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

those with packages or baby strollers. But the effortlessness of entering only serves to enlarge the decompressionzone—there’s nothing to slow you down even a little. Revolving doors are even worse, as they actually thrust you into the store with a fair amount of momentum. Some stores, especially smaller ones, benefit from having the entrance provide more of a threshold experience, not less. Even a small adjustment—a slightly creaky door or a squeaky hinge—does the trick. Special lighting on the doorway also clearly marks the divider between out there and in here. Other stuff works too, like a change in flooring color or texture.
    A big store can afford to waste some space up front. A smaller one can’t. In either case, store merchandisers can do two sensible things where the decompression zone is concerned: They can keep from trying to accomplish anything important there, and they can take steps to keep that zone as small as possible.
    A good lesson in what not to do with the entrance and decompression zone comes courtesy of a big, sophisticated company. In the early ’80s, Burger King was testing a new salad bar. To introduce it with a bang, they decided that they’d switch the entrances and exits on many of their restaurants. Until then, the door closest to the parking lot was always the entrance. They turned that entrance into an exit and put the salad bar just behind the big window next to it, so you’d walk from your car, go to the old entrance, see the salad bar, and be so tempted by it that when you entered—through the new entrance—you’d head straight for the lettuce.
    But here’s what actually happened: Customers went to the old entrance and tried to find the handle, which had been removed as part of the reconfiguration. They would then back up, scratch their heads and begin searching for a way to get into the place. They weren’t looking at the salad bar—they were too busy looking for a door! And once they found it, and burst into the restaurant feeling hungry and frustrated, all they wanted to do was find the counter and order their usual burgers and fries. In that atmosphere, the salad bar never had a chance.
    Another bad idea for the decompression zone was invented at an athletic goods chain where management decreed that every incoming shopper had to be greeted by a salesclerk within five seconds of entering the store. Here’s how that played in the real world: You’d walk in andcome face-to-face with a lineup of eager clerks hovering just inside the entrance like vultures, ready to pounce with a hearty hello. There’s an interesting curve here: Greet people too early and you scare them away. Talk to them too late and you get a whole lot of frustrated customers. In our work with Estée Lauder’s cosmetic counters, we were able to plot this curve pretty precisely. Leave people alone for at least one minute. Let them play first, and then you go from salesperson to cosmetics coach.
    We discovered another misuse of the zone a few years ago, when we tested an interactive computerized information fixture that had been designed for Kmart by a division of IBM. It had a touch screen and a keyboard, and you’d ask it where men’s underwear was, for example, and it would give you a map of the store and maybe a coupon for T-shirts or socks. A terrific idea, executed well. It helped customers and spared the store from having to pay someone to stand behind a desk and tell people where boys’ sweaters were seventy-two times a day.
    It wasn’t long, though, before store executives discovered a little glitch: Few shoppers used the fixtures. The problem was that no one admits, six steps into a store, that they don’t know where they’re going. At that point you haven’t even looked around long enough to realize you’re lost. Placing the computers too close to the door had turned them into very expensive pieces of