In 1916, a new department store opened in Memphis, Tennessee, under the sign of “Piggy Twist”. This may be the first self-help shopping store in human history, and it is also the embryonic form of all supermarkets later.
Walk slowly. Walkthrough all the shelves
After more than 100 years of development, supermarket operators in western countries have gradually summed up a set of Omni-directional management and strategies. For example, has the question ever occurred to you: why do so many brands of supermarkets have roughly the same layout? This is not because the supermarket operator lacks imagination, but because it is a particularly profitable layout.
From the moment you stepped into the entrance to the supermarket, your mind began to be influenced by the environment here. It takes a certain amount of time for a person’s brain to enter shopping mode, and even regular customers who have been here several times will quickly scan their surroundings when they first enter the supermarket. Supermarket merchants call the entrance of the supermarket a “decompression zone”. During the whole shopping process, this is the slowest shopping area, and supermarkets will place many affordable promotional products in this area. The purpose of this is only to give consumers a psychological hint that shopping here can save money and create a preconceived impression of material benefits in the minds of consumers.
Of course, for some consumers with a clear purchasing purpose, the decompression zone is unattractive in their eyes, and they only want to buy tender, fresh and affordable fruits and vegetables. But even these targeted consumers tend to unwittingly slow down in the context of a gentle supermarket, which is exactly what supermarkets want-slower movement means more goods will be noticed by consumers. Some supermarkets even choose small floor tiles to give consumers the illusion that they are walking too fast, thus slowing down their walking speed.
After the decompression area, consumers come to the fruit and vegetable area. Vegetables and fruits are very vulnerable to squeeze and collision, and in an ideal shopping order, consumers should buy fruits and vegetables at the end of the purchase. So why do many supermarkets use this area as the first food area for consumers? That’s because buying vegetables and fruits can give consumers positive cues that they have made choices that are good for their health and economy. And you haven’t even noticed that the supermarket specially chose green light vegetables to make the vegetables look greener. Next, when consumers choose foods such as barbecue products, puffed foods, carbonated drinks, and frozen ready-to-eat foods, they will be affected by previous purchases of fruits and vegetables, thus greatly offsetting their feelings of guilt.
Many consumers know that dairy and meat products are often placed in the core areas of supermarkets, and the purpose of this layout is to give consumers as much contact with as many unpopular shelves as possible before arriving in these areas. use hot shelves to drive the flow of people on unpopular shelves. Not only supermarkets, but many street convenience stores put popular items such as drinks and instant noodles in the deepest part of the store for the same purpose. Supermarkets also place the best-selling items of the same kind in the middle of the same shelf, so that consumers need to browse at least half the shelf to find the product they want.
Senses and consumer psychology
The senses of consumers are an important object of study in supermarkets. For example, many consumers may have noticed that they tend to pass by the baking area of bread and cake before reaching the meat, pre-processed, fish, and cooked food areas. Even if you don’t plan to buy bread, you can certainly smell the delightful sweetness of cream and cheese. Supermarkets deliberately let consumers enter the baking area first because the smell can arouse consumers’ appetite and make them hungry. If a person feels a little hungry, he is likely to buy a lot of food far more than he needs soon. Why should the job of seducing consumers “greedy insects” be handed over to baked goods? Because fish, raw meat, frozen food, and cooked food are either unpleasant or visually unpleasant, baked goods are the most suitable choice for both smell and appearance. Some supermarkets even set the baking area directly at the entrance of the supermarket to fully tap the senses of consumers and fully tap their purchases from the very beginning.
The fragrance is so easy to use and cheap to attract customers that the supermarket will certainly try its best to take advantage of it. Simon Harrop, a British marketing expert, has rich experience in adding flavor to goods. He would advise the supermarket to add the smell of clean and dried new clothes to the detergent shelves (but he always kept the recipe secret). He even adds citrus flavor to some clothes because he usually notices that many guests put the clothes close to their noses and smell them when choosing clothes.
The lighting of different colors is also a small skill used by supermarkets to increase the amount of money. In addition to using green light to make vegetables look greener, supermarkets also choose red lights in meat areas, while seafood areas are generally illuminated by light blue lights.
