Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing / Edition 2

by Herb Sorensen

Overview

World-Renowned Shopper Scientist Dr. Herb Sorensen Reveals: How Today’s Shoppers Think, Behave, and Buy
New Insights for Creating High-Profit Retail Experiences!

In retail, there’s only one number one. It’s not Wal-Mart or Costco, or even Amazon: It’s the shopper. To create high-profit retail experiences, you need to know exactly how your shopper thinks, feels, and acts at the point of purchase. Dr. Herb Sorensen illuminates today’s consumer behavior in the context of radical technological and societal changes that are transforming retail.

Building on these deep consumer insights, Sorensen introduces revolutionary new approaches to improving performance in self-service retail—whatever you sell, via bricks or clicks. You’ll discover today’s best ways to get the right items to the right customers when they want them… surpass the expectations of customers trained by online retail… own every consumer “moment of truth”!

New coverage includes:

• Converging clicks and bricks into a super-high-efficiency retail engine
• Building the “webby store”: visually managing every display like a web page
• Bringing product and shopper together via optimized navigation and search
• Measuring and promoting shopper efficiency
• Motivating long-cycle purchases: cars, tech, appliances, apparel, and more
• Speeding today’s shoppers from “want” to “need”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780134308920
Publisher:	Pearson Education
Publication date:	08/25/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Herb Sorensen is a preeminent authority on observing and measuring shopping behavior and attitudes within the four walls of the store. He has worked with Fortune 100 retailers and consumer packaged-goods manufacturers for more than 40 years, studying shopper behavior, motivations, and perceptions at the point of purchase. Sorensen’s methods are helping to revolutionize retail-marketing strategies from a traditional “product-centric” perspective to a new “shopper-centric” focus. As Baseline magazine commented, “Herb Sorensen and Paco Underhill are the yin and yang of observational research.”

Herb has conducted studies in North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America. His research has been published in AMA’s Marketing Research, The Journal of Advertising Research, FMI Advantage Magazine, Progressive Grocer, and Chain Drug Review. He has also been utilized as an expert source for The Wall Street Journal, Supermarket News, and BusinessWeek. Herb appeared on the television show Dr. Oz as an expert on the movement of the eyes as part of the shopping process. Additionally, he is currently a panelist of Retail Wire’s “Brain Trust” and blogs at www.shopperscientist.com.

Herb’s career intertwines the world of science with the world of business. His Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California at Davis, 1970, resulted in publications ranging from metabolism, to chemical and electron structures. He is also a Diplomate of the American Board of Clinical Chemistry. In 1972 he launched a food laboratory, specializing in nutrition, safety, and HACCP quality programs.

His second company, Sorensen Associates, “The In-store Research Company,” grew at an annualized rate of nearly 30% from 1979–2009. In the 90s a mentor, Bob Stevens of P&G, encouraged a sharper focus on “assessment in context.” This led to the invention and patenting of PathTracker, a second-by-second method of electronically studying shopper behavior in stores. Early on, PathTracker enjoyed mentoring and advice from Peter Fader, and Herb shared in the honor of the AMA’s EXPLOR award in 2007, with Fader and his group at the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania.

In 2004 Fast Company Magazine named Herb one of its top 50 innovators. In 2013, he received the Charles Coolidge Parlin Marketing Research Award, “honoring distinguished academics and practitioners who have demonstrated outstanding leadership and sustained impact on the evolving profession of marketing research over an extended period.” In receiving this prestigious award, Sorensen joined other marketing research legends such as Robert Wood Johnson, Peter Drucker, Arthur C. Nielsen, George Gallup, August A. Busch III, Paul E. Green, John A. Howard, Philip Kotler, Robert J. Lavidge, and Jagdish Sheth.

Globalization of Herb’s work expanded when he sold his company to TNS/Kantar and published the first edition of Inside the Mind of the Shopper and through affiliation with the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the University of South Australia as an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow. Herb is collaborating with Mark Heckman on Accelerated Merchandising, increasing sales and profits through shopper efficiency.

Read an Excerpt

Rethinking RetailPreface Rethinking Retail

“When you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.”

