Tag Archives: atmospherics

Cognition and Collective Awareness: Creating “Place” in Retail

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Humans favor certain environments that satisfy survival needs. Through millions of years of evolution we are hardwired to seek out environments that signal an increases sense of comfort and  a higher probability of survival.  We seek out evidence of:

  • Abundant resources
  • Minimal threat from predators and aggressors
  • Shelter from the outside world

Much of this is subconscious, but it remains deeply ingrained in our collective psyche. Consequently, humans have evolved a visual preference for spaces that allow us to see without being seen when we so choose.  From a retail perspective, this means developing enclosed spaces that downplay threat and encourage complete emersion in the experience.

Even as we seek out environments that speak to our needs of comfort and survival, humans are inherent risk takers. Enticement and peril are part of the exploration process and without this deep-seated need to explore and take risks, we wouldn’t be human.  Humans need to seek new information and test their skills.

Consequently, we seek out new experiences that can be differentiated from other experiences.  We categorize these experiences, giving them greater meaning and a higher probability of habitual use.  Categorizing and differentiating suggest:

  • Diverse resources
  • Greater stability

Ultimately, this appears to be a contradiction. But there is the possibility of resolution.  Environmental psychologists assume that individuals’ feelings and emotions ultimately determine their behavior. The problem is that people rarely shop as individuals, even if they are alone. On the surface that may sound confusing, but the point is simple. Human beings are cultural creatures, shaped by shared experience and the unavoidable truth that we are part of a complex system of beliefs and interactions. Uncovering those cultural processes and designing a retail experience around them offsets the impact of cognitive responses to an environment.

So what do we do to provide a sense of security while playing to the underlying desire to explore and learn knew things?  We strike a balance.  And we strike that balance by thinking in terms of converting space to place.  Place identity concerns the meaning and significance of places for their inhabitants and users. People create memories within places and form personal and collective connections. The stronger the connection, the more likely they are to frequent the space and to bring new people to that place. The goal is to endow a venue with symbolic meaning, memory and significance.

The sense of place may be strongly enhanced by the setting, or the setting it attempts to project, being written about, being party of stories handed down over time, being portrayed in art or being part of the collective myth.  It can be established through modes of codification aimed at preserving or enhancing places and traditions felt to be of value. All this creates a “database” for framing the socio-physical settings we experience.  By providing customers with symbolic cues in the environment that set it apart from the surrounding area, we cater to the need to delve into the new while subconsciously establishing an element of the known, the safe and the familiar.

 

Getting the 7% Retail Sales Bump

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I heard an interesting statistic the other day from a retail expert, while driving to a Barnes and Noble to pick up a birthday gift for a friend.  Admittedly, he was quoting statistics right and left, as experts are wont to do, but this one struck me as particularly interesting, not for the number itself but for how it is being interpreted.  Specifically, the statistic was that slowing down a shopper in the store increases sales by 7%.  I have long argued that being overly efficient can indeed cause more harm than good in the store, so I wasn’t surprised to hear the 7% figure.  What struck me was the fact that it was being presented as a magic bullet that required neither an understanding of the relationship between shopper and retail brand, nor the context around why we shop.  The overarching recommendation was simple: slow the shopper down regardless of your brand, why they are there from a sociocultural position, or how they use your retail space.  One size fits all.

The problem is that a one size fits all approach won’t work. Again, I support the notion that slowing people down increases sales, at least in principle, but if the tools used to slow down the shopping process do not meet expectations of the brand or the psychological and cultural reasons for shopping, then they simply become irritants.

My Barnes and Noble experience serves as an example.  The layout of the store has changed since the local, privately-owned bookstore and Borders went out of business.  More precisely, the store now carries far fewer books, has two toy sections and has islands throughout the store meant to catch the eye (and hand) of the passerby by.  And yes, it does slow you down.  But does it get the shopper to spend?  Perhaps for some, but it doesn’t always work – indeed, it may not work very often once the holiday shopping season ends.  Why?  Because while the shopping practices around Christmas certainly have people primed to stop and engage with all manner of display, this may not be true the rest of the year, at least not at this particular retailer.  Slowing the shopper down with items and displays that are out of context serve only as annoyances.  Slowing people down, on the other hand, with spaces where they are encouraged to read or uses imagery that conveys the symbolic associations with the kinds of libraries one finds on an estate, amplify the context of the bookstore and slow down the shopper with relevant messaging, subconscious though it may be.  The bump in sales doesn’t come from the slowing of the customer in and of itself.  The bump comes from designing an experience that is tied to the shared condition or the retail space and underlying shopper needs, both functional and symbolic.

