Prime Customer Interest with Adjacencies

Retailing consultant Paco Underhill, author of Why We Buy, praises an imaginative use of product adjacencies by a Restoration Hardware store. An expensive chest being offered for sale had a large old-fashioned jar positioned on top. Inside the jar was a collection of chrome-plated ball-peen hammers also being offered for sale.
     This didn't follow from the peanut-butter-and-jelly principle of product adjacencies. We stock the jellies on shelves close to where we shelve the peanut butter because when a shopper puts a peanut butter jar into the shopping cart, they're likely to start thinking, "Where is the jelly?" Mr. Underhill has plenty of those sorts of examples, too. Have the windshield wipers adjacent to the motor oil, he advises.
     But the chest/hammers adjacency is more whimsical, and that serves a function known by consumer psychologists as priming. We can introduce ideas to the shopper's brain indirectly or subconsciously. For example, the shopper whose attention is caught by the ball-peen hammers will subconsciously realize there's a chest for sale. Or it could be that the customer who came in to buy a high-quality chest is exposed to fancy looking ball-peen hammers. In either case, ideas introduced this way have a special power. Because the perceptions arrive subconsciously, the person is less likely to mobilize reasons not to buy. The shoppers are more open to influence when they see the product again.
     The tactic, then, is to prime customers' interest by placing the target product adjacent to something the customer is looking for, and then featuring the target product at a point where the customer is likely to see it again. Behind this is the same principle used in showing newly introduced products or brands as a shopper enters the store. Upon entry, customers are generally moving too fast to consciously process information.