Science Of Shopping

Do you know you are being “manipulated” to buy more products from the store? Consumers are becoming smarter and more aware of their shopping habits and retail stores are becoming more and more competitive with an increase use of online shopping. Retail stores need to do something to keep up with the consumers’ changes in society and beat their competitors. By analyzing data from observation or statistics, stores employ marketing strategies and tactics to make sure consumers spend more time and more money at their stores so they can make more profit. After learning various marketing strategies the stores use from The Power of Habits chapter 7 by Charles Duhigg and The Science of Shopping by Malcolm Gladwell and carefully analyzing Micro Center,

One of the observations was when people walk into the stores, they need some time to adjust to the lighting indoors for about five to fifteen paces. People usually walk right by this region with quick pace without paying much attention to their surrounding inside the store. With this downshift factor, the stores need a decompression zone, the area right into the front entrance five to fifteen paces. It is important to not put anything important like shopping baskets or big promotional displays in decompression zone because people will walk pass by it without noticing it. Paco concluded that “...customer interaction with any product or promotional display in the Decompression Zone will increase at least thirty per cent once it’s moved to the back edge of the zone…” (Gladwell) Store can utilized the importance of items placement to increase its sale. A lot of store even have two doors back to back to create dedicated decompression zone just like Micro Center. Two door entrance is used for keeping the air condition inside the store, but it also serve great to create separation and a decompression zone. Even though Micro Center have a dedicated decompression zone, they will be benefit more if they put their promotional flyers at the end instead of the beginning of the decompression

“With the Guest ID, we have your name, address, tender, we know you’ve got Target Visa, a debit card, and we can tied that to your store purchases.” (Duhigg 189) They can then use these information to do analysis through computer algorithm to profile each customer so they can send out coupon customized to each customer. Micro Center does have their own membership card and even their own credit card. It is not known how much information they track on each customer. But it is sure that they are definitely analyze a lot of data from purchase history to their online shopping