Many critical components develop the relationship between shoppers and the products they buy. What might appear to be a well-organized display that “match makes” the customer with a product is, in actuality, the end result of hours of meticulous planning, data crunching, and research carried out by stores and employees as a result of communication, timing, and yet more planning
Recognizing all the individual decisions that constitute consumer trends and behavioral patterns is both a science and an art. Humans are complicated beings, so determining which goods and services they choose to purchase – and especially the where, when, and why – is something where even the best “gut feeling” needs to be fact-checked and backed up by data.
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Welcome to Psychology 101: Shopper Behavior Analytics
People are creatures of habit. No matter how much anyone claims to be fully unique, common DNA means that every single individual is bound to be hardwired to have a non-infinite amount of propensities, fears, and natural likes and dislikes. To boil that all down, humans would not have survived as a species if they hadn’t learned how to spot patterns to help them cut down on guesswork when foraging for food, shelter, and water.
While most modern humans no longer have to watch for patterns along the trails that mean predator or prey, in modern-day hunting, shoppers can appreciate a grocery store laid out in which ketchup is kept with other condiments rather than next to the cereal; likewise, a business owner looking to expand their offerings would do so based on customer interests and trends rather than a passing whim.
The first step to capturing and influencing shopper behavior is by recognizing fundamental psychology based on heuristics and human emotion (no matter how seemingly irrational). When business owners begin to see their customers through this kind of scientific lens, they can then better rely on data that best measures the strengths and areas of growth businesswide.
Technology: The Secret Shopper
But of course, not all business owners want to add the role of “research scientist” to their already full-time work of being the end-all-be-all of their companies. This is where many technologies are being developed to help capture data to support the busy business person.
After all, as more companies are beginning to hybridize their commerce between traditional retail and e-commerce, tools also help capture real-time location and interest based on browsing history and macro-scale data usage, alongside clicks from email and social pages to store web pages and essential CRM services. Because search engines play a vital role in informing, influencing, and identifying customers, it is no wonder that more are integrating these technologies into tools that streamline customer and business needs alike.
Store Layouts and Indoor Mapping
This kind of computing is how theory becomes practice, as schematics and data get converted into tangible items that beckon to the shopper. No architect today would design a building without computers and calculators, and similarly, indoor mapping through retail analytics services is essential to supporting businesses in how they, among other things, align products according to customer traffic patterns, bringing inventory and demand to scale, and better identifying shopping patterns based on time in the store, employee interaction, responses to sales, and more.
Also, needless to say, virtual reality is here to stay, as industry experts throughout multiple sectors have come to recognize that post-COVID retail is the result of a more mature relationship between traditional retail and e-commerce. Indeed, even as early as 2011, business experts began to recognize the significant role that virtual reality would play in developing commerce, as the concept of “avatars” in online gaming and chat spaces began to graduate and look for employment opportunities in more sophisticated digital environments.
Conclusion
Certainly, the leading causes of lackluster sales include poor planning on the part of the appropriate inventory levels, appropriate levels of interactions between customer and employee, and how new products or services are presented to already scrutinizing customers. If a business owner is unable to “listen” to customers and show, through store layouts, that their customers are being heard, their human failure is often exacerbated by inadequate data due to their systems continuing only to show unhelpful numbers and patterns that can do little to rectify or identify why The Next Big Thing is whimpering in a proverbial corner.
This, in turn, can create a downward spiral rather than an upward trend, where data continues to reaffirm to the successful business owner what they can already see with their own eyes in the form of products flying off the shelves and customers’ rave reviews. After all, just as in any field, being equipped with the right technology is essential to any business owner who understands that time is money. Indoor mapping based on retail analytics is crucial to enhancing customer experience and company profit margins.