When you come to the heart of the supermarket, you are likely to encounter a counter for a free tasting. The kind and lovely salesman handed you a piece of ham sausage less than the size of your fingernails. you took a sample and ate it, savoring the ham sausage you had just eaten and continuing to browse the merchandise. At the same time, I felt guilty about not buying the ham sausage. Supermarkets don’t care if food is divided into negligible portions and given away for free, and they don’t care if you buy products or not. As long as the salesman distributes the food as much as possible, the goal of the supermarket will be achieved. Because chewing and swallowing food gives you a real meal. The process of eating requires the secretion of saliva, and people have a complete taste of the smell, taste, and taste of the food. Eating stimulates hunger more than smell or vision, which further induces consumers to buy more food.
Shopping carts can also greatly interfere with consumers’ senses: larger shopping carts can prompt consumers to fill it with more goods. Moreover, it is difficult for larger shopping carts to turn around in the aisle, prompting consumers to walk through the entire shopping aisle.
Manufacturers generally pay a shelf fee to the supermarket, and of all the shelves, the most competitive is the shelf location that is on a par with the human eye. The price of goods on shelves in this position is the highest, and it is also the area that consumers are most likely to notice, so it is also known as the “line of sight frame”.
Memory is also an aspect that affects consumers. Regular customers are often familiar with the layout of the supermarket, so they can avoid areas that are not attractive to them. For these guests, the supermarket will change the layout of the goods regularly, to increase the number of times the products are viewed as much as possible.
What is easy for you to get is always what the merchant wants to sell the most.
Supermarkets generally put products with high profits or products that are about to expire at a height of between 1.5 meters and 1.7 meters. So, as long as you stand on tiptoe or bend down, you can choose good and cheap goods.
Stretch out your hand, there are more surprises in the back of the merchandise.
Supermarkets are always used to selling advanced products first, so they generally hide behind freezers like fresh dairy products.
The special price area also needs “fire eye gold”.
Once I bought orange juice in the supermarket. I usually bought a bottle of orange juice for 17.9 yuan, and three bottles in the special area were 52.8 yuan. At first glance, I thought it would save a lot, so I bought it back, but as soon as I calculated that it was only 30 cents cheaper per bottle, Oh no, bought so much. In fact, in the special area, you should be able to find that products that are not of this kind of brand are also mixed inside. Also, only the cheap price is marked, and the expensive goods are also put inside, and the price is only hidden in the clothes.
The supermarket knows who you are
Every time we check out at the supermarket, the cashier asks us if we have a membership card. Why do supermarkets attach so much importance to membership cards? Because the membership card can be said to be another invention of the supermarket industry, the introduction of a membership card has directly increased the total income of the supermarket. Membership cards, also known as loyalty cards, its purpose is to take preferential treatment as a condition to cultivate customer loyalty to a supermarket. But the membership card also creates a personal profile for each customer, recording the details of each purchase. The more loyal customers in a supermarket, the more customer data they have, the more they make use of it.
The most successful example of the use of supermarket membership cards is Tesco in the UK. In 1995, Tesco began issuing membership cards to customers. Over the next five years, Tesco’s sales grew by 50%. Behind the high growth, membership cards can be said to be indispensable. When a customer checks out, each customer’s membership card records each transaction, and this data is used by the supermarket for RFV (Re-consumption, consumption frequency, and customer value) analysis. The analysis will associate consumers with certain types of goods according to their different consumption habits, which Tesco calls “buckets”. Barrel A may represent high-priced goods such as wine and desserts, while barrel B may represent bulk and promotional goods. According to the customer’s purchasing behavior, Tesco can directly see the proportion, quantity, and frequency of goods they choose from each “barrel”, so that they can know the customer’s shopping preference and evaluate the customer’s value to the supermarket.
If the customer does not have a membership card, how can the supermarket mine customer data? For customers without membership cards, the supermarket tracks customers through debit cards or credit cards to know whether the same customer visits the supermarket for the second time and how long it has taken since his last consumption, to judge the effectiveness of supermarket promotions. Besides, the cameras that can be seen everywhere in supermarkets are not only used to prevent the occurrence but are now also used by crowd analysis software to analyze consumers’ in-store behavior patterns, which also provides a source for supermarkets to obtain customer data. It can be seen that whether consumers use membership cards or not, large supermarkets ack customers’ consuming habits.
