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Why We Buy: The Science Of Shopping (Paperback)
by Paco Underhill
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Sales & marketing |
| Market price: ¥ 158.00
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¥ 148.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
This is a book both McDonalds and Ralph Nader would love - you'll learn about what happens from the parking lot to the checkout stand. |
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Author: Paco Underhill
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pub. in: June, 2000
ISBN: 0684849143
Pages: 256
Measurements: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00821
Other information: Touchstone edition
ISBN-13: 978-0684849140
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- Awards & Credential -
The national bestseller. |
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- MSL Picks -
Underhill, once a budding academic who worked on a William H. Whyte project analyzing how people use public spaces, adapted anthropological techniques to the world of retail and forged an innovative career with the consulting firm Envirosell. Since brand names and traditional advertising don't necessarily translate into sales, Underhill argues that retail design based on his company's close observation of shoppers and stores holds the key. His anecdotes contain illuminating detail. For example, since bookstore shoppers like to browse, baskets should be scattered throughout the store to make it easier for customers to carry their purchases. In clothing stores, fitting rooms are best placed closer to the men's department, because men choose based on fit, while women consider more variables. And he sprinkles in other smart suggestions: drugstores could boast a consolidated "men's health" department; computer stores, to attract women, should emphasize convenience and versatility, not size and speed; and clerks at luxury hotels should use hand-held computers to check in travelers from lobby chairs. Underhill remains skeptical about cyberspace retail, believing that Web sites can't offer the sensory stimuli, immediate gratification or social interaction available in brick-and-mortar stores. While the book does little to analyze the international, regional or ethnic dimensions of the subject, it should aid those in business while intriguing urban anthropologists, amateur and professional.
- From quoting Publishers Weekly
Target readers:
Business CEOs, marketing managers, retailers or just avid shoppers
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With clients ranging from McDonald's to Starbucks, Estée Lauder to Blockbuster and Citibank to Wells Fargo, Paco Underhill has been profiled in The New Yorker and Smithsonian Magazine, has written for American Demographics and Adweek and lectures widely. He is based in New York City.
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From the publisher
Is there a method to our madness when it comes to shopping? Hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as "a Sherlock Holmes for retailers," author and research company CEO Paco Underhill answers with a definitive "yes" in this witty, eye-opening report on our ever-evolving consumer culture. Why We Buy is based on hard data gleaned from thousands of hours of field research -- in shopping malls, department stores, and supermarkets across America. With his team of sleuths tracking our every move, from sweater displays at the mall to the beverage cooler at the drugstore, Paco Underhill lays bare the struggle among merchants, marketers, and increasingly knowledgeable consumers for control.
In his quest to discover what makes the contemporary consumer tick, Underhill explains the shopping phenomena that often go unnoticed by retailers and shoppers alike, including:
- How a well-placed shopping basket can turn a small purchase into a significant sale
- What the "butt-brush factor" is and how it can make sales plummet
- How working women have altered the way supermarkets are designed
- How the "boomerang effect" makes product placement ever more challenging
- What kinds of signage and packaging turn browsers into buyers
For those in retailing and marketing, Why We Buy is a remarkably fresh guide, offering creative and insightful tips on how to adapt to the changing customer. For the general public, Why We Buy is a funny and sometimes disconcerting look at our favorite pastime.
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Chapter Eight: Shop Like a Man
When they were a client I used to tell Woolworth's, if you would just hold Dad's Day at your stores once a week, you'd bring in a lot more money.
They didn't listen. You may have heard.
Men and women differ in just about every other way, so why shouldn't they shop differently, too? The conventional wisdom on male shoppers is that they don't especially like to do it, which is why they don't do much of it. It's a struggle just to get them to be patient company for a woman while she shops. As a result, the entire shopping experience - from packaging design to advertising to merchandising to store design and fixturing - is generally geared toward the female shopper.
Women do have a greater affinity for what we think of as shopping - walking at a relaxed pace through stores, examining merchandise, comparing products and values, interacting with sales staff, asking questions, trying things on and ultimately making purchases. Most purchasing traditionally falls to women, and they usually do it willingly - even when shopping for the mundane necessities, even when the experience brings no particular pleasure, women tend to do it in dependable, agreeable fashion. Women take pride in their ability to shop prudently and well. In a study we ran of baby products, women interviewed insisted that they knew the price of products by heart, without even having to look. (Upon further inquiry, we discovered that they were mostly wrong.) As women's roles change, so does their shopping behavior - they're becoming a lot more like men in that regard - but they're still the primary buyer in the American marketplace.
