Impress from the First

Shoppers are greatly influenced by what happens early on. First impressions set the scene. This is true to some extent for all consumers and, for people shopping in a group, the initial sights, sounds, and smells have a greater effect on the probability of return visits than do the experiences when paying for their purchases, exiting the store, or finding the car in the parking lot.
     First impressions have such a lasting impact that even if your store is remodeled, greater sales increases occur for new customers’ initial visits than for those customers who were accustomed to shopping with you before the remodeling. Researchers at Monash University assessed the trends in store visit frequency and spend-per-visit in a set of stores that had undergone major remodeling and a set of similar stores that had not. They found that for both new and existing customers, the remodeling increased sales revenues. Yes, renewed first impressions did stimulate the old customers. However, over the subsequent year, the returns were greater for the new than for the existing customers in the remodeled stores.
     In one of these stores, the researchers measured the customers’ psychological responses to the remodeling. New customers had a greater draw to the store than did existing customers because the visit was for the new customers, more of an opportunity to develop first impressions.
     Retail staff may fail to recognize that how each of them interacts with the shopper influences how the shopper interprets the interactions with staff they encounter next. Let’s say a sales clerk looks up at the approaching shopper and smiles gently. If that event had been preceded by a sincere greeting from the cashier as the shopper entered the store, the shopper is likely to consider the salesperson’s smile to be sincere and welcoming. This is less likely if the shopper had received no more than a cold stare from the cashier when entering the store.
     But if the first impressions are not as positive as you’d like, you could be able to rescue the situation, according to research findings at Washington University in St. Louis, University of California-San Diego, and University of Florida. They found that later experiences can be made to seem like firsts for a consumer. In one of their studies, an online review which came late in the sequence gained greater impact when presented as “the first review of the new year.”

Click below for more: 
Track the Trajectory of In-Store Impressions
Stress the Impact of Spreading Impressions
Lead Your Customers Through Changes Gradually