Bag Shoppers with Shopping Bags

A distinctive shopping bag your customers display to others can gain you customers. It’s like the effect of people seeing customers using what they purchased at your store.
     Researchers at Northwestern University and University of Pennsylvania applied that principle to the purchase of new cars because the consumer had seen others driving that make and model:

• The effect was larger among commuters than non-commuters, probably because commuters have more opportunities to observe the relative frequency with which people have selected various automobiles. With shopping bags, the effect is likely to be larger if your store is in a mall rather than isolated. Still, if the shopping bag is sturdy enough for reuse, it should get more exposure and thus influence more prospects. 
• The effect is stronger on people similar to the purchaser. In the car study, seeing vehicles associated with male traits of power and flash had greater influence on purchases by men than by women. Similarly, preferences were changed only among cars in a similar price tier. The Toyota Corolla prospect was not greatly influenced by seeing lots of people driving Lexus models. With shopping bags, a budget logo will influence budget shoppers more than luxury shoppers. Think what tag line you’d like to put on the bag along with your logo so it draws notice from your target psychographics. 
• There’s saturation. After seeing whole bunches of the same car model or the same shopping bag design, more of the same has no additional effect. Additional shopping bags are not necessarily better, and can instead be worse when you factor in the cost of production. 

     Other research suggests the shopping bag’s effectiveness derives from the mindset of the customer carrying the bag and how that mindset is observed by passersby. University of Minnesota researchers had female participants carry a shopping bag for an hour as they walked around a mall. Some of the women carried a Victoria’s Secret shopping bag. The rest carried a pink shopping bag with no store or brand identification. At the end of the hour, each woman returned to the research site and was asked to rate herself on a list of personality traits.
     Compared to those who carried the plain bag, the women who carried the Victoria’s Secret bag were more likely to rate themselves as feminine, glamorous, and physically attractive. These are characteristics associated with the Victoria’s Secret store and merchandise brands.

Click below for more: 
Strengthen Store Identification Using Bags 
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