Thursday, September 5

 
Circling the Racetrack and Other Curious Shoppers' Habits

Forget a lot of the conventional wisdom about how people shop in a supermarket. A new study by Herb Sorenson of Sorenson Associates shows how supermarkets need to rethink store design and product placement - where the best places are to merchandise products, how to manage the store's "dead zone" (Hint: That's why they put the milk way back there!) and on and on. If you believe firmly that stores are designed not for the shopper's convenience but to maximize the store's goal to extract as much cash as possible from the wallet, you might not appreciate some of the advice. As a shopper, though, I can attest to Sorenson's description of the "racetrack" method of shopping, in which I circle the store's perimeter and then make excursions up the aisles. (Which is a dumb way of doing things, because the cold items usually are on the perimeter, like meat, dairy and frozen foods, so they have lots of time to warm up in my cart while I hunt down kitty litter and paper towels). If the store wants to make my work easier and shorten my time in the store, I'm all for it.

This story appeared on the GreatMindsinMarketing.com Web site, one of the properties in the marketingsherpa.com online-publishing empire. marketingsherpa.com's sites and email newsletters should be required reading for anybody whose calling in life even remotely resembles marketing communications and email publishing. Publisher Anne Holland (like me, a refugee from the print world) and her crew are some of the smartest people in the business.
posted by Unknown 9:43 PM