In general, men, in comparison, seem like loose cannons. We've timed enough shoppers to know that men always move faster than women through a store's aisles. Men spend less time looking, too. In many settings it's hard to get them to look at anything they hadn't intended to buy They usually don't like asking where things are, or any other questions, for that matter. (They shop the way they drive.) If a man can't find the section he's looking for, he'll wheel about once or twice, then give up and leave the store without ever asking for help. You can watch men just shut down.
You'll see a man impatiently move through a store to the section he wants, pick something up, and then, almost abruptly, he's ready to buy, having taken no apparent joy in the process of finding. You've practically got to get out of his way. When a man takes clothing into a dressing room, the only thing that stops him from buying it is if it doesn't fit. Women, on the other hand, try things on as only part of the consideration process, and garments that fit just fine may still be rejected on other grounds. in one study, we found that 65 percent of male shoppers who tried something on bought it, as opposed to 25 percent of female shoppers. This is a good argument for positioning fitting rooms nearer the men's department than the women's, if they are shared accommodations. If they are not, men's dressing rooms should be very clearly marked, because if he has to search for it, he may just decide it's not worth the trouble.
Here's another statistical comparison: Eighty-six percent of women look at price tags when they shop. Only 72 percent 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 shoppers. They are also far more suggestible than women - men seem so anxious to get out of the store that they'll say yes to almost anything.
Now, a shopper such as that could be seen as more trouble than he's worth. But he could also be seen as a potential source of profits, especially given his lack of discipline. Either way, men now do more purchasing than ever before. And that 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 they marry women who work long and hard too, they will be forced to shoulder more of the burden of shopping. The manufacturers, retailers and display designers who pay attention to male ways, and are willing to adapt the shopping experience to them, will have an edge in the twenty-first century.
The great traditional arena for male shopping behavior has always been the supermarket. It's here, with thousands of products all within easy reach, that you can witness the carefree abandon and restless lack of discipline for which the gender is known. In one supermarket study, we counted how many shoppers came armed with lists. Almost all of the women had them. Less than a quarter of the men did. Any wife who's watching the family budget knows better than to send her husband to the supermarket unchaperoned. Giving him a vehicle to commandeer, even if it is just a shopping cart, only emphasizes the potential for guyness in the experience. Throw a couple of kids in with Dad and you've got a lethal combination; he's notoriously bad at saying no when there's grocery acquisitioning to be done. Part of being Daddy is being the provider, after all. It goes to the heart of a man's self-image.
I've spent hundreds of hours of my life watching men moving through supermarkets. One of my favorite video moments starred a dad carrying his little daughter on his shoulders. In the snacks aisle, the girl gestures toward the animal crackers display. Dad grabs a box off the shelf, opens it and hands it up - without even a thought to the fact that his head and shoulders are about to be dusted with cookie crumbs. It's hard to imagine Mom in such a wanton scenario. Another great lesson in male shopping came about watching a man and his two small sons pass through the cereal aisle. When the boys plead for their favorite brand, he pulls down a box and instead of carefully opening it along the reclosable tab, he just tips the top, knowing full well that once the boys start in, there won't be any need to reclose it.
Supermarkets are places of high impulse buying for both sexes - fully 60 to 70 percent of purchases there were unplanned, grocery industry studies have shown us. But men are particularly suggestible to the entreaties of children as well as eye-catching displays.
There's another profligate male behavior that invariably shows itself at supermarkets, something we see over and over on the video we shoot at the registers: The man almost always pays. Especially when a man and woman are shopping together, he insists on whipping out his wad and forking it over, lest the cashier mistakenly think it's the woman of the house who's bringing home the bacon. No wonder retailers commonly call men wallet carriers. Or why the conventional wisdom is, sell to the woman, close to the man. Because while the man may not love the experience of shopping, he gets a definite thrill from the experience of paying. It allows him to feel in charge even when he isn't. Stores that sell prom gowns depend on this. Generally, when Dad's along, the girl will get a pricier frock than if just Mom was there with her.
In some categories, men shoppers put women to shame. We ran a study for a store where 17 percent of the male customers we interviewed said they visited the place more than once a week! Almost onequarter of the men there said they had left the house that day with no intention of visiting the store - they just found themselves wandering in out of curiosity. The fact that it was a computer store may have had something to do with it, of course. Computer hardware and software have taken the place of cars and stereo equipment as the focus of male love of technology and gadgetry. Clearly, most of the visits to the store were informationgathering forays. On the videotape, we watched the men reading intently the software packaging and any other literature or signage available. The store was where men bought software, but it was also where they did most of their learning about it. This underscores another male shopping trait - just as they hate to ask directions, they like to get their information firsthand, preferably from written materials, instructional videos or computer screens.
