Recognize a Need, Then Fill It

Decades ago, cement mixers patrolled the San Francisco Bay Area with their slogan on the rotating drum reading “Find a Need, Then Fill It.” Those trucks were carrying cement from a company founded by industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, whose name might now be uttered most often in the phrase “Kaiser Health Plan.”
     In developing a strategic business plan, a retailer is well advised to find a need before attempting to fill it. For the store-based retailer, this determines where you locate. For all retailers, it determines what merchandise you carry and services you offer.
     But in the day-to-day retailer-to-customer interactions, it might be less a matter of finding a need and more a matter of recognizing the set of needs of a particular individual. And recognizing how each person’s needs will change over time—even very short times.
     Psychological research has for a long time and in many ways confirmed that when we’re hungry, we get more interested in food. No surprise there. And a hungry person becomes less discriminating about foods they’ll value positively. Foods which a person would dislike when not hungry get a less negative evaluation from the same person when hungry. Maybe not astounding either.
     Here’s one that goes beyond that: Researchers at INSEAD-Fontainebleau, University of Texas-Austin, and Universität Basel found that when people are hungry, they rate brands of shampoo less positively than when they’ve eaten. Deprive smokers of their nicotine fix and you’ll get fewer rave ratings of the shampoo. Or of a range of other consumer products or even interest in buying raffle tickets, according to the researchers.
     The advice for retailers: Show customers what you recognize they’re hungry for. Or as some other industrialist may have said at one time or another, “There's more to life than chocolate, but not right now.”

For your profitability: Sell Well: What Really Moves Your Shoppers