Pi-Consulting

Several centuries after Marco Polo introduced pasta noodles from China to Italians, that inventive race went one better and invented pizza, which promptly swept onto the fast-food menus of a grateful world. Now the tide may be beginning to reverse, at least in the UK, where Pizza Hut (700 restaurants across the country) has decided to re-name itself Pasta Hut. This startling decision is an effort to charm anew those customers whose palates have perhaps become jaded by family-sized Pepperoni Specials, Quattro Stagiones and American Hots, or are concerned about healthy-eating issues. Under its new name, the company is set to spend around $170 million on improving its restaurants, opening more outlets and developing its menu. The restaurants will still sell pizzas, but the new pasta-linked name will show that a range of healthier meals are now on offer, featuring a variety of new pasta-based dishes. Says chief executive Alasdair Murdoch: “We’re doing it to try to attract customers who probably haven’t been in for a few years”. It remains to be seen if the spirit of Marco Polo will exert the same influence over other pizza-eating countries like the USA. Source: London Financial Times, WARC News, Pi

“Chicle! Chicle!”. The cry goes up from tens of thousands of street-sellers every day in Mexico City, hawking chewing-gum to the 25 million inhabitants of that vast conurbation. Once it has been masticated to the point where the taste is gone, where does the gum go next? Straight onto the sidewalk, where it bonds to the paving slabs, absorbs dirt and smog deposits, and reminds passers-by of someone else’s fleeting moment of pleasure, probably for years to come.

There’s your trouble. Discarded gum has a half-life almost as long as spent nuclear fuel rods. How big is the problem? A survey of street surfaces outside the city’s metro stations, and reported in the Washington Post, implies that there are around 70 bits of old gum per square meter on average. If the same concentration affects the whole surface area of Mexico City, Pi calculates that we are talking about 50 to 100 billion (yes billion) blots on the streetscape.

Where to start? The city’s co-ordinator of conservation for public spaces have vowed to scrub the historic central district clean of chicle deposits, and a crack team of gum-busters are attacking the blobs with steam jets and chemicals, starting in February. With hope in his heart, co-ordinator Ricardo Jaral Fernandez is also placing public trashcans in prominent locations, each blazoned with an exhortation to “love your city”.

Meanwhile, in a truly startling and radical development, the municipal government is giving notice that it plans to start enforcing its own recycling laws. By now, according to city planners, over 70% of the residents of Mexico City are supposed to be separating household waste for recycling. In reality, fewer than ten percent of the people in the capital do so. Entrenched attitudes are about as difficult to turn around as a supertanker in the Panama Canal.

Chewing-gum has been on sale in Mexico for over 120 years, and nearly all of it is unthinkingly spat onto the sidewalk. Changing the attitudes behind this behaviour means nothing less than re-shaping Mexicans’ attitude to civic pride. The initiative sadly sounds a little like Don Quixote tilting at gumballs. Pi wishes Sr. Jaral lots of luck with his praiseworthy attempt to change a century-old bad habit, and the shoulder-shrugging indifference that causes it.

Supermarkets were first launched to promote “shopping convenience”. So why does their layout (which oddly never seems to vary) resemble a “mind maze”, a mental and sometimes even a physical obstacle course? Wouldn’t you rather expect a logical, time-saving and convenient approach to organizing shoppers’ pathways around the store? A penetrating analysis in the year-end edition of The Economist reveals key clues to this apparent contradiction. It’s all in the mind.

Wandering around the aisles of your typical supermarket is a little like being guided by an invisible hand. The owner of the hand knows more about our peculiarities and foibles than we imagine. Psychological principles and mood-promoting devices are deployed in different ways depending where in the labyrinth you find yourself.

The first area you encounter is known as the de-compression zone, which mentally slows, and calms, you down before new stimuli are directed at you. If you are in a Wal-Mart, you will encounter a “greeter”, who makes you feel welcome and powerful, and at least in theory diminishes your propensity for shop-lifting (“It’s harder to steal from nice people”, as The Economist explains).

