Humour

Exposing the inner shopper

T A Balasubramanian on the new era of spying for intelligent retailers

“It is the height of the holiday shopping season, and stress levels are high. For many shoppers, time is running short, budgets are tight and tempers are flaring as they embark once again upon this most wonderful time of the retail-spending year. Now, let us say two customers venture out to enter our fabulous shopping mall here. One will closely follow a neat checklist and stay within a carefully planned budget, and the other will amass a wallet full of receipts well beyond her family’s financial means and face a new year filled with a long season of credit card debt. What do you think makes these people different?” says Bazzaro Buyani, CEO of Wonderfully Inventive Marketing Push Systems, a bustling little business venture that is better known by the acronym ‘WIMPS.’

Arranged in front of him, wearing mixed expressions of incomprehension and boredom, are Brando Bhatt, Chief Marketing Manager and Sellina Reddy, Regional Sales Manager.

“Well, Boss,” says Bhatt, sounding puzzled. “Maybe the lady with the checklist has a bad memory, so she writes everything down?”

“Come on, Brando, we have to know our customers better than that.”

“She had a tight budget set by a strict husband,” says Reddy, brightly.

“Ah, well. Maybe both of you are right. But why keep guessing? Now, according to Dr Paul J Albanese, an associate professor of marketing, the answer lies in their contrasting levels of personality development.”

“How does he know any better than you or me?” says Bhatt.

“He is probably the world’s leading authority on the subject. In his book, ‘The Personality Continuum and Consumer Behavior,’ which packs in roughly 25 years of research on the subject, Albanese uses an interdisciplinary approach based on ‘a model of psychoanalysis, which says humans seek satisfaction through their relationships with others.’ But do not ask me what that means, since I am only reading from his book.”

“That seems fairly simple,” smirks Reddy.

“Albanese says that when he was a doctoral student in economics, like any economist, he learned the concept of the ‘rational economic man,’ but, unlike other timid economists, he just did not believe in it. So he spent quite a long time studying psychology trying to demonstrate that it was not a good idea. But he finally gave up and realized that it was, indeed a very good idea, though somewhat limited in scope. What he found was that the rational consumer, from an economic point of view, would have a normal level of personality development. People who are normal make plans, and they follow through on their plans.”

“All right, all right. They are normal. We get the point. Now that is also fairly simple to understand, Boss,” sighs Reddy.

“Now we come to the tricky part,” says Buyani. “Albanese says that the normal shopper is just one of four personality types.”

“And the other three are?”

“Neurotic, compulsive or psychotic,” says Buyani, triumphantly.

“Ah. Definitely more interesting,” murmurs Reddy.

“Unlike the normal shopper, the neurotic one hopes that purchases will satisfy emotional needs beyond the usefulness of the products themselves,” says Buyani. “The neurotic shopper loves shopping, but tends not to build up a lot of debt from her vice. Skilled at their craft, neurotic shoppers may thrive in the hustle and bustle of holiday shopping. About the only problematic aspect is that their shopping is excessive. They do not go out on blind buying binges. They tend to plan. They will look everywhere and they will not buy until they find the perfect flower vase; they exhaust anyone who shops with them.”

“I know the type. My mother is one,” says Reddy. “You know it’s going to be a long day and it will not end until she finds the perfect vase.”

“Compulsive shoppers constantly buy things to relieve anxiety, just like people who binge on alcohol or food or exercise. A true compulsive buyer is driven to engage in repetitive buying binges. What the person is buying is not important; it’s the act of buying and the relationship with the salesperson that gives them relief from the anxiety. Compulsive shoppers often get into major financial problems.”

“Oh, so they are addicted to shopping,” says Bhatt, nodding.

“That’s right, Brando. Which brings me to the last category—the psychotic shoppers, who swing between periods of depression and mania. They may go on a singular, spectacular buying spree during which they simply go nuts. Holiday crowds can bring on a psychotic spree. We are talking about something far more extreme than even compulsive buyers. The consequences are different.”

“That’s all fine, Boss. So what do we, at WIMPS, have to do with this lesson in shopper personalities?” says Reddy.

“I am coming to that, Sellina. Now what we marketing people fail to understand is that not all customers have grown up to reach the ‘normal’ level of personality development. When we do research, there is an implicit assumption that everyone that we observe is normal. So much of the research our could be flawed.”

“So what are we going to do about it?”

“This is where we have to get smarter,” says Buyani, smiling. “Keeping the Albanese model in mind, we need to get closer to customers and actually watch what they do when they shop. What if we could have software that allows shelves to look back at customers?”

“Shelves looking at customers, Boss? Isn’t that bizarre and intrusive?”

“Yes, indeed, it is. Behold, WIMPS introduces the new era of spying for intelligent retailers. But of course, we would not be calling it ‘spying’ or ‘snooping’. We would be merely ‘observing’ with the intention of providing live information to our retailing customers. We have technology that has been deployed to digitally observe—and analyze—how customers interact with digital signage. Peepware is a new customer watching tool that tracks shoppers’ faces as they look at interactive displays. A small camera mounted on a digital display follows a customer’s eyes and examines the characteristics of the face to determine if the shopper looked at the screen and for how long.”

“Wow, Boss. Is this for real?”

“Would I be telling you about an imaginary product? Advanced Peepware could also be used to interpret what they are doing while looking at a shelf loaded with merchandise such as, say breakfast cereals. Are they ignoring the product or are they picking it up, reading the label and then quickly putting it back? Does the timing and eye movement indicate they were repulsed by the sugar content near the bottom or the low fibre count?”

“Boss, if we have neurotic or psychotic customers, won’t this product make them extra jittery? I mean, if they knew they were being watched?”

“We would just tell them that the shop is under surveillance for security reasons. Which it true, anyway. Now, with a large enough budget, the ultimate test for Peepware would be to capture customers as soon as they enter the store, and then have a series of digital cameras to track them as they move. We could track what they are looking at, where they are lingering. We would have a log that contains every important fact about that store visit.”

“So when do we get rolling, Boss?” says Bhatt, impatiently.

“Immediately, Brando,” growls Buyani. “We can’t let all those customers with all those personality quirks go by without finding out exactly what’s going on in their heads. Get your troops out on the field. This is the shopping season and we have no time to lose.”