Push Shopping Baskets’ Pull for Sweet Items

How a shopper moves not only projects their buying intentions, but also influences their buying intentions. Consumer psychologists and smart retailers have known for a while that when a prospective customer nods their head up and down—even if the nod comes from reading a marketing brochure which uses narrow columns—the person becomes more likely to complete the purchase.
     Now researchers at Erasmus University-Rotterdam, Aston University, and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven report that when a consumer pulls their arm toward themselves, the consumer becomes more likely to purchase short-term pleasure over longer-term benefits. Have the restaurant patron lift the water glass to mouth to quaff the contents instead of drinking through a straw, and the potential for ordering dessert climbs. What’s even stranger is that when a shopper uses a basket instead of a cart in a grocery store, the shopper is almost seven times as likely to purchase candy bars rather than fruit as a snack.
     A Time Magazine blog posting points out that the shopper who chooses to use the basket on a particular shopping trip might have a different agenda than the shopper who chooses the larger cart, and this could account for the findings. However, the Erasmus/Loughborough/Norwegian School researchers conducted a set of studies which provide strong evidence the differences are due to more than conscious shopping agendas.
     Instead, the reason for the influence of arm flexion on purchase preferences appears to be that over our lifetimes, our brains subconsciously associate pulling our arms toward ourselves with acquiring pleasurable objects. It’s the sort of learning—called classical conditioning—that got Pavlov’s dog to salivate at the sound of a bell. For the adult consumer, pulling the arm toward the body activates subconscious expectations of short-term pleasure, and the arm pullers look to fulfill those expectations.
     It also works the other way around: Pushing an object away from ourselves, such as when navigating a large shopping cart through an aisle, subconsciously potentiates the brain traces of rejecting items which are not immediately pleasurable. This pushing effect is nowhere near as strong as the pulling effect. Still, the researchers do hypothesize that requiring a customer to push a door to enter a store lowers the likelihood of selling pleasure oriented items.
     These effects are subtle, but exploiting them can give you a retailer’s edge.

Click below for more:
Condition Your Customers
Give Shoppers Variety for Control
Start Your Shoppers Feeling Yes

(My thanks to Peter Laudin, owner of The Pattycake Doll Company, for bringing these recently published research findings to my attention.)