—Lord Kelvin

The supermarket is my laboratory. After earning my Ph.D. in biochemistry and working for a brief period in the food industry, I traded a lab bench for the aisles of the supermarket. At that time, the supermarket was a black box. Manufacturers and retailers were concerned about how to get shoppers into the door and make them aware of products before their trips, but they assumed that they understood what happened when the shopper was inside. Our research, discussed in this book, shows that in many cases they were wrong.

In the early 1970s, I left my practice as a board-certified clinical chemist and started a small laboratory providing a range of services, primarily to the agricultural and consumer packaged goods industries. One of the services that we provided was sensory evaluation—consumer taste test surveys. Following the example of universities, our “tasters” were college and university students. I initially started doing in-store research because a client said that he didn’t think the opinions of college students, with their well-known penchant for pizza and ramen noodles, were very representative of typical supermarket shoppers.

Being a scientist, rather than a market researcher, it never occurred to me not to interview supermarket shoppers. I approached the manager of a local supermarket, and he readily gave me permission to interview his shoppers. Remember, this was more than 30 years ago, and the local Albertsons manager had an amazing degree of autonomy. When we were in the store, we found that there were many other interesting questions to study.

I pursued the in-store research niche—first as a solo consultant and then as the founder and president of Sorensen Associates, “The In-store Research Company®,” and more recently, as Global Scientific Director, Retail and Shopper Insights at TNS, a global research and information services firm. We are now a part of the even larger conglomerate WPP, with a focus on advertising and communications. Although most of our experience is with supermarkets and brand manufacturers of fast-moving consumer packaged goods, we have found our core insights hold for work with supercenters, drugstores, convenience stores, auto parts retailers, building centers, consumer electronics, phone stores, and many other retailers or products. We have completed studies in a variety of channels on every continent except Africa and Antarctica, and the paradigm, metrics, and insights are as relevant elsewhere as in the U.S. (with some differences, as we will examine later). Over the years, we came to appreciate the value of conducting research in the store environment, rather than just doing research about the store, products, and shoppers.

We decided to study what shoppers actually did in the store, what they looked at, how they moved through the store, and what they bought. We examined strategies that could be used to increase sales, testing these approaches in the laboratory of real stores with actual shoppers. We traveled with customers down thousands of miles of supermarket aisles and analyzed millions of hours of shopping to help retailers create more effective stores and approaches. We found that simple interventions could have dramatic effects, but only if you understood how shoppers think. And some widely used strategies have little impact on the behavior of most shoppers, so we also helped retailers stop throwing money away.

As a pioneer in the field of in-store research, I have had the opportunity to see retailing go through many changes—including the emergence of new technologies and online retailing. As the industry continues to change, however, the basic insights from our research continue to hold true. And in a more complex and dynamic environment, understanding shopper behavior may be even more important.

I have spent millions of dollars of my own money doing some of this research, and the world’s top brands and forward-thinking retailers have spent millions more on specific projects and PathTracker® studies. We have looked at every square-inch of these stores and analyzed millions of shopping trips on a second-by-second basis, using the best technology at our disposal. The results, to the extent that the information is not proprietary, are contained within the covers of this book.

I am grateful to the many managers who embraced and supported this work, even when it was unproven. I am particularly fortunate to have worked with Bob Stevens, to whom this book is dedicated. He had recently retired after 40 years in market research for Procter & Gamble, and taught me to go far beyond the product-shopper dimension mentioned previously. This, in turn, led to the development of my current holistic view of the shopper experience, including the invention of the PathTracker® suite of tools, metrics, and a scientific paradigm for the subject of shopping. Finally, I am grateful for the fine work by other pioneers, such as Paco Underhill and Siemon Scammel-Katz.

Along the way, we have faced resistance to this approach. As researchers at one of the largest supermarket chains in the world told us: “We do not interview our shoppers in-store, but conduct phone or Internet surveys of them.” Interviewing shoppers outside of the store is like trying to understand the movements of a flock of birds by observing a specimen in a natural history museum. It is shocking to me, but not at all exceptional.

