Hidden Cameras Study How We Shop

Dec. 12, 2002 -- 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.

The bright red display succeeded in meeting what Wilcox calls the "squint test" — "If you squint your eyes, whatever you pick up in that squint is pretty much what registers when they're shopping." The items in the display had sales that were 15 percent to 20 percent higher than when they were scattered through the store.

In another case, Wilcox's team found that placing a flickering electronic fireplace on the left side of the store successfully overcame shoppers' natural tendency to start shopping on the right. (In Britain, shoppers generally gravitate to the left side of a store. Researchers speculate that that might be because they drive on the left.)

Men Are From Brookstone, Women Are From Victoria's Secret

In a test designed to show how the two sexes shop differently, men and women acted very differently around an oversized, green, black and gold "throne chair." The men mostly kept their distance from the chair, asking questions about its construction and features and not sitting in it unless invited to by a salesperson. "They kind of look at furniture the way they would shop for a car," Wilcox said.

Women, on the other hand, would touch the chair immediately, "almost to the point of caressing it," according to Wilcox. And they would sit in it. "Women get comfortable right away. They cross their legs. They sort of live in the chair," Wilcox said. One female visitor sat down and said to her friend, "OK, bring the wine."

Wilcox says that women shop emotionally, and need "a more creative approach" than men. "They want the setting to be something that really intrigues them."

Another phenomenon the FAME researchers have documented is that women often "visit" products they like three or four times before finally buying them — something seldom seen with men. Repeat visits give retailers the chance to sell women other, less expensive items in the meantime.

Sometimes shoppers defy what would appear to be conventional expectations. For a major nationwide chain, Wilcox's team recently tested a line of teenage girls' T-shirts with slogans like "Prince of Wails," "Countess of Cranky" — and "Queen of Farts." Shoppers were divided over the Queen of Farts shirt, with some calling it "tacky." But in overall sales, it came in fifth out of 12, meaning that it will be on shelves next spring.

Orange Juice and Cold Medicine

Another company, Virginia-based Brickstream, uses advanced image-recognition software to allow retailers to track the movements of individual customers in their stores.

The technology, which is in use in more than 100 stores nationwide, plots each customer's route on a floor plan of the store, recording how long they spend in each section, how long they wait on line, and what they buy. The company says it does not store information that allows the identification of individuals.

For one client, Brickstream learned that people often buy orange juice — a low-profit item — and cold medicine — a high-profit item — in the same trip. The client moved the cold medicine next to the orange juice to encourage more sales.

From the stores it has studied, Brickstream also found that the top reason people leave a store without making a purchase is the length of the checkout line when they get there — regardless of how fast it is moving. The number of people abandoning a line increases significantly after three minutes, the company has found.

Going Inside the Home

Other researchers focus on how consumers use products in their own homes. Believing that conventional focus groups are artificial and prone to influence by peer pressure, Bill Abrams left his job as a creative director at an ad agency in 1983 and formed a company specializing in "retail ethnography." The approach is based on ethnography, a scientific technique in which researchers study a small social group using close observation, ideally from inside the group.

"People on their own turf tend to tell more of the truth and to reveal more, because they feel safer in their own surroundings," Abrams says. His firm, Housecalls Inc., goes into American's bedrooms and bathrooms to film them using personal products like dentures, hearing aids and cosmetics.

For a recent study for Colgate-Palmolive, Abrams sent researchers into the homes of teenage girls in New Rochelle, N.Y., a suburb of New York City, to explore their relationship with their underarm deodorant — a $1 billion-a-year market.

The researchers and their camera operators — all women — sought out the most popular girls and paid them a fee to let them into their homes. They then filmed the girls using their deodorant — how many swipes, for instance — and talking about them. They recorded what deodorant the girls used, where they kept them and whether they took them in their bag when they went out. They even asked whether the girls thought the products should be labeled "antiperspirant/deodorant" or "deodorant/antiperspirant."

The New Rochelle interviews suggested a few things about teenage girls' attitudes to deodorant:

That they see deodorant as something that can differentiate them from adults. One girl called her mother's brand "an older woman's" deodorant.

That they talk to each other about what brand of deodorant to use, in a way that adults do not. "I got a lot of my friends hooked on Dove," one teen said.

That a deodorant's scent is critical. "I don't change brands. I change scents," one girl said. "I think adults want what works best and kids want what smells best," said another.

Abrams always cautions clients that his research based on small numbers and that they should test his findings in broader studies. But he said he would advise Colgate to bring out "a wardrobe of scents" for teens, so they could buy the same deodorant in three different scents, which they could use depending on how they felt on a given day.