How to increase sales
Published online: Nov 9th 2006
From The Economist print edition
How shops can exploit peoples herd mentality to increase sales
1.A TRIP to the supermarket may not seem like an exercise in psychological warfarebut it is.Shopkeepers know that filling a store with the aroma of freshly baked bread makes people feel hungry and persuades them to buy more food than they had intended.Stocking the most expensive products at eye level makes them sell faster than cheaper but less visible competitors.Now researchers are investigating how swarm intelligence can be used to influence what people buy.
2.At a recent conference on the simulation of adaptive behaviour in Rome,Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani,a computer scientist from the Florida Institute of Technology,described a new way to increase impulse buying using this phenomenon.Supermarkets already encourage shoppers to buy things they did not realise they wanted: for instance,by placing everyday items such as milk and eggs at the back of the store,forcing shoppers to walk past other tempting goods to reach them.Mr Usmani and Ronaldo Menezes,also of the Florida Institute of Technology,set out to enhance this tendency to buy more by playing on the herd instinct.The idea is that,if a certain product is seen to be popular,shoppers are likely to choose it too.The challenge is to keep customers informed about what others are buying.
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