This book offers managers in retail firms, or companies that sell products through retail, valuable insights into what happens to their customers when they walk through the front door of the store. Companies that spend countless dollars getting the customer to this point often look away just at this critical moment, giving scant attention to the “last mile” of retailing. Retailers and brand owners know all about who the people are going into the store, and what they are carrying home from the store, and a lot about what they are doing at home. But I stake my career to a large degree on the fact that they know very little about the process that occurs in the store. (As I will consider later, this lack of knowledge might be due in part to the structure of the industry, which means retailers and manufacturers get more out of interacting with one another than with customers in the aisles.) This book also offers anyone who has shopped or wants to understand the shopping experience, research-based insights into the habits of the shopper.

On the following pages, we explore some of the key insights from this work—the quick trip, three moments of truth for the shopper, in-store “migration” patterns, and how to put products in the path of customers through anticipatory retailing. We also look at how manufacturers and retailers can collaborate better in shaping flow and adjacency to sell more products in stores. In the second part of the book, we offer insights from a series of interviews with executives and experts on specific topics related to in-store retailing: deeper insights on the quick trip, the integration of online and offline retailing, multicultural retailing, and a retailer’s perspective on the issues presented in this book. Whether you are running or designing stores, building brands, or merely want a deeper understanding of shopping behavior, this book will challenge the way you look at shopping.

In a certain sense, the shoppers’ eyes offer a window into our entire society. As I realized in four decades of this work, retailing is at the cutting edge of social evolution because it brings people and the things they must have together. This is where the dreams and aspirations of consumers and the messages of brand owners intersect in a concrete action to make a purchase. If you want to understand our society, taking a trip with a shopper down a supermarket aisle is a very good start. I invite you to join me on this journey through the modern supermarket. I think you will be surprised at what we find.

—Herb Sorensen, Ph.D.

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Preface: Who Is #1? xxix
Introduction 1
Bidirectional Search 2
Products/Shoppers Competition 3
Open Space Actually Attracts Shoppers—Think Navigation! 5
Review Questions 10
Endnotes 10

