. In a store we researched in Alabama, listening station headphones were equipped with twenty-foot-long cords, so music fans could move around and even shop nearby racks. With that, the stores go from being places to buy records to places where one can listen to them, find out what’s out there, what’s new, who’s playing what. It turns the store into an interactive radio station and makes shopping there a fun experience. Best of all, from the store’s point of view, it lessens the retailer’s dependence on the labels to market their merchandise properly. When a store allows access to merchandise, it is in essence doing its own marketing—one-on-one, to an interested consumer who is in a position to act on his or her desires on the spot.

  Packaging often suffers when the shopper’s desire for information is thwarted. We see this with electronics—the shopper for headphones, for instance, finds a stack of them, boxed, in a store. There’s no display model in sight. If the box were properly designed—with a large, clear photo of the phones and all the features and specifications listed in readable type—maybe seeing the headphones would be less crucial. But when the packaging forces shoppers to guess, it becomes easier to just rip the damn box open, pull out the headphones and see for yourself. No one’s going to buy anything being sold in a shredded box.

  Packaging need not always be such an impermeable barrier to touch, however. Toy manufacturers realized that adults wanted to try toys before they bought them. Maybe this was because so much toy advertising is deceptive, giving gullible kiddies the impression that this cheap plastic airplane is actually capable of zooming around the kitchen like a miniature bomber on an air strike. At any rate, the trend is now to design packaging so it allows toys to be tried without having to molest the box or the plastic wrap. You can push the button or pull the string and Cookie Monster sings from inside his cardboard prison. This suddenly made it a lot easier to know what you were buying in the toy store, and this was one of those instances where shopper confidence led to increased sales. I recently saw maybe the smartest toy packaging yet—a kiddie plastic tricycle that was boxed in a way that left exposed the seat, pedals, handlebars and wheels, thereby allowing a child to test-drive it without disturbing the box. If that principle were applied to all product packaging, shopping would be a lot more fun than it is now.

  Security considerations are behind some reasons for placing merchandise off-limits. MP3 players are one such product. I guess any pricey item with lots of appeal for teenagers is heisted frequently. But the decision to sell these behind a locked counter should be enough; instead, they’re also packaged inside bulky, clear plastic “clamshell” containers, which makes it impossible to hear the player before buying it. I’m sure that shoppers would trade up to more expensive models if only they could comparison-shop a few brands—just witness the success of the Apple Stores, which invite you to play iPods and fiddle around with iPhones and other cool gear.

  Costume jewelry is another category that’s often guilty of this sin. You’ve got items that cost maybe $20 or $30 padlocked behind glass and steel, depriving shoppers of the chance to see how the chains and pendants would look and feel on a neck or a wrist. In the same store you’ll see plenty of other merchandise of equal or greater value on open display. It’s reflexive but makes no business sense. We see the same thinking about one of the hottest items to grow out of the computerization of America—ink-jet printer cartridges. Until very recently, in almost every major U.S. office product superstore (like Staples, OfficeMax, Office Depot and so on) they were displayed inside locked cabinets, owing to their small size and high price. But when you’ve seen as many frustrated shoppers prowling store aisles searching vainly for a clerk with a key as we have, you wonder if there isn’t something self-defeating about all that security. Printer ink cartridges drive a huge percentage of office product store profits, and in the past ten years, most of the major chains have redesigned their stores around the ink-jet cartridge section.

  Clothing retailers have learned a trick or two about placing goods on display without allowing them to be abused in the process. Let’s go back to that beautiful Armani store on Madison Avenue, for instance. You’ve got shoppers whose hands have been who knows where, and they’re groping costly Italian adornments like they already own them. Would you feel at ease knowing how many fingers have already had their way with your suit sleeve? Here’s one strategy: If a suit comes in several colors, the store will place the dark shades down where they can be reached easily and display the beiges and pale grays and off-whites up high, where they can be seen but not touched. If a sweater displayed on a table comes in several shades, you’ll always find the lighter ones on the bottom and the dark on top, where they’ll be rubbed and grubbed, but who will know?