Less purposeful or more easily distracted shoppers may find themselves drifting from the entrance-way to the racks of good over on the left, where a “chill zone” will tempt you into browsing aimlessly through movies on DVD, books and magazines, and top-ten music discs. The idea is to enhance the receptiveness, acquisitiveness and relaxation of the shoppers who drift into this area.

If you ignore the dreamy entertainment option and instead march smartly from the entrance bay straight to your front, you will find yourself in amongst the fresh fruit and vegetables. In practical shopping terms this makes little sense, since filling the bottom of your shopping cart with lettuces, grapes, peaches and bananas before you load in heavy bottles, tin cans and boxes of beer risks squashing all that soft and vulnerable fresh produce to pulp. Surely they should have located the fresh fruit & veg at the end of your circuit of the store, not the beginning, right? A careless mistake by the supermarket layout experts, perhaps?

Far from it, it’s deliberate. Studies show that inspecting attractive and colourful fresh foods uplifts the spirits, and makes shoppers feel less guilty about buying less healthy indulgence foods later in the same shopping trip.

Why are ‘unavoidable’ needs and daily staples like milk, butter and eggs always at the back of the store, usually in the far corners? Simple, dummy. It means you have to walk past all the stuff you didn’t know you wanted in order to get to the stuff you can’t really do without. For the same reason, supermarkets with an in-store pharmacy nearly always locate them at the back, and surround the waiting line of prescription-fillers with aspirational and discretionary items like hair colorants. High-demand items and special offers are often placed at the half-way point on an aisle otherwise filled with relatively uninteresting goods. If you want the goodies, you have to walk past a welter of purchase options that otherwise might never have occurred to you.

Environmental factors are also drafted in to help us spend more. The fragrant smell of baking bread around the in-store bakery is a sales incentive in itself. For the same reason, you may find a pleasing aroma of fresh laundry wafting around the aisle stocked with fabric conditioners. Playing muzak tracks of French accordion music has been demonstrated to increase sales of French wine, while Bavarian oompah bands steer purchasers towards the bottles of Moselle and Liebfraumilch. Bundles of balloons put us momentarily in party mood, upping the amount of alcoholic beverages we are likely to buy overall. Dear, dear, what suggestible creatures we “hard-nosed shoppers” turn out to be.

The hidden message in the maze is that the seemingly random layout that drives us nuts and feels like the product of lame planning are actually highly sophisticated responses to the way our minds work when we’re shopping. If anything about our aisle-wandering habits is still less than perfectly understood by the supermarket chains’ ‘footfall experts’, mobile phone technology is coming to fill in the gaps. Path Intelligence, a UK-based company working with MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), has developed a system for tracking shoppers’ movements by their cellphones. The mobile handsets don’t have to be in use, only switched on. They track an individual’s precise whereabouts by the constant signals they exchange with the cellular networks that carry their calls. If you walk briskly past the household cleaning products, but then pause for a minute in front of Mexican Foods, Path Intelligence will know it, and record the duration of your “dwell time”. Apparently whenever dwell-time rises, sales of the items concerned rises even more, by a measurable factor. Standing and thinking about an item on a shelf increases our likelihood of putting it in the cart and paying for it.

If this kind of insight into in-store selling techniques is not common knowledge, there is a reason for that. Too much revenue depends on store-planners keeping their deeper secrets to themselves. Market research giant The Nielsen Company recently launched its Pioneering Research fir In-Store Metrics (PRISM). Major retail chains like Safeway and Walgreens have joined up, but Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer by sales value, declined, citing its “internal data sharing policies” – i.e. no sharing of its internal data.

Now where the hell have they hidden the shoe-polish?

he average American will still order a double cheeseburger and large fries, then virtuously pick a diet soft drink to wash it down with. Since the early 1990s, America’s average bra size has jumped from 34B to 36C. Brassiere company executives attribute this mainly to the above mentioned double cheeseburgers and large fries, though surgical breast implants in the USA have also been increasing by as much as half each year. Clearly a contributory factor to the bra-size explosion. (Sources: Simmons, New York Times, American Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, Pi).