The retail space is an extension of the brand, not simply a place to display merchandise. As brands becomes more focused on shopper marketing, the retail space becomes increasingly relevant in how we think about marketing and design. This means that in addition to the consideration put into the initial design of the space, retailers have to think about the space as a destination, a place of pilgrimage.

Atmospherics has dominated much of the conversation around retail store design for the last decade. Approach and avoidance theory has focused on psycho-evolutionary principles. Specifically, Mehrabian and Russell propose that individuals’ reactions to environments are categorized as either approach or avoidance behaviors, which include four basic dimensions:

  1. A desire to remain physically (approach) or to leave  (avoid) the environment
  2. A desire to explore (approach) the environment as opposed to a tendency to remain inanimate in (avoid) the environment
  3. A desire to communicate with (approach) others in the environment versus a tendency to avoid interacting with others
  4. Enhancement (approach) of performance and satisfaction of task performances or hindrance (avoidance) of task performances

Environmental psychologists assume that individuals’ feelings and emotions ultimately determine their behavior. The problem is that people rarely shop as individuals, even if they are alone.  On the surface that may sound confusing, but the point is simple. Human beings are cultural creatures, shaped by shared experience and the unavoidable truth that we are part of a complex system of beliefs and interactions. Atmospherics addresses only the cognitive side of the shopper journey, letting the more powerful cultural drivers fall out of the equation.  An anthropologically informed model adds them back in. And without those cultural and symbolic elements, slowing shoppers down will not increase sales, it will simply slow them down.

Building Retail Environments Around Context

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Environmental sensibilities shape cultural expectations about how every environment we interact with should be properly organized. The physical construct envisioned by the architect, the interior designer, the store owner, etc. are all varied to some degree based on how they understand and respond to vague notions like “shopping.”  Add to that the varied, contextually mitigated understandings of the consumer about an activity and space, and designing the elements that are meant to fit into a space becomes highly contentious.  Frequently, retailers and CPG companies build around assumptions that rarely factor in the complex underpinnings of why people shop in a broader cultural context. The misunderstanding and conflicts that can occur from mismatches in conceptions of context, time and space can create considerable dissonance in civility, understanding and sympathy.  And that leads to lackluster sales.

While there are a host of theories and design doctrines that go into constructing a retail environment, methods for retail space design have largely cantered around atmospherics for the last 30 years. Basically, the model states that pleasant environments result in an approach response,  and unpleasant environments result in avoidance. Simply put, if the environment is pleasant it increases arousal and can lead to a stronger positive consumer response. If the environment is unpleasant, increasing arousal level will produce avoidance. The arousal quality of an environment is dependent on its “information load,” i.e., its degree of  Novelty (unexpected, surprising, new, familiar) and Complexity (number of elements, extent of motion or change).  People seek out novel experiences, but novelty becomes a burden and a threat if there is too much happening for the brain to process. Humans want to explore and be entertained, but not to the point of confusion.

The problem is that while the parameters of avoidance and approach, novelty and complexity, hold true at the cognitive and biological levels, they can’t compensate for cultural motivations. They are simply too simple. A contextual model expands on these principles and asks what cultural and symbolic elements can be built into the space to reflect context and the reasons people are shopping in a venue. Are they there to entertain themselves or their kids?  Are they seeking escape from a busy mall? Are they looking to the retail space as an extension of the brand they are shopping for and/or using as a means of personal expression? The point is that brands and shopping serve a wide range or roles.  More so in an era of increasing internet shopping, increased expendable income and access to goods.  The retail space is more complex than cognition and biological responses to stimuli.

Indeed, cultural norms often dictate our notions of comfort and self-worth, as do the various shopping contexts in which we find ourselves. The good news is that the contextualization of these actions by location provides a deep and varied “interaction space” and sets the stage from creating a recognizable brand identity. The key is understanding how the product, the retail space and conceptions of self and other work together as a system of meaning. Shopping begins long before the need to purchase an item arises and you get at a deeper understanding of what matters, in context, by exploring the deeper meanings behind the objects and the activities.  Once you understand that selling toilet paper is about concepts of hygiene and purity, that selling heartworm medication is about our deeper fears of pollution and impurity, or that shopping for clothing is frequently about sex, your range of options increase.

What all of this means is how we interpret space and our physical environment, both public and personal, literal and symbolic, shapes on how a promotion, a marketing message or a brand is perceived. Promotions in high-tragic, high-messaging location, for example, are easily passed over unless the offering has a very clear purpose – it can’t simply be clever. As another example, a high-end grocery isn’t just selling food.  For a husband trying to prepare an anniversary dinner for his wife, the store is selling self-assurance, facilitating love and helping lay the groundwork for a pleasant memory.  That means, potentially, decreasing efficiencies and helping navigate the shopper to areas of the store he may not have considered.