Paco will be in Turkey for Local Chains Summit (YerelZincirler Birliği) next week; 15-16 of April, an event to be followed certainly…
Please find some quotations below from his book “Why We Buy?”
Advice for the Store Staff
Remember that more than 60 percent of what we buy wasn't on our list. This isn't the same as an impulse purchase. It's triggered by something proposing the question "Don't you need this? If not now, then maybe in the near future?" Use this feeling to boost your sales…
Offer help, try to get the stuff your customer needs to carry that limits her / his desire to put on the products, offer to put the coat/bag behind the counter....
Shoppers are more pressed for time than ever. They've grown accustomed to stores where everything for sale is on open display; and they expect all the information they need will be out in the open. Keep in mind while designing in store- signageand visuals.
Smile: Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton's homespun advice to retailers was that if you hire a sweet old lady just to say hello to incoming customers, none of them will dare steal.
Critical location Dressing Rooms : A shopper who talks to a salesperson and tries something on is twice as likely to buy as a shopper who does neither. Not only does shopper conversion rate increase by half when there is staff-initiated contact, it jumps by 100 percent when there is staff-initiated contact and use of the dressing room.
Store Design & Signage
The Gap, Aeropostale and Anthropologie-all apparel store chains-put their discount sale products in the back left-hand corner of the store. They've trained their most veteran shoppers to visit the remotest corner of the store. Once they've gotten them to the back, their challenge is to make sure the pathway back to the front of the store is well merchandised and that at least some of the signage is facing the customer going back-to-front.
In the retail environment, a chair's main purpose is slightly different: When people go shopping in twos or threes, with spouses or children or friends along for the trip, seating is what keeps the non-shopping party comfortable and contented and cared for and off the shopper's backJ
Retailers should walk every foot of selling space asking this question: Can I stand here and shop without being jostled from behind? Any place where the answer is no is no place for merchandise requiring a careful look.
Aisles must also be wide enough for baby strollers. Adjacencies should be planned rather than accidental
For the most part, the men and women who design clothing stores do everything possible to allow us to touch all that's for sale. But then, when it's time to design the dressing rooms, they show how completely they misunderstand what happens inside that store. Where do they go wrong? They think of dressing rooms as bathrooms without the plumbing. They see them as booths where shoppers can strip, don the garment in question, emerge for a quick, dutiful glance into a mirror and then switch clothes again. They design dressing rooms with all the romance and glamour of changing stalls at public pools. It's the most misguided aspect of store architecture and design, a trade that at its best isn't terribly responsive to retailers or shoppers. They skimp on dressing rooms, I believe, because they don't want to "waste" space by making these rooms too large. They don't want to blow too much of the budget on rooms that will never be photographed by the fancier design magazines. In fact, the dressing room may be more important than the floor of the store. It's a truism that improving the quality of dressing rooms increases sales. It never fails. A dressing room isn't just a convenience- it's a selling tool, like a display or a window or advertising. It sells more effectively than all of those combined, if it's properly used.
Men & Women
86% of women look at price tags when they shop. Only 72% of men do. For a man, ignoring the price tag is almost a measure of his virility. As a result, men are far more easily upgraded than are women. They are also far more suggestible than women.
Men now do more purchasing than ever before. That figure will continue to grow. As they stay single longer than ever, they learn to shop for things their fathers never had to buy. And because many marry women who work as long and hard as they do, they will be forced to shoulder more of the burden of shopping.
Here's the actual breakdown of average shopping time from a study, performed at one branch of a national housewares chain:
Woman shopping with a female companion: 8 minutes, 15 seconds
Woman with children: 7 minutes, 19 seconds
Woman alone: 5 minutes, 2 seconds,
Woman with man: 4 minutes, 41 seconds
A good general rule to design future: Take any category where women now predominate and figure out how to make it appealing to men without alienating women.
Competition
Today everybody is competing with everybody else, and so the threat can come from any direction. It is dangerously narrowminded for a store owner to believe that the only competition is from others in his or her category. .In truth, retailers compete with every other demand on consumer time and money.
if the experience of spending twenty minutes of unused lunch hour browsing in a computer store is more enjoyable than visiting a bookstore, then it becomes likely that some software will be sold-and impossible that a book will be. The era of the visionary retailer or the manufacturing king is over. In the twenty-first century the consumer is king. Just as fashion comes from the street up, the world of retail is about following shoppers where they are going.
