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12.10.2008
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A Brand Called Hope
Reimagining Consumer Culture
By Harvey Hartman
A valuable resource for anyone in the food industry! A Brand Called Hope delivers the knowledge, cultural models and insight into consumer behavior you need to reimagine brands, categories, products and experiences.
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For more Hartman Group articles on PARENTING, click here...
05.16.2007 Alpha Moms: Hype or Opportunity?
04.04.2007 The Next Generation of Wellness Consumers
11.08.2007 Marketing to Unique Households
05.11.2006 Marketing to Today's Mom
04.05.2006 Brand Trust and Children's Wellness
02.09.2006 At Home with the American Consumer
10.13.2005 (Food) Pyramid Schemes & the Myth of Following Nutritional Guidelines
04.14.2005 Emerging Trends in Parenting the Healthy Eater
11.11.2004 What's for Dinner?: Understanding Meal Fragmentation as a Cultural Phenomenon
09.23.2004 Asian Dinner Mixes & the Family Meal: Evolving Food Culture
10.25.2002 Children's Wellness: Making Decisions & Negotiating
10.18.2002 Children's Wellness: Who's Leading the Charge?
04.15.2002 Embracing a Wellness Lifestyle Market Opportunity
04.15.2001 Opportunities in Children's Wellness
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StumbleUponCaution: Children at Play
Sometimes common sense is all wrong.
If you’ve strayed into retail or marketing waters in the past ten or so years, you’ve no doubt heard about the critical importance of experience within the retail setting. “If you make the experience more engaging, more immersive, more entertaining,” the thinking goes, “shoppers will be more interested, will likely stick around longer and, hence, leave with fuller baskets.” Those who provide the proper mix of engaging entertainment and relevant merchandising sets will win the big game. And as an archetype, branders and marketers typically point to the success of the Apple retail stores as a benchmark to which all others should be compared.
What if, however, experience is really a complex, multidimensional notion (e.g., taste) that cannot be easily assuaged with a one-size-fits-all approach (i.e., salt)? Perhaps people vary widely in terms of the amount or type of experiences they desire. Moreover, what if there were predictable variations in response to retail experiences based on age? Perhaps senior citizens desire very different experiences than our millennial shoppers.
Finally, what if, say for certain demographics (e.g., young children), the ideal experience (from a profit standpoint) might be no experience at all? Experiences, after all, are not a one size fits all proposition. They come in all shapes, sizes, flavors, distinctions and levels of interactivity and engagement. They vary by individual and occasion. This is why, sometimes, the perfect experience for an individual consumer may be an experience that is perceived to be rather mundane when compared with higher order experiential shopping environments. Think shopping for books where you want a quiet nook to peruse the latest best-seller vs. the visual allure, excitement and coolness of the aforementioned Apple store.
* * *
If you hang out with little kids for any amount of time, you’ll quickly realize that they are always playing. Kids play with each other, kids play with toys and games, kids play house, kids play school, kids play mommy and daddy, and so forth. Not surprisingly, kids will often refashion their play to match the context and confines of the given situation.
Left to their own accord and free from distraction, most kids will play with their toys, household objects, their pets or anything else nearby. Place them in school and they will — with varying degrees of cooperation — “play” the role of student. But if you place them in a big box retailer on a routine household shopping trip — with no access to a kids' playland, television sets or other diversions — they begin emulating their parents by “playing” shopper, maniacally grabbing items at every turn and petitioning mom or dad for inclusion in the family cart.
Initially, the above insight may strike many as simplistic or even common sense, but when we combine this observation with relevant cultural insights, the implications are profound, if not staggering.
We Americans have forever bristled at arbitrary, capricious authority. That’s what the Boston Tea Party was all about after all. Our little experiment in democracy was in fact a direct result of our disdain for the royal monarchies of Europe that governed by something called divine right. So, it should come as little surprise that we parents loathe to invoke those four words we vowed we would never repeat once we got the chance to be parents — “Because I said so.”
Don’t get us wrong, we put this maxim into practice all the time — usually when forced — it’s just that we don’t like or prefer to do so. Doing so repeatedly leaves a bitter taste in our mouth, as if we are shirking on our parental responsibilities. That’s why when you watch a young kid start to pour his hot chocolate on the ground at Starbucks, what follows is (usually) not a slap to the face or a stern “don’t do that” but, instead, an extended monologue on the nature of free-will, choice and consequences and so forth. In this, modern parenting practices stressing choice over ultimatum could not be a more willing ally in the effort to train our youth to be successful consumers.
Bringing the discussion back into the retail arenas we care about, the above observation is critical because if you follow a child playing “shopper” throughout a big box retailer — a child who is relentlessly offering up repeated selections for the family cart — you find that mom or dad actually relents to the child’s suggestions with surprising ease. This isn’t so much because parents are weak or lack backbone as it is they are trying to get on with the task at hand. And quite honestly, there are only so many logical arguments to be made about what are often irrational, impulse purchases to begin with.
So, when little Kieran asks for Johnson & Johnson SpongeBob SquarePants Band-Aids, which probably offer greater utility to the household than that holiday-themed doormat we hadn’t planned on purchasing anyway, what are we really going to say?
In the end, what we find are a lot of bored children accompanying mom or dad on routine shopping trips through an 80,000 square foot “big box” retailer. Lacking access to anything more interesting or entertaining along the way, children revert to “playing” the role of shopper, engaging in constant dialogue with mom or dad as to additional items to be allowed into the family cart. Moreover, there are important cultural pressures for mom or dad to not simply say “no”— at least not most of the time.
In the marketing and retail arenas we travel in which forever seek to identify and maximize marketplace opportunities, we could not imagine a more idealized scenario.
* * *
Bored Children: Your Biggest Untapped Asset
The single most important strategy to assist your junior shoppers consists of removing all obstacles and distractions which might interrupt their play. As we all know, kids have remarkably short attention spans, so it only follows that the slightest distractions can stall their emulative shopping behavior. So as counterintuitive as this may sound, the last thing a retailer would want to do is offer entertaining, compelling experiences designed to distract their young shoppers. This means no play equipment, no video monitors featuring cartoons or video games, no arcades, etc. Remember, your goal is to keep them shopping, not entertain them.
At the same time, you should focus on planogram strategies which seek to maximize the amount of smaller, colorful and/or licensed products merchandised within easy reach of short people with little hands. The above mentioned SpongeBob Band-Aids strategically located on bottom shelves of track-facing end-caps are a hallmark example. Seasonal tie-ins with major holidays are a likewise a no-brainer here, as well-nigh every holiday features rituals and caricatures which resonate strongly with our little ones (Easter, Halloween, Valentine's Day, etc.).
Note here that we are by no means suggesting that experience has no place within a big box retailer. Rather we are merely suggesting that compelling experiences be properly situated so as to not distract young children — especially young children roaming the perimeter of mass retailers with idle hands to feed!
Use your lemon grass wisely, my friend
Given the rapid proliferation of distinctive retail brands in the late twentieth century, the temptation to want to entertain and engage consumers in retail settings is understandable. Likewise wherever marketers turn, they are bombarded by imperatives to enhance their brand via appeals to less tangible concepts like experience, emotion, engagement and so forth. But while we surely believe these elements are relevant or “have a place” in the current pantheon of business literature, we also believe they should be deployed with prudence and care. Simply tossing a healthy dose of experience or engagement into one’s strategy just because it’s popular is akin to McDonald's deciding to add a few teaspoons of lemon grass to their Big Mac recipe just because it is a trendy ingredient. Not only might you not help the situation but you may make things much, much worse.
© 2010 The Hartman Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