PART I: TOWARD TOTAL CONVERGENCE OF BRICKS-AND-MORTAR AND ONLINE RETAILING
Chapter 1 How We Got Here and Where We Are Going 15
What Is Selling? 16
Selling Requires a Salesperson, Not a Retailer 17
SELLING: Focus on the Big Head of What the Shopper Wants to Buy 18
Stop Shouting at Your Shoppers 21
How We Got This Way 25
Early Shopping in America 26
The Birth of Self-Service Retail 26
Can Selling Make a Comeback in the Twenty-first Century? 32
The Four Dimensions of Purchasing 33
Now! Purchases (Advantage—Bricks Retail) 35
Surprise/Delight Purchases (Advantage—Bricks Retail) 36
Routine/Autopilot Purchases (Advantage—Online Retail) 37
Frustration/Angst Purchases (Advantage—Online Retail) 37
Where Is Selling Going? 37
The Selling Prescription 40
The Shopper’s Ideal Self-Service Retail Experience 41
What Does the Ideal Self-Service Retail Store of the Future Look Like? 42
The Dark Store 43
Step-by-Step 44
The Ever-Changing Retail Landscape Favors an Evolving Retailer Species 46
Review Questions 47
Endnotes 48
Chapter 2 Transitioning Retailers from Passive to Active Mode (by Mark Heckman) 49
Passive Merchandising No Longer Suffices in a Shopper-Driven World 50
The Journey to Active Retailing and the Five Vital Tenets of Active Retailing 51
The Five Vital Tenets of Active Retailing 52
Tenet 1: Measure and Manage the Shopper’s Time in the Store 53
A Shopper’s Time Should Be as Important to the Retailer as It Is to the Shopper! 55
Wasted Days and Wasted Nights 57
Implications for Active Retailing 58
Steps for Managing Shoppers’ Time in Store 58
Tenet 2: Focus on the Big Head 59
Implications for Active Retailing 61
Retailers Attempting to Manipulate or Extend a Shopper’s Trip Are on a Fool’s Errand 62
Steps in Managing the Big Head 63
Tenet 3: Assist Shoppers as They Navigate the Store 63
Mr. Retailer, Tear Down This Wall! 66
Implications for Active Retailing 67
Activating the Dominant Path 68
Steps in Assisting Shoppers as They Navigate the Store 71
Tenet 4: Sell Sequentially 71
What Comes First, The Chicken or the Egg? 72
Does the Order of Things Matter? 72
Implications for Active Retailing 73
Steps for Sequential Selling 76
Tenet 5: Managing the Long Tail 76
So Where Does This Leave the Tens of Thousands of Other Items That Populate the Shelves of the Store? 77
“Nobody Goes There Anymore. It’s Too Crowded”—Yogi Berra 77
Implications for Active Retailing 79
Steps in Managing the Long Tail 81
A Passing Thought about the Role of Displays in Active Retailing 82
Closing Thoughts 82
Review Questions 83
Endnotes 83
Chapter 3 Selling Like Amazon Online and in Bricks Stores 85
Amazon Selling Online 87
Amazon Point of Focus #1: Navigation—Simple and Fast 88
Amazon Focus: Selection 89
Amazon Focus #2: Immediate Close 90
Amazon Focus #3: Affinity Sales and Crowd-Social Marketing 91
Amazon Focus #4: Reaching into the Long Tail 93
Amazon Focus #5: Info, Info, Info 94
Amazonian Selling in Bricks Stores 95
Amazonian Bricks Focus #1: Navigation—Simple and Fast 96
Amazonian Bricks Focus: Selection 101
Amazonian Bricks Focus #2: Immediate Close101
Amazonian Bricks Focus #3: Affinity Sales/Crowd-Social Marketing 104
Amazonian Bricks Focus #4: Reaching into the Long Tail106
Amazonian Bricks Focus #5: Info, Info, Info 107
Review Questions 112
Endnotes 113
Chapter 4 Integrating Online and Offline Retailing: An Interview with Peter Fader and Wendy Moe 115
How Did the Internet Change the Study of Shopping Behavior? 116
In What Way Are the Online and Offline Patterns Similar? 117
How Are Paths in the Supermarket Similar to Paths Online? 119
Can Online Retailers Learn from Offline Shopper Behavior? 119
Tell Me about What You’ve Found Out about Crowd Behavior? 120
What Have You Learned about Licensing and Sequencing—Such as the Purchase of Vice Items After Virtue Items? 120
What Have You Found Out about the Pace of the Shopping Trip? 121
What Have You Learned about Shopping Momentum? 122
What Have You Learned about the Role of Variety in Shopping? 122
What Have You Learned about Efficiency? Is It Better to Allow Shoppers to Get Quickly In and Out of the Store, or Should Retailers Try to Prolong the Trip? 123
This Raises the Question of Whether Shoppers Are in the Store for Utilitarian Reasons Alone or If They Are Interested in an Experience. What Is the Difference? 124
What Have You Learned so far about What Shoppers Are Looking for When They Go Online? 124
How Do Online Retailers Use These Insights about Shopper Visits? 125
This Captures the Whole Point of What We’ve Called “Active Retailing ” Online Is Leading Offline in This Area How Does This Come into the Physical Store? 126
How Do Some of the Complex Forces of Shopping Behavior Play Out? Why Is There a Need for Better Modeling? 126
What Topics Are You Studying Now? 127
Review Questions 127
Endnotes 128
Chapter 5 The Coming Webby Store 129
The “Ideal” Sized Store 135
Review Questions 137
Endnotes 137

