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08.02.2002

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For more Hartman Group articles on CONSUMER EXPECTATION & EXPERIENCE...

NATURAL SENSIBILITY

The Way to the Consumer's Heart is Through Experience

Wellness Trends 2002

Creating the Buzz: Marketing Eco-Products to Today's Wellness Consumers

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The Abcs Of Experience

The first step to understanding the consumer's retail experience is to embed that experience in a larger context, which recognizes the fact that the aspects of experience relevant to retailers and manufacturers do not occur in a vacuum. Rather, they emerge as parts of an ongoing activity, which frames the in-store experience by setting up expectations about that experience.

Anyone who has ever gone on a shopping trip knows a great deal happens before and after the actual store encounter. If you only focus on your own turf, you will miss the big picture. Even experienced retail anthropologists have fallen victim to the ease of recording only in-store behaviors. Certainly, it pays to discover that your customers will spend $0.78 more if you run your aisles front-to-back rather than side-to-side, but creating an "experience" enlarges on this myopic vision to take advantage of the inertia built into consumers' lifestyles. People flock to stores like REI, Restoration Hardware, Pottery Barn and Anthropologie not because of their signage or prices. These companies succeed because they help us express our warm-blooded selves in ways a cash register simply would not understand.

Consider how consumers experience shopping simply in terms of the type of shopping trip embarked upon. For example, a quick run to the local convenience store to pick up a six pack of beer before the game is a very different kind of experience than the one associated with a cross-town outing to a beer emporium to find some new and interesting seasonal brews to sample. (For more on shopping trips, see the "Experience, Expectation and the Shopping Trip".) Viewed in this light, the shopping trip becomes a major determinant of the success or failure of the in-store shopping experience. An experience that cannot be appreciated without a commitment of time and energy on the part of the consumer will probably succeed only in annoying shoppers bent on getting in and out as quickly as possible. On the other hand, the very same experience may completely captivate consumers looking to enjoy their shopping excursion. To meet these conflicting needs, retailers across the land employ the time-honored approach of designating a portion of checkout lines as "express" lines.¹

Hundreds of hours of ethnographic research and thousands of survey respondents tell us that a particular shopping experience will move them when a guaranteed lowest price will not. This particular experience must offer something more than good value. It must appeal to a part of the consumer that mere utilitarian needs fail to capture. While traditional marketing methods stress features, experience marketing emphasizes emotion. Of course, pure emotion is not sufficient to win over the hearts and minds of consumers. Creating a winning experience means raising both utility and emotion, as Figure 1 illustrates.

Exactly how to achieve both high utility and high emotion is a challenge, which explains why most books extolling the virtues of experience fail to detail the steps necessary to create experience. Indeed, most will endeavor to side-step, if not completely overlook, even this simple treatment of experience through utility and emotion.

An important point not to miss when considering how to create the right experience is that utility also plays a part. Creating emotion with nothing substantial to hang it on can work, just as offering exceedingly dull but high utility can work, it just does not deliver the one-two punch that a high utility-high emotion experience offers.² We examine the utility-emotion scorecard of different retail channels. An interesting finding for wellness shopping is that channel categories as a whole tend to do well either in terms of emotional factors or in terms of utilitarian factors, but not necessarily both. Even though specific stores might score better than others on both dimensions, we do not see the channel categories performing this way.

Shoppers experience shopping whether or not we do anything special. Creating a wellness shopping experience that draws shoppers from other retailers to your door, however, is not easy. We have learned enough about wellness consumers to know they seek authentic experiences that enhance their knowledge and contribute to their ability to create a lifestyle out of a diversity of products and services. By raising both emotion and utility, you create a relevant experience that becomes an integral part of how today's consumers are defining themsleves in the wellness arena.

¹Is this as good as it gets? Could retailers extend the express idea to entire areas within their store? Just as convenience stores have invaded the territory traditionally held by inconvenience stores, these full-service stores' owners might profitably question convenience stores' exclusive claim to the time-challenged consumer.

²The hot air that fills celebrity endorsement sails is a good example of how well emotion sells. The problem, of course, is the fickle nature of emotion-driven consumers. An experience that provides utility probably stands a better chance of surviving dips in emotion than one devoid of utility.

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