Merchandising Is About Helping Shoppers Feel Great

Retail merchandising is about emotion. It's about the mood or the feeling retailers create for the shopper. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I came across these two articles that are right on the money.

They both discuss the need for retailers to help customers look good. When customers look good, they feel good about themselves. Bill Gerba, in his Retail Media News article, Retailers remember: if we look good, you look good, says:

Granted the body of Sara's argument, namely that people will spend more when they look/feel better, is a much more well recognized and understood concept nowadays. In fact, retail anthropologist Paco Underhill has written entire chapters on how bad most dressing rooms are, and how many more sales would be completed if retailers would just spend a little money to make them look better (and by extension, make their customers look better, too).

Sara, is Sara Cantor, the Curious Shopper. I was pleased that Bill's post pointed me to this great blog that I hadn't read before. What caught my eye in her article was this:

I bought the glasses. They were perfect. And as I wore them each day, a funny thing happened. I would almost subconsciously recall the feeling I had about them in the store. It was a very private, personal feeling, something along the lines of "I look so smart and sophisticated." And you know, that feeling lives on, somewhere deep inside my brain.

It's the feeling, the emotion that the retailer is selling. It's the feeling that sticks with the customer, long after the shopper leaves the store and forgets the experience.

What the shopper remembers, is the emotion she has every time she wears, or uses the product she bought.

The next time she wants that feeling, she's going to go to a store that creates that same feeling - likely it'll be right back to your store.

Oh - and by the way, Bill - Sara's ritual is exactly the way girls shop. I sat through this ritual on two separate shopping trips to the same eyeware store before my teenage daughter finally decided on a pair. Same thing for shoes...