A few years back we ran a study for a wireless phone provider that was developing a prototype retail store. And we found that men and women used the place in very different ways. Women would invariably walk right up to the sales desk and ask staffers questions about the phones and the various deals being offered. Men, however, went directly to the phone displays and the signs that explained the agreements. They then took brochures and application forms and left the store -- all without ever speaking to an employee. When these men returned to the store, it was to sign up. The women, though, on average required a third visit to the store, and more consultation, before they were ready to close.
For the most part, men are still the ones who take the lead when shopping for cars (though women have a big say in most new-car purchases), and men and women perform the division of labor you'd expect when buying for the home: She buys anything that goes inside, and he buys everything that goes outside - mower and other gardening and lawn-care equipment, barbecue grill, water hose and so on. This is changing as the percentage of female-headed households rises, but it still holds.
Even when men aren't shopping, they figure prominently in the experience. We know that across the board, how much customers buy is a direct result of how much time they spend in a store. And our research has shown over and over that when a woman is in a store with a man, she'll spend less time there than when she's alone, with another woman or even with children. Here's the actual breakdown of average shopping time from a study we 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
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| View all 10 comments |
Colleen (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-06 00:00>
Paco Underhill and his consulting firm have made a study of the psychology of shopping - watching and taping people as they make their way through stores, determining how the layout and placement of fixtures and items encourages or discourages sales. He lays out his conclusions in Why We Buy, in language accessible to a lay reader, heavy on anecdotes rather than charts or stats.
This is a must-read if you are a retailer yourself, of any kind, and even if you aren't, will give you ideas for your next garage or rummage sale! And even if you are merely a shopper, it will change your shopping experience as you become more aware of the tricks of placement that are maneuvering you into buying more (or fleeing the store). I've also enjoyed doing a small imitation of Underhill's researchers and watch others shop. It's fascinating! This is a book that will change your experience of an important part of every day life, well worth reading. |
Connie J (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-06 00:00>
Since I have never been an avid shopper (usually once or twice a year besides the grocery), I found this book absolutely enlightening! I find I "shop like the guys" in the stores the few times I go each year. Usually I give my neighbor money and she buys my clothes, etc., during her very frequent shopping trips.
However, about a year ago I opened a Holistic Clinic and have started carrying items to fill needs of my bodywork clients and yoga students, etc. Paco's book really made a BIG difference in how I have done the presentation of products, signs, customer checkout, etc. My sales did indeed increase significantly!
I'm in a Business Networking group and have recommended the book to the other 20 people in that group and loaned it to a few. I also recommended it to 3 of our local bookstores (including a very large chain), the post office, and have given it as a gift to two friends who are starting their own businesses.
My husband teases me about "Well, what does Paco say?"
This book is fun to read, extremely informative, and has made a great difference in my sales - and a newfound enjoyment in shopping for me! |
Joel (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-06 00:00>
I enjoyed this book immensly, because it examined a practice which we all seem to enjoy, yet we never stop to think about the different theories and practices within the industry. For example, we never think to ourselves how the merchandise is placed so that it is perfectly in our view, and how the store is laid out so that we take in all of the atmosphere and stimulents which are directed towards us. As with all books, the reader will find some parts of this book to be somewhat "boring", but you will find plenty of instances where you find yourself saying "so that is why they do that" and "gee, i never realized that". |
Richard (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-06 00:00>
I was fortunate enough to get my hands on an advance copy of Paco Underhill's new book on shopping. Now, like many people I am often recommended to "how to" & "why" books on various business subjects -and I find that they are usually quite ponderous and dry and I generally last about a chapter - not so with this book - Underhill presents a POV on a subject that many of us take for granted -how people shop and why they do what they do when they are in a bank or a store. Obviously, since his business is studying this subject in all its minute details, he has had ample opportunity to study and probe vast amounts of film and this experience has provided him with insights that are both fascinating and, at times, quite humorous as he explores the human condition in that very American - and now increasing global activity of shop 'til you drop. In short, it's ainteresting and informative read and every store manager should be given thisn bookm as required reading - as well as "civilians" who frequent these establishments - large and small. |
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