Inside the Mind of the Shopper Quotes

“wonder how many really good ideas are killed in the testing phase because they are being scrutinized so closely, whereas, if the problem appeared in the market, it would never be considered or even seen.”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“how is it that almost all research is conducted in the test environment? It would seem to me that we would have some interest in the user environment, especially if there is a substantial difference in the assessment under the two perspectives. We don’t, after all, sell to the world’s testers but to users. It is they who dictate a brand’s success or failure. Actually, I like using both the tester and the user environment when assessing a brand’s potential. I generally prefer to use testers in the upstream research and, as I get closer to market, I use the user perspective. I have found that very few companies use the latter when assessing a brand’s potential. Why? I think that few companies realize that two perspectives exist. Among those who do, many don’t use the users because few field services offer both options, and it is perceived to be difficult and expensive”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“Research has found that when you ask a person to test something for you, they place it under the microscope. They see things that, in the course of normal usage, they would never see or even consider.”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“great retailers and brand owners continue to experiment. They test to find out what works, and what doesn’t, so they can continue to improve their strategies. This rigorous investigation and testing is how we arrived at the principles discussed previously.”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“Using category reinvention, you can upgrade the emotional feel of an entire aisle or department. The coffee aisle, for example, can be redesigned to give it a café ambiance. Remember, the goal is to make your winners win bigger. This will be more easily done with large displays that you can dominate—appropriate to your vital few. And now on the near and far horizon, digital media, even interactive, is a tool of greatest value to you as the brand owner. This means that you can win even in good retailers. Great retailers will expect and appreciate your cooperation with game-changed retailing!”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“10. Stores have massively excessive verbal communication. Products and packaging are a significant part of the clutter. Using iconic images, colors, shapes, and appropriate emotional totems is a better way to connect to shoppers than more words.”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“9. Reach you can buy, but stopping power and closing power are inherent to the product, primarily through the package. Both stopping power and closing power can be measured for individual products, as well as categories. The significance is that some products are good at attracting attention, but poor at closing the sale, whereas others are good at closing, but can’t seem to stop the traffic. Besides remedial package design, appropriate shelf management and promotional strategies can increase the stopping and closing power of existing products.”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“you can more easily turn your top few sellers into super performers than bring up the laggards. Again, long tail principles apply—the long tail attracts, and the vital few sells. Maintaining a reasonable long tail is essential for both attractive purposes, as well as the competitive imperative. Make clear distinctions in your planning and thinking on these issues.”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“Shoppers are attracted to the store by the long tail, but when they get there, they buy the big head (the vital few). The 50 million books Amazon carries encourages me to think they will probably have the few a month that I want. But they would be out of business (I think) if each time I came through their virtual door, they started from scratch to identify what I most likely want to buy.”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“5. Open space attracts! Shoppers compete with products for space in the store. Good retailers might be oblivious to this competition, and freely tip the balance in favor of the products over the shoppers. Jamming the store with products leads to lots of narrow aisles (“aisleness”) and psychic discomfort for shoppers. Great retailers refuse to sacrifice shopper space, and use wide promenades to lead crowds of shoppers through a speedy, efficient, high-dollar trip. The allocation of open space is of paramount importance in store design—and there is no single recipe for success.”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“The most important promotion is place, not price. In a typical store, probably 2 percent of the total items in the store at any one time are being promoted on end-of-aisle displays or other secondary promotional displays. This 2 percent of items may constitute a full 30 percent of all the sales in the store. However, half the shoppers purchasing an item from one of these promotional displays are unaware that it is at a reduced price. Of the half who are aware, half of those really didn’t care about the price. Good retailers are locked in a mindset that price considerations dominate shopping.”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“3. Display the “vital few” (or the “big head”) along the dominant path your shoppers take, rather than expecting them to find them. Good retailers expect shoppers to find the merchandise they want; great retailers learn all they can about what the shoppers want, and take it to them!”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“Good retailers are obsessed about what they (and their suppliers) want to sell to shoppers. Great retailers are obsessed about what shoppers want to buy!”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“1. Focus on the short trip. For supermarkets around the world (the same principle applies to all classes of trade), half of all shopping trips result in the purchase of five or fewer items, with one being the most common. These short trips typically account for one-third of store sales. The new strategy is to increase the size of each of those baskets by one or two items. Quick trippers spend money very fast, and getting them to buy one or two more items is far easier than motivating stock-up shoppers to buy ten or twenty more items. This focus, focus, focus on the quick trip could deliver an easy 30 percent sales lift (and a lot more when the synergies with other types of trips become apparent).”