Tag Archives: cognition

Mom, Christmas and Retail

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If you’ve ever shopped with a child in tow during the hectic holiday shopping season, you’re no stranger to stress, particularly during the holiday shopping season. But, retailers who apply human biology and the cognitive theory to in-store design could potentially gain a leg up in making moms more comfortable – not to mention more likely to shop and spend? Moms are busy people, juggling a multitude of duties.  It is important to remember that moms are usually the primary shoppers in a household. And shoppers aren’t always the person who consumes a product.  Because moms are juggling so many duties, it is easy to make little mistakes in a retail setting that will drive them away.  The more a store can do to provide an environment that puts them at ease, the longer they will stay and the more loyal they will become.

  1. Red is Dead. Humans are hard wired to associate warm colors with natural spaces that trigger the brain to feel calm and make shoppers want to linger. Differentiate your store by saying goodbye to traditional red and green and hello to warm colors like maroon and evergreen. The soothing colors will decrease stress and create a non-threatening environment encouraging moms to purchase.
  2. Arch this way. For centuries, arches have served as symbolic gateways, signaling the entrance into a “special” or safe place. Anthropologists refer to this as “liminal space.” Archways signal to us that we are entering a space that is different and therefore special. Moms are more likely to purchase when they are in a relaxed, safe environment and believe they are buying a unique product. Use arches in your retail space to draw attention to special offers or seasonal areas and create a safe shopping environment.
  3. You touch it, you buy it. The more often a person touches a product, the more likely they are to buy it. Touching something, even in passing, subconsciously signals ownership and draws in.  Moms, in particular, are trained to touch as a way of ensuring quality and safety of objects for their family. When we test for quality, we are committing ourselves to something and in doing so make it our own.  Use fixtures and displays that require shopper interaction to increase engagement and lead to higher purchase rates.
  4. Get intimate. Personal space ranges from 2 to 4 feet. When moms feel they are doing something intimate, rather than just a task, they will have more positive associations with the experience. To create an intimate shopping experience, arrange your displays with 2 to 4 feet of space on either side of the shopper.
  5. From a space to a place. Familiarity with a location puts people at ease and lets them take their time examining things.  Public space have no personal connection and are potentially threatening. Moms that feel like they are in a comfortable, familiar space will spend more time and more money.  Don’t be afraid to use furniture on the edges of an aisle to make it appear more homey.
  6. Sometimes “mom” is not the word. Forget about “mom” for a minute. Human beings respond to symbols.  Moms are constantly being reminded of what their social role and sometimes it can get tiring.  Periodically use symbolism in displays that reminds them of their lives outside motherhood, such as pictures of a woman relaxing or shopping for herself.
  7. Hidden treasures. People love to find hidden gems, whether they are shopping for food, cards, or anything else.  “Hide” merchandise in unexpected places throughout an aisle.  When moms find these items, it reminds them they are clever and skilled shoppers.  This will drive them to continue shopping, as they look for additional deals.

Human perceptions of space, although derived from sensory tools that all humans share, are shaped and patterned by culture. Designing your retail space to reflect these often subconscious behavior patterns will put moms at ease, which leads to increased time in the store – and increased sales.

 

 

A few notes on cognition and decision making

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Successful decision making in a social setting depends on our ability to understand the intentions, emotions and beliefs of others. The mirror system allows us to understand other people’s motor actions and action intentions. Empathy allows us to understand and share emotions and sensations with others. “Theory of mind” allows us to understand more abstract concepts such as beliefs or wishes in others.

In all these cases, evidence has accumulated that we use the specific neural networks engaged in processing mental states in ourselves to understand the same mental states in others.

However, the magnitude of the brain activity in these shared networks is modulated by contextual appraisal of the situation or the other person. An important feature of decision making in a social setting concerns the interaction of reason and emotion – we do more than respond to rational things rationally. Social motivations and emotions compete with each other, while higher-level control processes modulate the interactions of these low-level biases.  In other words, even the human mind works as a system of give and takes.  Better think of that when building a brand.