PART II: GOING DEEPER INTO THE SHOPPER’S MIND
Chapter 6 Long-Cycle Purchasing (by James Sorensen) 141
Higher Cost Leads to Anxiety and Indecision 142
Longer Shopping Process 143
Long-Cycle Purchasing 143
A Word about Building Desire 144
Wish 145
Want 145
Need 145
Got 146
The Shopper Engagement Spectrum 147
Speeding the Shopper along the Path-to-Purchase: First Build Desire and Facilitate the Tipping Point 149
Life Changes 150
Product Benefits 150
Ability to Pay 150
The Shopper’s Journey 151
Early in the Shopping Journey 151
Educate 151
Late in the Shopping Journey 152
Validating Choice 152
Complete the Transaction 153
Mobile 153
Again, the Sales Associate Is Key to Closing the Sale and Completing the Transaction 153
Conclusion 153
Review Questions 154
Endnotes 154
Chapter 7 The Quick-Trip Paradox: An Interview with Mike Twitty 155
How Do You Define a Quick Trip? 155
Why Do Shoppers Make So Many Quick Trips? 158
How Do Pre-store Decisions Affect the Quick Trip? 160
What Factors Do Consumers Consider in Deciding Where and How to Shop? 160
How Do Consumers Think about Shopping Trips? 161
What Did You Learn from This Research? 162
How Could It Be that Even Warehouse Clubs and Supercenters—Whose Design so Strongly Encourages Stock-up Shopping—Receive More Quick Trips than Stock-up or Fill-in Trips? 164
Given that Quick Trips Account for Two-thirds of Shopping Trips, How Can Retailers and Manufacturers Cater to these Shoppers? 165
What Is the Quick-trip Paradox? 165
Given this Paradox, How Can Retailers and Manufacturers Capitalize on the Quick Trip? 166
Could the Shoppers’ Motives for Making the Trip Offer Insights into the Best Assortment to Offer? 168
How Can Retailers Best Meet the Needs of Quick-Trip Shoppers? 168
What Are the Implications for Retailers and Manufacturers? 170
Review Questions 171
Endnotes 172
Chapter 8 Three Moments of Truth and Three Currencies 173
Moments of Truth 177
Seeing the Truth: Eyes Are Windows to the Shopper 178
Reach: Impressions and Exposures 182
Stopping Power (and Holding Power) 188
Closing Power 189
Three Currencies of Shopping: Money, Time, and Angst 190
Time 191
Angst: A Vague and Unpleasant Emotion 194
A Complex Optimization 195
Review Questions 196
Endnotes 197
Chapter 9 In-Store Migration Patterns: Where Shoppers Go and What They Do 199
If You Stock It, They Will Come 201
Understanding Shopper Behavior 204
First Impressions: The Entrance 206
Shopper Direction: Establishing a Dominant Path for the Elephant Herds 207
The Checkout Magnet 210
Products Hardly Ever Dictate Shopper Traffic—Open Space Does 211
Open Space Attracts: The Call of the Open Aisle 212
The Great Pyramids 215
New Angles 216
Managing the Two Stores 219
Five Store Designs 221
The Enhanced Perimeter 222
The Inverted Perimeter 223
The Serpentine Design 225
The Compound Store 225
The Big Head Store 226
Where the Rubber Meets the Linoleum 227
Review Questions 227
Endnotes 228

PART III: CONCLUSIONS
Chapter 10 Brands, Retailers, and Shoppers: Why the Long Tail Is Wagging the Dog 231
Where the Money Is in Retail 232
Massive Amounts of Data 234
Shifting Relationships 235
A Refreshing Change: Working Together to Sweeten Sales 237
Beyond Category Management 238
A New Era of Active Retailing: Total Store Management 239
Pitching a Category’s Emotional Tone More Precisely 245
Retailers Control Reach 246
The Urgent Need for Retailing Evolution 248
Review Questions 251
Endnotes 252
Chapter 11 Conclusion Game-Changing Retail: A Manifesto 253
The Package Is the Brand’s Ambassador 258
Review Questions 260
Afterword 261
Index 267

Preface

Preface
Rethinking Retail

“When you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.”

—Lord Kelvin

The supermarket is my laboratory. After earning my Ph.D. in biochemistry and working for a brief period in the food industry, I traded a lab bench for the aisles of the supermarket. At that time, the supermarket was a black box. Manufacturers and retailers were concerned about how to get shoppers into the door and make them aware of products before their trips, but they assumed that they understood what happened when the shopper was inside. Our research, discussed in this book, shows that in many cases they were wrong.

In the early 1970s, I left my practice as a board-certified clinical chemist and started a small laboratory providing a range of services, primarily to the agricultural and consumer packaged goods industries. One of the services that we provided was sensory evaluation—consumer taste test surveys. Following the example of universities, our “tasters” were college and university students. I initially started doing in-store research because a client said that he didn’t think the opinions of college students, with their well-known penchant for pizza and ramen noodles, were very representative of typical supermarket shoppers.

Being a scientist, rather than a market researcher, it never occurred to me not to interview supermarket shoppers. I approached the manager of a local supermarket, and he readily gave me permission to interview his shoppers. Remember, this was more than 30 years ago, and the local Albertsons manager had an amazing degree of autonomy. When we were in the store, we found that there were many other interesting questions to study.