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“A striking feature of good retailing has been almost a single-minded focus on matching the right selection of merchandise to the customer base, with little or no regard to the time it costs shoppers to acquire the merchandise. Good retailers, with their suppliers’ complicity, regularly squander (waste) 80 percent of the shopper’s time. Great retailers will make productive use of that “lost” time.”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“This manifesto is a distillation of critical action points that will lead to double-digit sales and profit increases, and which have actually led some retailers to achieve as much as five times more sales over the past many years. The adage, “The good is the enemy of the great,” is possibly nowhere more applicable than in retailing. With a global population nearing seven billion, the world demand for goods and services is swelling. The movement from developing societies (traditional retailing) to highly developed societies (modern retailing) continues apace. Demand alone has been the driving force behind good retailing, globally.”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“Attitude at retail is a factor given too little consideration, when a large share of achievement is attitude.”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“This book is the distillation of nearly forty years of a scientist spending time in stores studying shoppers, with the last decade increasingly spent on understanding the relationship of those shoppers to the store and its management, on the one hand, and to the products and their brand suppliers on the other.”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“A strategy for where and when and how to interact with shoppers becomes crucial. And a solid strategy rests on solid theory tested with empirical results. That is where good models come in.”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“One measure we are using is how many seconds it takes for each store to generate a dollar of sales. They run anywhere from 30 seconds to 120 per dollar. What do you think about this measure? Heckman: It would be a very useful measure if you could effect change and remeasure it to see if you are making headway.”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“convenience means a lot of different things. It can mean that I’m driving by you and it’s only a mile from my house, where brand X is two miles from my house. Convenience also means that I can get into your shopping center easily. I can get in and out without spending an hour doing so. The parking lot is laid out well; it’s safe, clean, and well lit at night. Upscale people tend to shop in upscale locations; they don’t necessarily like to drive into areas that aren’t on par with where they live. But more downscale or midscale shoppers don’t mind shopping up. They’re more likely to do that than the other way around.”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“If you’re not getting your fair share of that business, you’re probably going to have a problem with that store because that means they’re rejecting you, even though you’re more convenient to them.”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“Consumers look for geographically convenient rooftops. In urban areas, there typically are three or four supermarkets for every three or four square miles just because there is a demand for that many. You try to put yourself in a “first right of refusal” position to as many conveniently located households as possible. The first right of refusal’s very important in our business, and that means that you drive by us either coming from work, going to work, or coming from home to anywhere you go. You have to drive by us to get to somebody else. We feel like if we have first right of refusal to, say, 60 percent of the geographically convenient trade, then if we get our fair share of that—and our fair share is the lion’s share—then that store has a chance to be successful”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“There is a lot of research that shows reviews have a significant impact on sales. If you have more positive reviews, or even just a higher volume, you get more sales.”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“We need a proper statistical model that lets each person have his own momentum effect and each person have his own checkout attraction and to see if we can pull him out from the data.”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“Efficiency is another area of balance. On the one hand, you want the trip to be as efficient as possible, so the shopper finds what he or she needs and leaves. On the other hand, you want to create engagement, to make the shopper stay longer and interact to drive more impulse purchases and form some kind of relationship. You also want variety, but not too much.”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“Fader: As we’ve discussed, there are sometimes countervailing forces in shopping. Crowds attract shoppers but might make them less likely to actually shop. (This is similar to the attraction of the “long tail” discussed earlier, which attracts shoppers to the store because they know they can get anything they need—although they may only buy from the “big head.”)”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“How do online retailers use these insights about shopper visits? Moe: The next stage of research looks at differentiating between online shoppers not just according to what pages they are looking at, but by also actually examining the products they are interested in.7 In other words, what are the characteristics of the products they are searching for and interested in? And what are their ideal products? Building a model based on data from this research enables the retailer to estimate the probability of purchasing. For example, if someone looks only at a series of black shoes, you can infer that she has a clear preference for this color shoe. Someone else might be looking only at shoes in a certain price range.”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“What have you learned about shopping momentum? Fader: The idea here is that as more purchases are made, everything in the store becomes more attractive. Once shoppers pick up a number of items, it gives them the momentum to buy more.”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing

“Fader: There is a sequence in how people buy things. One important driver of this sequencing may be “licensing” behavior. If shoppers buy a virtue product—something good for them—then it gives them license to buy a vice product—something that they might enjoy but is probably not good for them. If they pick up broccoli or tofu in the produce section, they can buy the ice cream or chocolate cake or cigarettes.”
― Herb Sorensen, Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing