Pi-Consulting

After years of marketing fairy-tale and “princess” fantasy products to little girls, the Walt Disney Company has decided to do something for their brothers too. Hey, it’s the boys’ turn! Disney is launching new initiatives, targeting entertainment products at the hitherto elusive market sector of boy children aged 6–14. The company is rebranding its cable and digital TV channel Toon Disney (currently available in 72 million US households) as “Disney XD”, offering programs based around action and adventure themes, videogames and skateboarding. There will also be a new boy-friendly website, DisneyXD.com, featuring music, games, videos and social networking capabilities. Disney’s sports affiliate ESPN will provide sports content. Says Rich Ross, president of Disney Channels Worldwide: “We looked at the landscape and felt that girls are being served, but boys really haven’t been”. The new plan should do much to even out the battle of the sexes. Source: WARC News

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?

The average American adds a tip of between 8% and 37% after an enjoyable meal. Yet 40% of Americans profess to hate tipping as a practice. They are not alone. Australians have a long history of hating the whole idea of tipping, on the basis that “The person’s doing their job and getting paid, so why should I pay them even more?”. Sydney taxi drivers have been known to give tippers a nasty look, throw the tip money on the sidewalk, and shout “Think you’re better than me, eh, cobber?” (Source: Cornell University, Pi).

To dub? Or to sub-title? Movies on TV are supposed to be entertaining, and Spanish-speaking viewers don’t feel they should have to work too hard at having a good time. For mainstream American audiences, of course, the question scarcely arises, since foreign-language movies from beyond the US domestic market only hit the national consciousness with extreme rarity, if at all.

Views can vary in the dubbing vs. titles debate. In Latin America, for instance, large numbers of the films and TV shows aired are American in origin, but preferences for translation formats are far from uniform. Overall, dubbing seems to win by a comfortable margin. However, a surprising number of TV viewers and moviegoers in Argentina and Mexico say they prefer the original English soundtrack, and reading the sub-titles. This seems to correlate with (a) a higher proportion of the population professing to speak English, and (b) a sense of pride in taking Anglo-Saxon cultures on board undiluted. Upscale Mexicans, for instance, will be at pains to seem comfortable with Hollywood Americanisms in the original English. For their part, Argentineans notoriously regard themselves as more European than the Europeans. In Buenos Aires, the overwhelming practice in movie theatres is to show foreign films in their original version, with Spanish subtitles only provided for those ‘ignorant’ enough need them.

Curiously, in Brazil they tend to ‘dub-title’ movies, i.e. viewers get much English-language material dubbed into Spanish, with Portuguese subtitles added as well. This can get ferociously confusing. Your Pi blogmeister has sat on planes to Rio or São Paulo, and realized that the two simultaneous translations of the in-flight movie not only mis-represent the English original, but are also totally different from each other.

With dubbing, something always seems to get lost in the translation, and the quality of the movie-watching experience can suffer. Puerto Rican viewers, many of whom are bi-lingual in Spanish and English, complain that Hollywood fare dubbed into Spanish is often so badly done that the movies and series seem more like parodies of themselves. The same voice-over artists’ voices come back, thinly disguised, again and again. “It’s awful”, says one viewer in San Juan. “Serious programs come across as screamingly funny, while supposedly funny ones simply aren’t”. Sounds like “The Unwatchables”.

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).