Views from the Hills by R. E. Stevens, GENESIS II (The Second
Beginning) E-Mail views@aol.com
Attractions in Dead Zones
Some day I hope to meet someone from K-Mart's marketing department.
I am very interested in finding out how they arrived at the "Blue
Light Special" and the real purpose behind the program. For years,
I thought it was a clever way of getting rid of items they had over-stocked
or just wanted to eliminate the stock. Then I thought maybe it was
an overall promotion scheme to get people to think "K-Mart." Now, after
reading about a research program held in a Minneapolis Store called Once
Famous, I wonder if the Blue Light program was not a clever way to
get people to venture into areas of the store that were considered "Dead
Zones."
It turns out that the store called Once Famous is really
a state-of-the-art retail laboratory for a retail brand agency called Fame.
The agency, which has its offices behind one-way mirrors, uses the
facility to study consumers' shopping habits. As Fame's
founder, Tina Wilcox, says, "Retail is all about anthropology. It's
about customers in their natural environment. We're trying to get as
close to reality as possible with the customer."
According to the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association, 70%
of all purchases are impulse buys. If the retailer can increase the
shopper's "Dwell Time," it boosts the chance of increased sales. Fame
came up with a factor called the "Squint Test." They collected various
objects of the same color (red in their experiment) into a single, bold
display. This display was placed in the back of the store in a common
dead zone. The display succeeded in drawing shoppers to the site and
increased sales 15% to 20% higher than when the items were scattered throughout
the store. In another experiment, they placed a flickering electronic
fireplace on the left side of the store to overcome the shopper's natural
tendency to start shopping on the right side of the store. And it worked.
I guess you can say the fireplace drew customers to the left much
like a moth is drawn to a flame.
I sincerely hope the readers of the Views from the Hills of Kentucky
see familiar words in Ms. Wilcox's statement. Words such as "their
natural environment" and "close to reality as possible."
Over the years I have seen market research organizations move further and
further away from conducting research in the customer's natural environment.
Can you imagine trying to assess pricing structures of products sitting
on a table in the back room of a mall? How typical is that of the
natural environment? Maybe it is typical of research, but not of the
consumer's natural environment of product prices. How about testing
the appearance of a container sitting on a table and not on a store shelf?
It's like testing driving comfort of a car while sitting in it on
the show room floor.
For years, Sorensen Associates have been using real stores to test consumer
products. Actually 90+% of their studies are conducted in the retail
environment. That's why they are called the "In-Store Research Company."
While at Procter & Gamble, I was heavily involved in utilizing
the consumer's home and the store environment as my laboratory. P&G
was using homes before I ever came on board, and that was in 1951. I
believe Dr. Smelser, the creator of Market Research Department in 1923,
utilized the consumer's home as the base of all their research. In
the 1970s we started using real stores as focal points for assessing brand
images, brand choices, package design, pricing, purchased motivation, brand
rejection, etc.
It's called Assessment in Context. I think it is all about
reliability and validity of research.
Sponsor: Sorensen Associates Inc
Portland, OR 800.542.4321
Minneapolis, MN 888.616.0123
The In-Store Research Company