Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing by Herb Sorensen

From the Publisher

How Today’s Shoppers Really Think, Behave, and Buy:

“Inside the Mind of the Shopper is the preeminent handbook for any marketer or retailer seeking to understand why people do what they do when they shop. Armed with the knowledge in this book, marketers and retailers can work together to predict how shoppers will respond (or not!) to package and label design, selling messages, shelf plans, and the entire retail space.”

–Matt Ohligschlager, Senior Manager, Consumer and Market Knowledge, Procter & Gamble

“From his 40 years of observing shoppers, Herb Sorensen has given us the gift of understanding shoppers. Now, we clearly see that the store layouts merchants want are not what shoppers want. On the ground, managers THINK they know their shoppers, but anyone who follows Herb’s handbook on shopper insights will know them a lot better.”

–Joel Rubinson, Chief Research Officer, The Advertising Research Foundation

Today, improving the effectiveness of the retail experience is no longer an option: It’s a matter of survival–and nobody knows more about doing that than Herb Sorensen. That’s because Sorensen understands your customer’s in-store behavior better than anyone else on earth.

Now, drawing on microscopic analysis of millions of shopping trips, Sorensen reveals exactly what your customers are thinking, why they behave as they do, and how to reshape stores to deliver truly remarkable results.

You’ll discover how to drive more profit from the “quick trip”...the three “moments of truth” in every shopping event...customer “migration patterns” within the store...and how to use “active retailing” to place products precisely where they’ll do best.

Publishers Weekly

Sorensen has made a career out of studying the way consumers behave in supermarkets. His research into their behavioral patterns includes inventing PathTracker, a system that tracks the motions of shopping carts and fitting test shoppers with specially designed glasses that record their field of vision every 3/25ths of a second, telling him exactly what they are looking at and for how long. It turns out there are three different groups of shopping excursions-quick trips, fill-ins and stockups-and Sorenson studies shoppers by behavior, rather than demographic. He exhorts retailers to forget the old system of making the shopper walk through a store, hoping they'll make impulse buys; instead, get them buying as quickly as possible and build momentum by putting products-particularly high frequency purchase items-directly in their paths. He cites such stores as Stew Leonard and Tesco as taking full advantage of new shopper research and provides interesting studies to back up his claims. While vastly informative-even from a sociological standpoint-the book comes across as too theoretical and academic for the general reader. (June)

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Forewords & Introductions

Table of Contents

Forewords & Introductions

“When you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.”

—Lord Kelvin

The supermarket is my laboratory. After earning my Ph.D. in biochemistry and working for a brief period in the food industry, I traded a lab bench for the aisles of the supermarket. At that time, the supermarket was a black box. Manufacturers and retailers were concerned about how to get shoppers into the door and make them aware of products before their trips, but they assumed that they understood what happened when the shopper was inside. Our research, discussed in this book, shows that in many cases they were wrong.

In the early 1970s, I left my practice as a board-certified clinical chemist and started a small laboratory providing a range of services, primarily to the agricultural and consumer packaged goods industries. One of the services that we provided was sensory evaluation—consumer taste test surveys. Following the example of universities, our “tasters” were college and university students. I initially started doing in-store research because a client said that he didn’t think the opinions of college students, with their well-known penchant for pizza and ramen noodles, were very representative of typical supermarket shoppers.

Being a scientist, rather than a market researcher, it never occurred to me not to interview supermarket shoppers. I approached the manager of a local supermarket, and he readily gave me permission to interview his shoppers. Remember, this was more than 30 years ago, and the local Albertsons manager had an amazing degreeof autonomy. When we were in the store, we found that there were many other interesting questions to study.

I pursued the in-store research niche—first as a solo consultant and then as the founder and president of Sorensen Associates, “The In-store Research Company®,” and more recently, as Global Scientific Director, Retail and Shopper Insights at TNS, a global research and information services firm. We are now a part of the even larger conglomerate WPP, with a focus on advertising and communications. Although most of our experience is with supermarkets and brand manufacturers of fast-moving consumer packaged goods, we have found our core insights hold for work with supercenters, drugstores, convenience stores, auto parts retailers, building centers, consumer electronics, phone stores, and many other retailers or products. We have completed studies in a variety of channels on every continent except Africa and Antarctica, and the paradigm, metrics, and insights are as relevant elsewhere as in the U.S. (with some differences, as we will examine later). Over the years, we came to appreciate the value of conducting research in the store environment, rather than just doing research about the store, products, and shoppers.

