There is a light that never goes out...
What makes you walk through a shop doorway?
I hope you had a lovely Easter weekend, and for the many members of the Moving Tribes gang who work in retail, I hope the weekend delivered for you commercially. I spoke to half a dozen or so senior retail execs last week from different businesses and depending on our sectors we were either hoping for lovely sunny weather or the kind of grey rainy day that makes you want to do some home improvements.
Luckily, this being the UK we all got a little of what we hoped for!
A shorter working week brings a slightly shorter newsletter post too, but prompted me to dig some pictures out of the Moving Tribes archives to consider the fairly fundamental question of what it is that makes you walk into a shop at all.
The answer depends, obviously, on the purchase mission you are on. Often times we are purposefully shopping to buy something in particular, and will visit one or more of the stores around us that sell that particular product. In that case, we might not even notice the cues on the outside of the store at all. I often begin a retail visit by buying a coffee and hanging around for a while outside the store I intend to visit to quietly observe the behaviours of the shoppers passing and entering the store. Those purposeful visits are very easy to spot as the customer, head down, turns and walks into the store without a glance sideways. Anyone who has spent hours in meetings debating what the store window display should look like would be horrified to realise how rarely customers even notice them!
But for those less purposeful retail visits, the browsing and the ‘just passing’, what can we do to make our stores more likely to get that visit? In my wanderings over the years, here are a few things that make a difference - but I’m really keen to hear yours too, so do please add a comment with your own builds.
Light
Consider the two stores pictured above. I really can’t often tell when I walk past the Starbucks in my home town whether it is open or not - they keep the lighting so low it just looks closed. (I appreciate the guy in the window is probably a clue, but you get my point). Contrast that with the beautiful glow of the incense stall on the right and you can see how much more inviting it looks.
Sadly, the dim-light phenomenon is more than just a Starbucks problem. Too many shops on my high street, including both chains and indies are guilty of looking, well, closed. I completely appreciate the context in a world of ever higher energy bills, but there is no getting away from the fact that as shoppers we are part-moth and drawn to light. I spent a couple of weeks running a Christmas Market stall a few years ago and we saw the same thing then - the stalls which were really lit up and glowing, especially in the grey of winter just did more business.
Crowds
Oddly enough, another lesson from the market stall is that we tend to want to go where other people are - the stall was either empty or heaving with customers and rarely anything in between. It is odd that the more crowded a shop is the easier it is to enter, but still true.
Here the incense shop in our picture illustrates a negative rather than a positive - going in when it is empty, with just the staff staring at you is indisputably a little bit intimidating, and that flash of fear when you walk past can easily be enough to keep you walking.
Strong merchandising
At the risk of stating the obvious, we can also draw people into our stores with a great product display. Zoom in, if you can, on the incense shop and you’ll see a fairly small range of product really wonderfully displayed - on nice shelving, in an attractively laid out way.
We wandered into a charity shop a few weeks ago where the team had really worked on merchandising - the clothing was arranged by colour and spaced well around the store instead of presented in heaps on tables, and the whole effect was so redolent of a high end fashion store that you had to keep reminding yourself that this was donated clothing on sale for a few pounds.
Books have been written on merchandising, and by people who know a lot more about it than I do, but there is no mistaking the fact that if the first impression when you walk into a shop is that it is a place where the product is loved and where your senses are filled with the colours and textures of the product you are more likely to take that critical next step into the space and start shopping.
Hello
And finally, as I’ve written about before, the next best thing you can do to get people into your shop is make them feel welcome. Time and again, whether it is in observations of independent shops or detailed statistical analysis of mystery shop scores for chains, the same truth re-emerges - stores which offer a cheery ‘hello’ when you first walk in do more business.
What would you add to this list? What advice to you have for your fellow retailers about how to create a store that attracts customers, first from the outside using the window and then further into the store to become browsers and buyers?
Retailers spend significant time and budget on specifying their window displays, and expect good implementation at the store level, so It always amazes me how few store managers must look at the outside of their store as part of their daily set up - if they did they would see the catalogue of errors the customer often sees (lighting out, POS misaligned / fallen, poorly dressed mannequins, issues with basic cleaning standards, cigarette buts etc).
The standards set outside the store are often an indicator of the standards inside!