I pursued the in-store research niche—first as a solo consultant and then as the founder and president of Sorensen Associates, “The In-store Research Company®,” and more recently, as Global Scientific Director, Retail and Shopper Insights at TNS, a global research and information services firm. We are now a part of the even larger conglomerate WPP, with a focus on advertising and communications. Although most of our experience is with supermarkets and brand manufacturers of fast-moving consumer packaged goods, we have found our core insights hold for work with supercenters, drugstores, convenience stores, auto parts retailers, building centers, consumer electronics, phone stores, and many other retailers or products. We have completed studies in a variety of channels on every continent except Africa and Antarctica, and the paradigm, metrics, and insights are as relevant elsewhere as in the U.S. (with some differences, as we will examine later). Over the years, we came to appreciate the value of conducting research in the store environment, rather than just doing research about the store, products, and shoppers.

We decided to study what shoppers actually did in the store, what they looked at, how they moved through the store, and what they bought. We examined strategies that could be used to increase sales, testing these approaches in the laboratory of real stores with actual shoppers. We traveled with customers down thousands of miles of supermarket aisles and analyzed millions of hours of shopping to help retailers create more effective stores and approaches. We found that simple interventions could have dramatic effects, but only if you understood how shoppers think. And some widely used strategies have little impact on the behavior of most shoppers, so we also helped retailers stop throwing money away.

As a pioneer in the field of in-store research, I have had the opportunity to see retailing go through many changes—including the emergence of new technologies and online retailing. As the industry continues to change, however, the basic insights from our research continue to hold true. And in a more complex and dynamic environment, understanding shopper behavior may be even more important.

I have spent millions of dollars of my own money doing some of this research, and the world’s top brands and forward-thinking retailers have spent millions more on specific projects and PathTracker® studies. We have looked at every square-inch of these stores and analyzed millions of shopping trips on a second-by-second basis, using the best technology at our disposal. The results, to the extent that the information is not proprietary, are contained within the covers of this book.

I am grateful to the many managers who embraced and supported this work, even when it was unproven. I am particularly fortunate to have worked with Bob Stevens, to whom this book is dedicated. He had recently retired after 40 years in market research for Procter & Gamble, and taught me to go far beyond the product-shopper dimension mentioned previously. This, in turn, led to the development of my current holistic view of the shopper experience, including the invention of the PathTracker® suite of tools, metrics, and a scientific paradigm for the subject of shopping. Finally, I am grateful for the fine work by other pioneers, such as Paco Underhill and Siemon Scammel-Katz.

Along the way, we have faced resistance to this approach. As researchers at one of the largest supermarket chains in the world told us: “We do not interview our shoppers in-store, but conduct phone or Internet surveys of them.” Interviewing shoppers outside of the store is like trying to understand the movements of a flock of birds by observing a specimen in a natural history museum. It is shocking to me, but not at all exceptional.

This book offers managers in retail firms, or companies that sell products through retail, valuable insights into what happens to their customers when they walk through the front door of the store. Companies that spend countless dollars getting the customer to this point often look away just at this critical moment, giving scant attention to the “last mile” of retailing. Retailers and brand owners know all about who the people are going into the store, and what they are carrying home from the store, and a lot about what they are doing at home. But I stake my career to a large degree on the fact that they know very little about the process that occurs in the store. (As I will consider later, this lack of knowledge might be due in part to the structure of the industry, which means retailers and manufacturers get more out of interacting with one another than with customers in the aisles.) This book also offers anyone who has shopped or wants to understand the shopping experience, research-based insights into the habits of the shopper.

On the following pages, we explore some of the key insights from this work—the quick trip, three moments of truth for the shopper, in-store “migration” patterns, and how to put products in the path of customers through anticipatory retailing. We also look at how manufacturers and retailers can collaborate better in shaping flow and adjacency to sell more products in stores. In the second part of the book, we offer insights from a series of interviews with executives and experts on specific topics related to in-store retailing: deeper insights on the quick trip, the integration of online and offline retailing, multicultural retailing, and a retailer’s perspective on the issues presented in this book. Whether you are running or designing stores, building brands, or merely want a deeper understanding of shopping behavior, this book will challenge the way you look at shopping.

