New Assault on the ConsumerTO U.S. merchandisers, the key to bigger sales is a new pseudo science
that analyzes the U.S. housewife's whims with equal parts of
salesmanship, psychology, hypnotism and common sense. Its name: impulse
buying. The idea is not new, but with the rise of self-service
supermarkets, super drug and variety stores, there is a greater
incentive than ever before to encourage shoppers to throw away their
shopping lists and buy more than they ever intended.Despite all talk about price as the great determinant, low cost is the
major factor for barely 16% of all shoppers; studies also show that
another 16% shop only for heavily advertised brands. In between ranges
the vast middle ground of shoppers, fair game for the motivational
researchers, who take dead aim with all the analytical gimmicks under
the supermarket sun. They claim, for instance, that the undecided mass
of supermarket shoppers —they call them “emotionally insecure”—really
do not know what they want when they enter a store and often are not
sure what they have bought right up to the cash registers. In tests,
researchers paid for housewives' purchases, led them to another market
and asked them to shop again for the week's groceries. There the women
bought an entirely different basket of goods. Such tests have persuaded
stores to stay open at night to enmesh the undecided male as well as
the female. A couple shopping together buys 60% more than the man
alone, 30% more than the wife alone.Most supermarket chains have merchandising committees to figure out ways
to present and sell the best of the 150 new products flooding into the
market each week. Once, grocers could depend on personal service to
push a product; today, with the rise of the self-service market, the
business has about 1,500,000 fewer clerks than it would otherwise need.
What sells is what appeals to the shopper's impulse: the color, the
size, the shape, even the shelf position of the package. Years ago,
only comparatively few companies worried about their labels. Now all
do.Libby, McNeill & Libby was having trouble selling baked beans until it
changed the label to a rich, dark color, emblematic of the
molasses-smothered beans inside, has since redesigned nearly all its
250 labels. One manufacturer put out cotton-tipped swabs in three
colors: white, pink and chartreuse. White and pink were fine;
chartreuse flopped because it reminded women of baby's soiled diapers.
In many cases the brighter—and sometimes the more incongruous—the
package, the greater the appeal. California's Thoro-fed Dog Food
watched sales jump 40% when it wrapped Fido's dinner in gleaming gold
foil. Among the new gimmicks: multiple-unit “specials,” with three, six
and twelve items in a pack. One Midwest chain reports that it sold only
nine cans of sauerkraut a week at a dime apiece, but 441 cans priced at
ten cans for $1. A West Coast petfood packer sells more three-can
packages priced at 29 than three individual cans priced at 9 apiece.
