Hidden Cameras Study How We Shop

Dec. 12 -- Market researchers have studied Americans' shopping habits for years, but at one store in a downtown Minneapolis office building, they are taking it to a new level.

As shoppers browse the furniture, clothing and gifts on sale at a store called Once Famous, researchers study them from behind one-way mirrors, tracking their movements through the store and their reaction to the products on display. Hidden cameras and microphones record shoppers' behavior for further study.

The store functions as a regular retail outlet and turns a small profit, but it is in fact a state-of-the-art retail laboratory for a retail brand agency called FAME. The agency, which has its offices behind the one-way mirrors, uses social science techniques to study consumers' shopping habits for major retailers including Minneapolis-based Target and its Marshall Fields division.

"Retail is all about anthropology. It's about customers in their natural environment," says FAME's president and founder, Tina Wilcox. "We're trying to get as close to reality as possible with a customer."

Willing Guinea Pigs

A blinking light at the entrance warns customers that they are being monitored for research purposes, but Wilcox says few customers object. "The comments we get from customers are, 'We're glad somebody finally asked us our opinion,'" she says.

According to the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association, 70 percent of all purchases are impulse buys, meaning that the shopping environment can be as important a factor for retailers as a product's price and construction. If a retailer can increase a shopper's "dwell time" even by a minute or two, it boosts the chance that they will make a purchase, according to Wilcox.

Conquering the ‘Dead Zone’

In two recent tests, for instance, FAME researchers explored ways of drawing shoppers into "dead zones," areas of a store that customers tend to stay away from. In one case, they found that collecting various objects of the same color — red, in their experiment — into a single, bold display succeeded in drawing shoppers to the back of the store, a common dead zone.