In a certain sense, the shoppers’ eyes offer a window into our entire society. As I realized in four decades of this work, retailing is at the cutting edge of social evolution because it brings people and the things they must have together. This is where the dreams and aspirations of consumers and the messages of brand owners intersect in a concrete action to make a purchase. If you want to understand our society, taking a trip with a shopper down a supermarket aisle is a very good start. I invite you to join me on this journey through the modern supermarket. I think you will be surprised at what we find.

—Herb Sorensen, Ph.D.

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

Editorial Reviews

The Second Edition of Inside the Mind of the Shopper is a goldmine for anyone trying to wrap their heads around the disruptions reshaping retail in the 21st Century. It provides much-needed clarity to a variety of hotly contested issues, from a pragmatic approach to ‘moments of truth’ to a dispassionate assessment of how physical and digital retailing can co-exist, compete, and (most importantly) be managed. But, for me at least, while there is much new ground broken here, none is more fertile than Sorensen’s notions of shopping as a ‘directional search’ and the idea of the retail area as the interface of products’ and shoppers’ competition for space. The author has given us many things to learn and even more to think about.”
– Ryan Mathews, CEO, Black Monk Consulting; author of The Myth of Excellence; The Deviant’s Advantage; and What’s Your Story?

“The author’s new chapters really contribute to making his ideas about active retailing even clearer, and making the book more up to date with the comparisons between online and offline. The book is so refreshing due to the author’s unique perspective and approach to retailing. I am used to both the practitioner’s ways of reasoning as well as academic literature on retailing, but the author’s perspective is distinct. He seems to have the mind of both an engineer as well as that of a retailer.”
– Jens Nordfält, Head of Research, Hakon Swenson Research Foundation; Assistant Professor, Stockholm School of Economics

“The Second Edition of Inside the Mind of the Shopper is version 2.0, not 1.1. Rarely does an update pave so much new ground that it could be considered an entirely new book. In the first edition, the author summarized the wisdom he developed from watching shoppers across close to a million shopping trips. In the second edition, the author examines today’s most pressing questions for retailers–how to rapidly evolve into a hybrid world of bricks, clicks, digital, social, and mobile. The second edition is an essential read whether or not you’ve read the first edition. Most of the information is new and virtually all of it is essential.”
– Neale Martin, CEO, Sublime Marketing; Professor of Innovation, Coles College of Management, Kennesaw State University; author of Habit: The 95% of Behavior Marketers Ignore

“Herb Sorensen’s seminal first edition of Inside the Mind of the Shopper has not only become prescribed reading for our consultants, but it has also become the go-to read for many of our clients. This is not a cover-to-cover read but rather a constant companion for any retail or shopper marketing practitioner, as it is packed with valuable insights drawn from over 40 years of shopper understanding. The updated second edition takes into account the dramatic changes technology has brought about since the launch of the first edition seven years ago. Technology has not only changed shopper behavior, but it has also played a significant role in how retailers and marketers engage the shopper. The author’s recommendations for how bricks and mortar retail should venture forth in this digital age are both reassuring and energizing. One thing that hasn’t changed over the two editions is the message that the shopper should be at the heart of everything we do as retailers and brand owners.”
– Peter Wilson, Director, koji

“I found this book to be a very important part of the industry. I also think it is a must-read for every merchandiser and category manager and would be the right text book for any retail merchandizing course for retail management programs, and even for management trainee programs. I spent time at Grand Union stores years ago in each of their four phas

From the Publisher

Sorensen has made a career out of studying the way consumers behave in supermarkets. His research into their behavioral patterns includes inventing PathTracker, a system that tracks the motions of shopping carts and fitting test shoppers with specially designed glasses that record their field of vision every 3/25ths of a second, telling him exactly what they are looking at and for how long. It turns out there are three different groups of shopping excursions-quick trips, fill-ins and stockups-and Sorenson studies shoppers by behavior, rather than demographic. He exhorts retailers to forget the old system of making the shopper walk through a store, hoping they'll make impulse buys; instead, get them buying as quickly as possible and build momentum by putting products-particularly high frequency purchase items-directly in their paths. He cites such stores as Stew Leonard and Tesco as taking full advantage of new shopper research and provides interesting studies to back up his claims. While vastly informative-even from a sociological standpoint-the book comes across as too theoretical and academic for the general reader. (June)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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