They’ve set up a cot for me at my neighborhood Home Depot. Well, not really. But I spend so much time here I'm beginning to feel like Norm on Cheers. You see, after years of renting, I just bought my first house. So I need stuff. A lot of stuff. I have a garage to fill, after all. And there’s a workbench in the basement that’s crying for companionship (Psst! How about bringing me a nice orbital sander?). Plus, I’ve got half a dozen remodeling projects going.

So I’ve been doing a lot of shopping lately. Some of it has been enjoyable, some has been traumatic. Take my first visit to Home Depot. Please. Orange shopping cart gripped in my sweaty palms, I wandered agog through aisle after skyscraper-like aisle of fixtures and fittings and blades. I felt like I’d been dropped onto the Martian surface. What the heck is all this stuff? Who uses it? How am I ever going to find the WD-40?

Successive visits have been easier. And when I shop the other retail behemoths I’m getting better at tuning out the "noise" and finding my way to the products I need (and a lot of those I didn’t know I needed until I got to the store.) I don’t feel the urge to flee anymore (except when I walk into a Wal Mart - I keep expecting that scary price rollback smiley face to come zooming down the Tupperware aisle at me).
 
All in all, I’ve adapted quite well to shopping the megastores. Hugh Phillips would be proud of me. Phillips is a senior lecturer at De Montfort University and research director at Visuality Research & Design in Oxford, England. He maintains that as stores have gotten bigger, taxing our already limited attention skills, people have learned to cope by learning to shop. "Stores are just too big to shop in. You have stores that are 100,000 or 200,000 square feet. It takes people an hour to shop them. They also have to cope with 200 or 300 other customers, a barrage of signage, etc.," he says.

Visuality’s niche is applying observational research and cognitive psychology to packaging design, store environments and merchandising planning. "Our emphasis has been on how people shop," Phillips says. "Can we understand the psychology of the shopper as opposed to the psychology of the consumer? Because all the evidence is stacked up to say that they are different. It’s amazing how complex it is, understanding how people scan, how they make their decisions, how they identify the branding of a package or the market positioning of a product. You can’t summarize it in one word. People use peripheral vision. They use a two-stage decision making process. They use quite complex methods of engaging and disengaging their attention."

To survive the shopping process and avoid information overload, consumers have to subconsciously scan the store and its shelves until a product or product type they’re looking for captures their attention. "They have to learn routines called schemata, pre-progammed behavioral responses triggered by the environment, like a macro on a computer," Phillips says.

"If you look at video of inexperienced shoppers, they’re all over the place. They’re using their conscious attention, they’re not scanning, they get very fired, and they go home with only half the things they want. If you see a shopper who has learned to shop and they’re using these schemata, they’re very relaxed. We’ve done research to show that their eye-blink rate goes down. The eye-blink rate is correlated to the degree of conscious attention, so we can show that they are processing the store subconsciously. When they see something that arouses their interest, they click in their consciousness, their eye blink rate will go up."

Visuality’s in-store research has found that people scan for very small cues or clues from packaging to identify the product field, the brand and its positioning in the market. "For a retailer or manufacturer the crucial thing is, how do you get in contact with that subconscious scanning? If your product isn’t saying, ’I’m here, Buy me! Buy me!’ you’re not even going to be thought of."

Research misses the mark

Because a lot of shopping behavior is second nature, Phillips believes research on shopping is often ineffective. Consumers are being asked to talk about something they may not be aware they’re doing. Or, as he puts it,"You can’t say to someone, ’Excuse me, how were your synapses working recently?’"

He cites an example of a paint brush manufacturer who came to Visuality after focus groups failed to turn up valuable information. The only important point of difference respondents expressed in the focus groups was that the bristles fell out of cheap brushes and didn’t fall out of betterquality ones.

In in-store research, brush buyers exhibited a number of interesting behaviors. The researchers saw respondents feeling bristles, running them Up and down their palms, holding the brushes to see if they felt good in their hands. "The research had to be done in the store because once people were away from it the information was lost," Phillips says.

"The challenge for research is, how can you adapt to this knowledge? You can’t just sit there in focus group discussions and ask how people shop. Most questionnaires try to lock into conscious behavior because they have to. I’m not bashing the market research industry, I’m in it. But the problem is that the behavior you are interested in is subconscious and it may be fleeting. I have seen some terrible questionnaires shown to me, where people were interviewed coming out of stores, and they are asked, ’Can you tell me which displays you looked at and which influenced you to buy products?’ The important behavior is subconscious, and that sort of questioning is not going to get at it."

Capture attention

Making marketers’ jobs even more difficult, Phillips says, is the fact that consumers have changed. Post-recession consumers are more value-oriented, more self-assured. "This consumer is cynical about manufacturers and retailers and any big institution. People want to take control. So consequently there is an empowering going on. What does that mean for shopping? People are motivated to seek variety and be themselves rather than following rules. The consumer has changed radically and if we’re good marketers we’ve got to follow them. We have to adapt the stores, the displays, the packaging."

In addition, more and more purchase decisions are being made in-store, Phillips says. "In the U.S., 70 percent of purchases are being made at the point of sale. It used to be about 50 percent. So you’ve got to have not only marketing strategy and communication strategy, you’ve now got to have a point-of-purchase strategy. The old rules governing the predisposition to buy a product before you go into a store, which is the classic marketing creation of demand, are completely different. People are looking for the store to make recommendations. They are menu planning in-store. They are looking for ideas for Nfts, what to wear.

"It creates enormous challenges for the researchers. There has been a major increase in in-store marketing and the researchers have to adapt to this and realize that they’re working in a new area. The rules of the road are totally different. If you use research methods that are not in tune with the consumer’s behavior then you’ll get the wrong results."