Seduced and abandoned

In days gone by (any time before the current recession), the shopping cart was a customer’s rolling possession holder, containing all the selections that were as good as bought and paid for. With its vertical bars, the cart gave off a warning to other shoppers to keep out, contents contained within this high-security traveling metal fencing are “my stuff.” At the same time, each product placed within the cart represented the shopper’s (almost) solemn commitment to purchase—nothing would leave the cart until checkout. Sure, once in a great while you might see a vaguely embarrassed customer beg off an item at checkout—to the tsk-tsks, tut-tuts and clucking sounds of others in the queue, a chorus of muses who sensed some important cosmic code of shopping conduct had been violated. But mostly, the mighty mobile fortress simply served as the shopper’s purchase conveyance until their items could be taken out to the parking lot and put in the car.

No more. In a recent study we did for a large retail chain, upwards of 500 items were abandoned every day in each of the stores we were in, relegated to a corral of carts in the corner whose sole purpose was to house these rejected products (looking rather forlorn, anthropomorphically speaking, like abandoned puppies at a shelter). A cottage industry sprang up in the stores to sort and re-stock these “re-shops”—a thankless, never-ending task for the associates. Clearly, customers had exploded the idea that moving an item from the shelf into their cart represented any kind of implied purchase agreement.

Yesterday’s New York Times featured an article on abandonments in the online shopping world, highlighting a new web service which remarkets to those who might put an item in their electronic “cart,” but not finish the transaction. It’s an interesting approach to nudging people to re-consider, but certainly loaded with complications, not the least of which is the highly intrusive annoyance factor.

Perhaps the customer contract in bricks-and-mortar retailers will be re-initiated, and shoppers will once again follow the age-old Cafeteria Rule—take all you want and eat (buy) all you take. Or we may be witnessing something that has already changed forever—good or bad economy notwithstanding—the cart as nothing more than a carriage of considerations.

Can we do an MRI in Aisle 11?

Ron writes: The search for the perfect predictor of advertising effectiveness continues. According to a recent story in the New York Times, a Yale undergraduate is using magnetic resource imaging to “study brain waves and determine why people respond to some advertisements but not others.”

Emily Yudofsky became curious about the potential of neuromarketing in high school, when she worked in a laboratory that did research on the consumer response to Coke vs. Pepsi. Yudofsky’s neuromarketing company will specialize in research on public service advertising, hoping to develop anti-smoking or don’t-drink-and-drive campaigns.

The article suggests neuromarketing is “tremendously controversial,” both because it is seen as “creepy” and, as scientists point out, “just because a neuron fires does not mean a consumer likes Coke better than Pepsi.” If neuromarketing is indeed effective, we will see it used for more commercial applications. It is tempting to believe that brain scans can provide a complete understanding of how consumers make decisions. However, no matter how refined this technology gets, it won’t be a substitute for the observation of behavior and the resulting insights that bring true understanding of the consumer. At least not yet.

On second thought, bring back the lasers

Ron writes: Getting a hard count of how many people pass through New York’s Times Square every day is an important measure for a number of commercial interests—setting retail rents and outdoor advertising rates most particularly. According to this article in the New York Times, the Times Square Alliance pays $100,000 a year for a team of Russian immigrants who are paid $8 an hour to count the masses. The NYT reports that high-tech gadgets such as video recordings, vertical cameras, and even lasers have been considered, but that the immense volume of traffic overwhelms the technology. Instead, the human tide is counted by “dozens of Russian immigrants armed with clipboards, folding chairs and counters.”

Still, the low tech hand clicker approach employed by the Russians doesn’t work perfectly either. According to one of the counters, “When people walk en masse, it’s useless.” So when Times Square is most crowded, and counting accuracy is most important, the low tech method breaks down, too.

Having worked with many companies to help them understand customer traffic and behaviors, I know the best results come from employing both higher tech solutions such as video cameras, along with a low-tech, more labor-intensive approach. Perhaps if the Times Square Alliance employed this one-two punch, they would be able to get true head-count fidelity.

Even so, the most crucial assessments would still elude them—like how many people are actually stopping into the stores and buying, and who and how many are actually looking at the billboards. Those are the numbers worth real money.