Plant Decision Trees

An article in The Economist bounces off the first line in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In the article, the quote becomes, “…thin people are all (roughly) alike, fat people are all fat after their own fashion.” The context for the quote is plus-sized women searching after their own fashions.
     About 65% of American women would be classified as overweight by U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention standards, yet women’s plus-size clothing has traditionally constituted less than 20% of the women’s apparel market. One reason for this disparity is that women have trouble finding clothing which fits them well.
     A related reason is that women want to spend as little time as possible trying on clothes in the presence of thinner shoppers. You’d think, then, that the market share for plus-sized fashions would be higher among online purchases, which can be done at home. However, reports The Economist article, the share is only about 11%.
     Charming Shoppes, a retailer with a major stake in the plus-sized market, has aimed to increase the share for full figure fashions through use of a decision tree tool they call Fashion Genius. To start, each woman is asked whether her figure might best be described as hourglass, rectangular, circular, or some other shape. Then she’s asked about the specifics of problems with fit: Loose at the waist? Rides up at the back? And so on. At the conclusion, Fashion Genius crunches the data and generates recommendations.
     Design of this decision tree tool was based on results from more than one million previous survey responses and more than 10,000 custom fittings. Fashion Genius automates what the best salesperson in the store does with a customer.
     In your store, how thoroughly are you gathering question sequences like these for whatever products and services you sell and turning the sequences into scripts to be used by your less able salespeople?
     Decision trees are particularly useful when a couple is shopping together. Married couples aim to balance out their shopping tendencies. Researchers at University of Pennsylvania and Northwestern University provide intriguing evidence that tightwads—who recognize they should be more willing to spend money—tend to marry spendthrifts—who recognize they should be more cautious in spending money.
     A decision tree sequence of questions helps the couple navigate through their complementary approaches.

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

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