Why We Buy by Paco Underhill Read Free Book Online Page A

of the long-held beliefs and opinions of this company.” At any rate, they’ve begun to do some things differently in store layout, display, merchandising and staffing, and I have no doubt that they’ll improve their conversion rate and make more money as a result.
    Our findings were also important to that company’s big picture. We showed that meaningful growth—which Wall Street demands and everybody else is pretty fond of, too—can be stimulated at the store level, without having to expand the empire, an expensive strategy that always runs out of gas sooner or later. In 2007, same-store sales are the bellwether for a chain’s good health.
    The marketer was equally in the dark through the end of the twentieth century. Until the past decade, there was sales data or the compilation of register tapes. Today, however, almost all major consumer product companies have shopper-and consumer-insight groups. They often fiercely debate the difference between what happens to people in the store (shoppers) and what happens once they get their products home (consumers). All in all, insight groups have been a positive change. Yet for the marketers sitting in their suburban campuses, there are often some pretty striking disconnects. In 2008, it is easier to collect data than to figure out what it means, much less map out what you can or should do about it. Since the science of shopping was invented, there are now a lot of companies talking about the scale of their databases—we tracked a million shoppers with security cameras and so on—yet, in the end, what does it mean? To me, ten years after I wrote the first edition of this book, the rightful evolution of the science of shopping is for a corporation to look at what they do with this information and, based on whatever measure they use, ask themselves: Did it make or save us money?
    Let’s go back to the basics. Conversion rates vary wildly depending on what kind of store or product we’re talking about. In some sections of the supermarket, the conversion rate probably is around 100 percent (I’m thinking of dairy or toilet paper here). In an art gallery or high-endjewelry store full of big-ticket items, maybe one shopper in a hundred will buy something, and that’s plenty. Whatever’s being sold, though, I think it’s impossible to dispute that conversion rate is a critically important measure of performance. Marketing, advertising, promotion and location can bring shoppers in, but then it’s the job of the merchandise, the employees and the store itself to turn them into buyers. Conversion rate measures what you make of what you have—it shows how well (or how poorly) the entire enterprise is functioning where it counts most: in the store. Conversion rate is to retail what batting average is to baseball—without knowing it, you can say that somebody had a hundred hits last season, but you don’t know whether he had three hundred at-bats or a thousand. Without conversion rate, you don’t know if you’re Mickey Mantle or Mickey Mouse.
    Yet conversion in its simplest form has its limits. In the past ten years a number of companies have rigged up electronic counters on the doorways of stores, then hooked them up to the register. Voilà—instant ongoing conversion rates. Yet the real story is often hiding in the details. What’s the difference between men and women? What happens when you add a kid to the process, or an African-or Latino-American? That counter at the door counts bodies, and that’s all it counts, never mind the fact that it’s unlikely a family of four will walk out of a store lugging four big-screen TVs, one per person. Yes, some of the more upscale ones can calculate body mass and get some gauge on people’s gender, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it. We get a lot of calls from companies that installed counting systems, and three months into the daily stream of