  Selling is the main reason for making merchandise as available as possible to shoppers. But it’s not the only one—there’s also selling up. If you have no real basis for comparing one product to another, the normal instinct is to buy what’s cheaper. But if a store sets itself up to educate shoppers, even just a little, a certain number of them will spend more than what is absolutely necessary. If given a choice of three brands, or three models, and given the chance to pit one against the others, the shopper will at least have a sensible reason for choosing the better item.

  This is an issue for just about every product we’ve mentioned so far—men’s underwear and coffee and stereo headphones and sweaters and skin cream etc. In mattress stores, too. There, typically, you find a whole field of undressed beds awaiting inspection. Some are cheaper than others, but it’s just as expensive to stock and maintain the $1,500 mattress as it is the $4,000 one. So if you can get just one customer in five to start out trying the cheap number and work up to a better one, you’re doing pretty well.

  And how, aside from trial, can that be made to happen? Clearly, no other way. And the beds are all out there, ready for you to recline, isn’t that right? Well, kind of. You really need to feel comfortable to try out a mattress. It’s a vulnerable position to take in such a public space, in front of strangers. You may even wish you didn’t have to lie down while the salesman stands there, looming over you. (He, of course, is afraid that if he backs off five feet and stops sending you telepathic “Buy this mattress now!” messages, you won’t purchase anything.) And you’re on a mattress that has been helpfully positioned in the front of the store, where your supine form can be seen easily through the front window, and where, if you are a woman in a dress or skirt, your modesty will be severely tested. How much worse can this experience be made? How about no sheets on the bed, so you never even see how it will feel if and when you get it home, and no pillow either, so you get no idea of the comfort this baby will (or will not) provide?

  It seems that if the better mattresses were positioned away from public view, maybe even partly partitioned, to give the experience a little of the feel of a dressing room, maybe shoppers would be encouraged to upgrade their bedding desires. More thought is given to the trial experience when you’re buying a pair of $40 jeans than when you’re buying a $4,000 mattress. We did a study of mattress retailing, during which we asked a manager whether pillows of various thicknesses and firmness could be provided, along with freshly laundered pillowcases, for mattress try-outs.

  “But we don’t sell pillows,” was his flat rejection of the idea. Never mind that pillows have a much higher margin than mattresses even, or that selling pillows was a way of adding on accessories to a product that had few opportunities for such novelties.

  Similarly, at AT&T phone stores, the focus was on selling the main product; almost as an afterthought, they sold a dopey little item called the Sof
tTalk phone holder. It was a soft plastic cradle designed to make it more comfortable to keep your phone jammed between your neck and shoulder. The thing didn’t look like much of anything, but once you tried it you learned that it was ingenious and truly effective. Without trying it, however, it looked pointless, and because none were on display there was no easy way to actually try it, and thanks to the sales staff’s lack of effort nobody ever did. Sure, it was only a $5 or so item, but the margin on it, as with most accessories, was obscenely high—the most profitable thing in the joint. We computed that if every third customer bought one, the profit would cover a store’s monthly rent.

  Another glaring example is wireless services, where customers can compare the costs of handsets and services online. It is a very competitive market where margins are small and where the money is made by selling accessories, from ringtones to carrying cases. Best Buy, for example, has struck a deal with Liz Claiborne to develop slick cell phone and laptop cases. At one recent store opening, they staged a fashion show exhibiting carrying cases for phones, computers and digital cameras. None of them were cheap. Great idea. I just wish they’d been smart enough to realize that if you want to sell high-priced laptop bags, you also need mirrors. In Japan you can “tattoo” your phone or iPod—you pick out the skin and for about $40, someone carefully applies the decal to cover your phone. Add to that spare batteries, a charger for your car and a hands-free device, and the transaction is that much more profitable.