“Walk? Not bloody likely!” Eliza Doolittle in Shaw’s play Pygmalion memorably declared, “I’m goin’ in a taxi!”. This may be the last recorded expression of unconditional enthusiasm for taxicabs as a mode of transport. In today’s world, you are more likely to hear a string of complaints about them. A taxi ride seems to be one of those products or services which consumers pay for because they have to, not because they want to.

In a world of increasing product harmonization, is a standard-issue cab ride a more or less standardized experience around the globe? On some measures it probably is. Taxi users everywhere are united in their complaints about high prices, indirect routes, surly drivers, mysteriously defective taxi-meters, and the fact that you can never find a cab when it’s raining. (Actually that last one is sort of a back-handed compliment to this much reviled mode of transport. There are moments when we actually need a cab).

However, the complaints about high prices may not always be justified. An examination of available sources on five large cities in different corners of the Americas suggests that price is only part of a complex of variables determining how many people use taxis in a given market.

In a recent comparison, Los Angeles was charging the highest urban taxi fares in the world, at just under $15 for a 3-mile ride. New York was not far behind, and both cities showed low figures for “used a taxi yesterday”. Coincidentally, high percentages of Angelenos and New Yorkers own their own cars. By contrast, both cab fares and car-ownership are dramatically lower in places like Buenos Aires and Mexico City, and taxi usage is therefore higher. The principle seems to be that fewer private cars mean a bigger pool, both of taxis and of paying customers to ride in them. If it’s true, that means there are parallel economies of scale which hold down prices and increase uptake as a result. In many cities, taxis are a ‘commoditized’ alternative to a creaking and unreliable urban public transport system. One wonders if this ‘benign circle’ might possibly be repeated elsewhere. Could traffic congestion in New York and London be reduced by slashing 80% off taxi fares? We will probably never know.

Of course a taxi ride is not just about getting from A to B. It’s also an opportunity to exchange views with one of the most dogmatically opinionated people on the planet. New York cabbies, in Pi’s experience, know very little, but have strong opinions on just about everything. If their passenger is brave enough to voice an opinion of his own from his perspex prison-cell in the back of the car, chances are he will be sharply told to “fuggeddabadit”. London cabbies, by contrast, really do know everything. Since London traffic has now apparently slowed to an average speed of less than 5 miles an hour, even a ride of a few blocks gives your driver the chance to share with you the full extent of his knowledge about the entire universe, sometimes twice.

What of the “in-taxi experience”? Depending on where in the world you hire your cab, its interior fixtures and décor will probably differ in exotic ways. The miniature football boots dangling from the rear-view mirror will be the same, but everything else will be a tribute to the uniqueness of local culture. In Mexico, for instance, the inside of a taxi is often decked out like a religious shrine Crimson ‘altar cloths’ fringed with gold tassels cover the dashboard. St. Christopher medals and images of the Virgin of Guadalupe dangle distractingly in front of your driver’s eyes. (This is so that he can take his hands off the steering wheel and clutch onto something genuinely reliable when a traffic accident is imminent). In Saudi Arabia, Pi was told, you will find cabbies watching miniature TV sets while driving you around. One nervous English passenger asked if this wasn’t a rather dangerous practice. “Not really”, said the driver, “at least it’s not as dangerous as reading the newspaper”.

The importance of in-cab appurtenances should not be underestimated. The taxi market is apparently governed by a “price-to-kitsch ratio”. Comparative figures reveal that the cheapest cab-rides are to be had in Mumbai, Bangkok, Jakarta and in the rainbow-colored ‘jeepneys’ of Manila. Coincidentally, these are all cities where taxi-drivers vie for the honor of owning the most exotically decorated taxi on the street. How different from the sober black of London taxis, (which of course cost a lot more to ride in).

The mathematical principle at work here seems to be that the fare charged for a cab ride varies in direct inverse proportion to the garishness of the vehicle’s décor. So, when hailing a cab in foreign parts, Pi advises you to keep an eye out for fairy-lights, gold trimmed crimson altar cloths, holy medallions and little flashing neon football boots. You’ll probably save money.