How today’s shoppers shop: a matter of choice

Despite that fact that it’s just plain wrong, people continue to parrot the ‘statistic’ that 75% of purchasing decisions are made in store.

It really is about time we ditched this nonsense, which is wheeled out purely to promote the in-store cause, because it obstructs our view of the complex reality of shopper behaviour.

Let’s be clear: shoppers do not stand at fixtures drilling down through decision trees until they establish suitable options.

The truth is that preference decisions are influenced by a large number of factors and are made both outside and inside the store over time. And this process is dictated by the nature of the choice itself.

Choice systems

Our highest status decisions – those that are really important to us, like our choice of car – are made consciously.

Such decisions have deep personal significance: they often sustain our perceived status and involve purchases of high financial value or visibility.

These choices are risky and likely to be based on a certain amount of rational research but when they are finally made, emotion has a strong role to play, for example in our choice of marque or brand.

While advertising, above-the-line and in-store, is a peripheral influencer and plays an awareness role, we look to our peers or trusted editorial for endorsement.

Secondary status decisions, which we would describe as ‘fairly important’ to ourselves or our loved ones, involve much less research.

The items involved, such as breakfast cereals or coffee, are functionally important but have relatively little impact on our status: they are, however, visible in the home.

These are often commodities that we purchase on a regular basis and therefore our ‘choice’ is habituated: we don’t have the level of concern to make continuous, performance related decisions so we make do with a broadly acceptable options which may be based on a series of irrational choices.

When we shop for these items we are less considered in our sources of influence and allow advertising to play a stronger role than recommendation, although ultimately any conscious decision is more likely to involve rational parameters such as a price or perceived value trade-off.

At the tertiary level are items that are not very important to us or to our families. When purchasing these we are not really making choices so much as ‘discovering’ options that appear roughly in line with performance expectations and we rely on a source (such as a retailer) to have pre-selected a range of simple options.

These infrequent purchases, such as stain removers or blank DVDs, are of low interest and have no effect on our perceived status so we generally use very simple tools such as price to confirm our choice.

We may be influenced by word of mouth – probably only peripherally by advertising – but our choices, while rational, are ill-informed.

Influencing choice

In other words, many of the choices that we make are much more arbitrary than we realise; even the highest-level decisions rely heavily on non-rational elements.

And the impact of marketing is much less than advertisers would have us believe, with mass advertising’s influence dwindling in the face of accelerating media fragmentation.

So how can we influence choice? The category has a fundamental role to play but it is essential to identify the predominant shopping mode(s) in each particular one.

A primary consideration is the level of shopper involvement in the category.

Staples like milk or bleach generally inspire low shopper involvement; indulgent cosmetics, on the other hand, engage the shopper and enjoy high involvement.

This starts to determine the type of communication required.

Low involvement categories need to be clearly signposted to facilitate navigation and ease of shop but do not need to convey much additional information.

On the other hand, high involvement categories present opportunities to educate, inspire and encourage trial.

Be warned that it is important to establish whether a category is high involvement because it is interesting, like wine or whisky, or because it is complex and confusing. In the latter case, the shopper’s needs will be very different.

The degree of involvement also needs to be plotted against other parameters, such as frequency of purchase, to produce a matrix onto which any category, brand or product can be pinpointed.

This is important because, for example, an involving category entails some decision making at the point of purchase. However if it is shopped infrequently, decision criteria are less well-established: such a category can be very confusing to shop.

This approach establishes a shopper-based framework for NPD, packaging, advertising, marketing and merchandising.

It is nothing less than a revolutionary idea.

And it sure beats duff ‘statistics’.