We decided to study what shoppers actually did in the store, what they looked at, how they moved through the store, and what they bought. We examined strategies that could be used to increase sales, testing these approaches in the laboratory of real stores with actual shoppers. We traveled with customers down thousands of miles of supermarket aisles and analyzed millions of hours of shopping to help retailers create more effective stores and approaches. We found that simple interventions could have dramatic effects, but only if you understood how shoppers think. And some widely used strategies have little impact on the behavior of most shoppers, so we also helped retailers stop throwing money away.

As a pioneer in the field of in-store research, I have had the opportunity to see retailing go through many changes—including the emergence of new technologies and online retailing. As the industry continues to change, however, the basic insights from our research continue to hold true. And in a more complex and dynamic environment, understanding shopper behavior may be even more important.

I have spent millions of dollars of my own money doing some of this research, and the world’s top brands and forward-thinking retailers have spent millions more on specific projects and PathTracker® studies. We have looked at every square-inch of these stores and analyzed millions of shopping trips on a second-by-second basis, using the best technology at our disposal. The results, to the extent that the information is not proprietary, are contained within the covers of this book.

I am grateful to the many managers who embraced and supported this work, even when it was unproven. I am particularly fortunate to have worked with Bob Stevens, to whom this book is dedicated. He had recently retired after 40 years in market research for Procter & Gamble, and taught me to go far beyond the product-shopper dimension mentioned previously. This, in turn, led to the development of my current holistic view of the shopper experience, including the invention of the PathTracker® suite of tools, metrics, and a scientific paradigm for the subject of shopping. Finally, I am grateful for the fine work by other pioneers, such as Paco Underhill and Siemon Scammel-Katz.

Along the way, we have faced resistance to this approach. As researchers at one of the largest supermarket chains in the world told us: “We do not interview our shoppers in-store, but conduct phone or Internet surveys of them.” Interviewing shoppers outside of the store is like trying to understand the movements of a flock of birds by observing a specimen in a natural history museum. It is shocking to me, but not at all exceptional.

This book offers managers in retail firms, or companies that sell products through retail, valuable insights into what happens to their customers when they walk through the front door of the store. Companies that spend countless dollars getting the customer to this point often look away just at this critical moment, giving scant attention to the “last mile” of retailing. Retailers and brand owners know all about who the people are going into the store, and what they are carrying home from the store, and a lot about what they are doing at home. But I stake my career to a large degree on the fact that they know very little about the process that occurs in the store. (As I will consider later, this lack of knowledge might be due in part to the structure of the industry, which means retailers and manufacturers get more out of interacting with one another than with customers in the aisles.) This book also offers anyone who has shopped or wants to understand the shopping experience, research-based insights into the habits of the shopper.

On the following pages, we explore some of the key insights from this work—the quick trip, three moments of truth for the shopper, in-store “migration” patterns, and how to put products in the path of customers through anticipatory retailing. We also look at how manufacturers and retailers can collaborate better in shaping flow and adjacency to sell more products in stores. In the second part of the book, we offer insights from a series of interviews with executives and experts on specific topics related to in-store retailing: deeper insights on the quick trip, the integration of online and offline retailing, multicultural retailing, and a retailer’s perspective on the issues presented in this book. Whether you are running or designing stores, building brands, or merely want a deeper understanding of shopping behavior, this book will challenge the way you look at shopping.

In a certain sense, the shoppers’ eyes offer a window into our entire society. As I realized in four decades of this work, retailing is at the cutting edge of social evolution because it brings people and the things they must have together. This is where the dreams and aspirations of consumers and the messages of brand owners intersect in a concrete action to make a purchase. If you want to understand our society, taking a trip with a shopper down a supermarket aisle is a very good start. I invite you to join me on this journey through the modern supermarket. I think you will be surprised at what we find.

—Herb Sorensen, Ph.D.

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