"Why We Buy" reports on evolving shopping culture. It's a book about us, from moms & dads to seniors & kids, what we do & don't do in restaurants, showrooms & stores. It's about the struggle among merchants, marketers & increasingly knowledgeable customers for control. With insight, anecdote & data, retail anthropologist Underhill leads a journey into shopping heaven & hell. For those in retailing & marketing, "Why We Buy" is a remarkably fresh guide, offering concrete & usable advice on how to adapt to changing customers. For the public, it's a charming, sometimes disconcerting mirror of who we really are.Underhill & his Envirosell company, are credited as being the founders of the science of shopping. For decades, he's been leading blue-chip clients into retail trenches. Like a modern-day Margaret Mead observing the local mail, his firm records & measures what goes on in stores as we wander or rush about, find what we want & sometimes do the unexpected. From base camps in NYC, Milan & Sydney, he & his colleagues follow in person & on videotape between 50-70,000 shoppers a year thru their retail experiences in stores, banks & public offices. (They record some 20,000 hours of what he reports to be generally some of the most dull videotape imaginable.) He explains how consumer & retail marketing has gone from being a war to being a bar fight, an environment in which Coke iscompeting not only with Pepsi, but with every product on promotional display.The marketing tools of retail & package-goods industries no longer work as well as they used to. The gender models that have driven stores & designers have become obsolete. There's a reason why the Jeep Cherokee comes with a driver's side makeup mirror. "Why We Buy" looks at men trying to buy gifts in lingerie stores & women seeking attention, service & respect in car dealerships & technology stores. It reveals men as more promiscuous buyers & softer touches for klds, as well as how a woman will stay longer in a store if she's with a woman friend."Why We Buy" explains why we do what we do, notice what we notice, ignore what we ignore & buy what we buy. It tells why women won't linger in narrow aisles, why the Internet cannot replace shopping mails, how hardware stores are learning to adapt to women & how men are beginning to shop like women, how working women have altered the way supermarkets are laid out & why the person in charge at a branch bank sits farthest from the front door. "Why We Buy" amuses & instructs. It will change forever the way you look at stores & at yourself.
In an effort to determine why people buy, Paco Underhill and his detailed-oriented band of retail researchers have camped out in stores over the course of 20 years, dedicating their lives to the "science of shopping." Armed with an array of video equipment, store maps, and customer-profile sheets, Underhill and his consulting firm, Envirosell, have observed over 900 aspects of interaction between shopper and store. They've discovered that men who take jeans into fitting rooms are more likely to buy than females (65 percent vs. 25 percent). They've learned how the "butt-brush factor" (bumped from behind, shoppers become irritated and move elsewhere) makes women avoid narrow aisles. They've quantified the importance of shopping baskets; contact between employees and shoppers; the "transition zone" (the area just inside the store's entrance); and "circulation patterns" (how shoppers move throughout a store). And they've explored the relationship between a customer's amenability and profitability, learning how good stores capitalize on a shopper's unspoken inclinations and desires.
Underhill, whose clients include McDonald's, Starbucks, Estée Lauder, and Blockbuster, stocks Why We Buy with a wealth of retail insights, showing how men are beginning to shop like women, and how women have changed the way supermarkets are laid out. He also looks to the future, projecting massive retail opportunities with an aging baby-boom population and predicting how online retailing will affect shopping malls. This lighthearted look at shopping is highly recommended to anyone who buys or sells. --Rob McDonald
