I’ve been meaning to start placing my favorite quotes from Paco Underhill’s “Why We Buy” but have not had the time. This is the first in a several part series. Enjoy:

“We can tell you how many males who take jeans into the fitting room will buy them compared to how many females (65 percent to 25 percent).” pg. 17

“The butt-brush factor, we wurmised, was why that rack was an underperformer.” pg. 18

“Shoppers have been spooked by too-close quarters.” pg. 18

“Move the treats to where kids and little old ladies can reach them.” pg. 19

“Much of the signage was misplaced–common sense dictated that it be positioned to face the main entrance of the store, but we found that most jeans shoppers came upon the section from a completely different direction.” pg. 20

“My old colleagues in the world of academia regard what we do with envy and horror–envy because we get to do what we do and get paid for it, horror because we actually stick our necks out and are held accountable for the success or failure of our suggestions.” pg. 21

“Why not take the tools of the urban anthropologist and use them to study how people interact with the retail environment?” pg. 24

“To my surprise things that seemed logical and obvious to me were delightful insights to my clients. It was clear that I had stepped into a world of business where what I did had value, but I knew nothing of the consequences or, really the context.” pg. 27

“…the view from the register back into the body of the store is distinctly myopic.” pg. 28

“A store has more than one constituency, and it must therefore perform several functions, all from the same premises.” pg. 29

“If we went into stores only when we needed to buy something, and if once there we bought only what we needed, the economy would collapse, boom.” pg. 31

“…we are now generously overretailed–too much is for sale, through too many outlets. The economy even at its strongest can’t keep up with retailing’s growth. Judging from birthrates, we are generating stores considerably faster than we are producing new baby shoppers. Retailers are not opening stores in the United States to serve new markets anymore. They are opening stores to try to steal someone else’s customers. As the competition gets heated, there is a need for an edge–a science, if you will.” pg. 31

“The standard tools of marketing work, they just don’t work anywhere near as well as they used to. Many purchasing decisions are made, or can be heavily influenced, on the floor of the store itself. Shoppers are susceptible to impressions and information they acquire in stores, rather than just relying on brand-name loyalty or advertising to tell them what to buy. As a result, an important medium for transmitting messages and closing sales is now the store and the aisle. That building, that place, has become a great big three-dimensional advertisement for itself. Signage, shelf position, display space and special fixtures all make it either likelier or less likely that a shopper will buy a particular item (or any item at all).” pg. 32

“Finally, our studies prove that the longer a shopper remains in a store, the more he or she will buy. And the amount of time a shopper spends in a store depends on how comfortable and enjoyable the experience is.” pg. 33

“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 if 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.” pg. 36

“The average shopper spent two minutes in the cosmetics section. The average shopper who bought something spent only thirty seconds more. Now, the amount of time a shopper spends in a store (assuming he or she is shopping, not waiting in a line) is perhaps the single most important factor in determinging how much she or he will buy. Over and over again, our studies have shown a direct relationship. If the customer is walking through the entire store (or most of it, at least) and is considering lots of merchandise (meaning he or she is looking and touching and thinking), a fair amount of time is required…” pg. 37

“Here’s another good way to judge a store: by its interception rate, meaning the percentage of customers who have some contact with an employee…All our research shows this direct relationship: the more shopper-employe contacts that take place, the greater the average sale. Talking with an employee has a way of drawing a cusotmer in closer.” pg. 37

“Here’s a finaly measure, a real simple one waiting time. This, as we discuss elsewhere, is the single most important factor in customer satisfaction. But few retailers realize that when shoppers are made to wait too long in line (or anywhere else), their impression of overall service plunges.” pg. 38

“This finaly matter doesn’t involve any particular way to measure a store, but it’s a remarkable example of businessperson ignorance: they often don’t really know who their shoppers are.” pg. 39

“Smart retailers would reward employees who learned a little Japanese, German, French or Spanish–even just a handful of phrases would make a difference, as anyone who has shopped in a foreign country would realize. Restaurants should have menus in Japanese and German on hand.” pg. 39 ( I might ad, what about the digital signage?).

stay tuned for more coming up….