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There are many tactics available to retailers to add meaning to their brands and traffic in short order. All have to do with precisely how humans think and act. Here are some of my own takes.

1- Reeling-in: what is it that beckons new customers in? Traffic increases when this is attended to. Scents that quaffe from within. Sounds. Storytelling as window display. Curiosity draws.

2- TaDa Effect: Experience killers upon entry include sales signs, greeters that don’t greet, carriages that  don’t roll, blatant Big Brother camera viewing, tagging of your bags (everyone is a potential thief), “caution wet floor” signs, unkept appearance,  sensory cues that are off, etc…The first 20 feet (5 to 10 for small stores)  are critical. One second before a customer becomes aware, bad chemicals may have already kicked-in. Those chemicals stay in the body working for 20 minutes–the average store visit. An entry point is experienced within a small visual aperture and every detail is felt.

3- Sensory Isolation: All senses are engaged, all the time. You cannot ignore one while tending to others. Isolate your senses to see, hear, feel, smell each individually within your stores. The brain catches it all.

  • olfactory: block your ears and eyes. If scents are incongruent to the content sold wipe them out. Rubber mats, cleaning solutions, excessive perfume are the usual perps. This is the fastest, most powerful sense. And almost always ignored.
  • visual: humans see/cope in small apertures. Retailers call it “boutiquing”. This is why big box, high ceilings with a zillion lamps to underscore the fact, hasten the end of shopping trips. It’s just too much.
  • touch: promote touching products, they will sell more. It’s a natural action from our early development. This also applies to textures on fixtures, wall, floors. Reduce flat surfaces, straight edges and lines. Add texture and rounded edges wherever you can.
  • audio: stop the tinny uni-directional radio. Invest in a good sound system to pipe relevant music to your audience. Use it as an employee PA system at your own peril. Good music (not musak) increases pleasure, releases good chemicals in the brain. And while you have blocked out the other senses, what voices do you hear? Your employees gossiping or yelling out SKUs? Or worse, deafening silence–a real killer.

4- In-Utero: Create intimate space, a real emotional need for shoppers, lower the ceiling–armies of low hanging lamps or coffered edges won’t do it. However signage and hanging “stages” might. People are uncomfortable in large empty spaces, vertically and horizontally. A throwback to our nine months in-utero. It’s a wonder why bix box ceilings are so high, a cannibalizing element.

5- Sunrise-Sunset: Many stores are abominably overlit. Some believe that spraying more and more light into their stores and on merchandise will move more of it. Not so. It is tiring visually and completely washes out textures and depth-of-field. Turn off all the lights, start over by targeted spotlighting key objects with warm light–a museum-like approach to your artifacts (products). Then continue adding necessary lighting–but know when to stop. Dramatic lighting adds richness, color, texture and value to your artifacts and surroundings. That’s why photographers shoot notoriously at dawn and 3 pm, when depth-of-field is the highest. And the color of the lighting matters–blue hues send discomforting cues–memories of bus stop waits, and hospital tables. Lighting is more about emotions than it is about light.

6- Deepening: If you sell cashmere sweaters add signage about its origins and how it is harvested from the underbelly of sheep. Place pictures of the process before text. A customer is no longer buying a sweater but rather, an experience. If you are obsessed with the ease and speed of delivering experiences, you will be relegated to selling sweaters which may sit idle.

7- Paralanguage: Teach employees body language, tone, expression. These are faster and more powerful cues than verbal language shared. Simulate. Rehearse. And alter the state-of-mind to ensure a positive one each morning–in a dignified style.

8- Navigational Anthropology (NA): Store navigation must be intuitive. The linguistics in signage must be natural–and not driven by your own operations. And one product can be found in many areas e.g. flashlight in camping, lighting and automotive. This is intuitive. One retailer once told me he wished to minimize orientation for the customer because it kept the customer in the store longer; this is quintessentially backward, bean-counting thinking. The customer feels lost and frustrated and will resist future visits. Caveman comes back to cave without carcass–unhappy.

9- Portalling: This applies expecially to mass and large merchants. Invariably customers may be buying cribs which are 3 feet from men’s rubber boots. This is a mistake. The contextual representations in the mind for each are incongruent and affect the response to both. Instead, announce a new department by creating a portal.

10- Primacy-Recency: The first and last moments will be most remembered. This is what lingers in the brain. Recency is about the last moments–the most powerful of the two. Yet cashing out is reportedly one of the worst phases of the shopping experience. Entertain, assist and delight here. Too many customers are lost emotionally at exit. You need “thankers” as well as “greeters”–this is authentic! This is a pandora’s box with a myriad of innovative possibilities. Completely unchartered because retailers are focused on the current visit and not the next. More loyalty is lost here.

Well it was hard to stop this list! I am a latent retailer. Retailers are in the most enviable place where customers come in direct contact with their brand. Customer experience seems to take a back seat to operations. Marketing folks need to get their nose in their departments and work closely with them. It is an inane practice to isolate marketing/branding from operations. It’s not about same store sales per sq ft. It’s about same store sales per customer.