 

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Cognitive Biases and Shopping

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Watching shoppers navigate a retail environment is often analogous to watching mice scurry about a maze. Each individual shopper¹s needs, response to environmental stimuli, procurement methods and decision-making abilities play out as a continuous large-scale experiment in cognitive function. Instead of wafting the smell of cheese down corridors or administering shocks, however, retailers instead often prey upon the consumer in a (usually) more subtle way: exploiting cognitive biases.

Cognitive biases are patterns of deviation in judgment occurring in specific contexts or situations. They’re near universal quirks of the human rational thought-process triggered by memory, perception and emotion. Now, a retailer might find emotionally salient influence difficult to consistently achieve. Similarly, hitting the right notes of nostalgia without becoming kitsch is very hit-or-miss in such a context sensitive environment. Luckily (for them), however, the retailer can usually hang their hat on the consistent failure of consumers to process numbers or have a cogent dialogue between their hunter-gatherer instincts and their wallet.

An arrow both manufacturers and retailers frequently pull from their quiver is the focusing effect, or Anchoring. This is the human tendency to rely too heavily, or “focus,” on one trait, symbol/word or piece of information when making purchasing decisions.

What this means for Best Buy is that they can slap HD on anything and the consumer will assume it’s a superior product, making the Blue Shirts quest to upsell that much easier. This bias is also the reason that your friend dropped $100 on Monster Cables HDMI cables instead of the $10 regular brand HDMI cables, even though they are the exact same product. Sure, logic would dictate that, because it is a digital cable acting as a conduit for 1’s and 0’s, conductivity and bandwidth don’t really mean anything, either it works or it doesn’t – but because your friend’s brain registers the “HD” designation on the packaging and the plus is shinier, it must be better.

You can also see this at work in the grocery store. Sales of organic food have skyrocketed. Never mind that the USDA and FDA’s classification for “natural” and “organic” are tenuous at best, the word “organic” symbolizes pure, healthy and better. A simple sticker can immediately trigger this response in the consumer’s mind: “No wormy, pesticide-ridden peasant produce for my family, by God, as a loving parent I’m committed to providing the healthiest safest food I can.” One word will illicit all of that, whether it’s grounded and rational or not.

[At this point I will just type the word “3D.” You know what I’m talking about and you know exactly what just popped into your head when you read that particularly nasty little word. I’m not going to go into it. The millions of dollars we as a nation have pumped into the studio and electronic company coffers for a gimmick and a shitty visual product is just astounding. We just keep chasing that first Avatar high, don’t we? Moving on...]

Another brain-glitch that retailers frequently profit from is Irrational Escalation, essentially the phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on a prior investment or cumulative prior investment, even if that decision was a mistake. This is the logical fallacy that leads shoppers to spend an extra $80+ in warrantees on that treadmill they might use, because, hey, they spent that $300 for this nice hamster wheel why not insure it against damage for six months. This fallacy is also responsible for service plans, my father spending $300 to fix the A/C on a car worth $750, it’s why Mila Kunis stayed with Macauly Culkin so long, and explains my purchase of a ticket to Star Wars: Episode III (damn it). This also leads to post-purchase rationalization, where we convince ourselves that we made the financially smart decision, even though we know deep-down that we’re an idiot.

Finally, the third most-exploited (and most-evil) cognitive bias by retailers has to be Hyperbolic Discounting, the tendency for people to prefer more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs, where the tendency increases the closer to the present both payoffs are. This makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint; that dead deer probably wouldn’t be very tasty in 100 days and “compound interest” is mutually exclusive to a society whose technological hallmark is flint knapping.

Where do we find this in the retail environment? I’ll tell you after you finish signing up for that J.Crew credit card with the first-time use 20% discount. Moral hazards and Lemons be damned, you would literally just die without that pashmina pink scarf for your chihuaha, Snickers. We want what we want, and we want it right now. It’s like our wallets are quietly chanting suffrage slogans from our back pockets whenever that new version of the iPhone catches our eye. Bugs? What bugs? Luckily the Apple Store also sells Apple service plans and warrantees, right?

There are at least 30 decision-making cognitive biases that play right into retailers’ hands. It’s just that easy to manipulate consumers, or to set consumers up to manipulate themselves.

By Matt Cloud