Are you reaching your customers?

To appeal to retail customers, the best way to understand what makes them tick is by studying
consumer behaviour.

Paco underhill, a consultant whose market research firm, Envirosell, has been studying retail
shopper behaviour.

Underhill shuns academic market research as being too theoretical. Yet some of this research
supports under-hill’s common-sense findings. Such is the case with the work of Gerald
Zaltman, a Harvard Business school marketing professor who has brought qualitative methods
to what has been a field dominated by the qualitatively obsessed. While Underhill’s work
focuses on what shoppers do, Zaltman’s deals whith why they do what they do.

Both approaches hold myriad insights for manufacturers, retailers, marketers, and commercial
developers. Business people seeking to craft a more effective message to, and to get lucrative
insights from, the shopping public would be well advised to listen to what Underhill and
Zaltman have to say. Following are some of their communication secrets.

Examine the messages you are sending. Are they right ones for your customers? Are you
getting them across? Many communication errors stem from a naïve belief among marketing
people that they are necessarily trying to connect with people exactly like themleseves.

Don’t rely heavily on focus groups. “Focus groups tend to be like the law of the hammer”,
says Zaltman. “Teach a kid to hammer, and everything begins to look like a nail. You don’t get
a lot of depth in a focus group. People tend to say what they think they are supposed to say,
rather than what they’re actually thinking. And because there are 8 to 12 people, there’s just
not enough time for each person to talk. The maximum number for effective interpersonal
communication is 3.”

Instead, hire professional interviewers to probe typical customers’ shopping motivations.

Interviewers should be careful not to prompt the interviewees into saying what they want to
hear. It is a common error that wreaks havoc with results of customer surveys and interviews.

Reserve your best customer communication efforts for the areas well inside the store.

Underhill found that customers typically don’t notice things placed just inside a retail outlet.
The reason: this is a “transition zone” in which customers shift from their fast parking lot pace
to a slower shopping speed. As a result, much of what you may want to tell the customer in this
area isn’t getting across.

Communication itself sells products. Underhill has found that retail environments that foster
communication between couples or groups who shop together do more business. A pleasing
environment with attractive lighting and décor not only makes an individual shopper linger,
but it makes groups or pairs more reluctant to leave. So they stick around and talk about the
items- a process that leads to more purchases.

Understand that shoppers are on a mental journey. “Most of store managers’ attention is
on what happens between the aisle and the register, and that’s where so much money is spent
on research and package design,” says Zaltman. “That’s important, but there’s a much longer
journey for which the store is just a way point.”