It’s one of the most common, frustrating, and expensive mysteries of retail. You start carrying a new line of merchandise—products that you’re genuinely excited about, high quality stuff that you can offer at a competitive price—and your customers just don’t care. They walk right by your carefully designed displays, not even slowing down long enough to give them a second glance. They ignore the line completely, yet your competitor is having a hard time keeping the exact same merchandise in stock.
What’s going on here?
This is more than an rhetorical question. Being able to predict how your customers will respond to merchandise ahead of time is one of the Holy Grails of retailing. If you can, with a reasonable degree of confidence, consistently identify the merchandise your customers really want and will actually buy—well, then you’re on the way to being Walmart. You’re on the way to being Target. You’re on the way to being Trader Joe’s, or AutoZone, or Amazon.com.
If you can’t? Well. You know how that story ends.
Solving Retail’s Mysteries: Choosing More Appealing Merchandise
When a particular line of merchandise isn’t moving in your store, the almost universal and immediate reaction retailers have is to try to identify what’s wrong with the stuff you’re selling. Is the quality in alignment with the rest of your offerings? Is there some external reason, not directly connected to your store, that impacts the appeal of the brand? Are your price points completely out of whack?
These are all good questions to ask, and answering them can, sometimes, solve the mystery of why a particular line of merchandise just isn’t moving. However, there are going to be times when there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the merchandise—if you can set aside the fact that your customers just don’t seem to care about it.
It’s at this point that far too many retailers stop their investigation. They throw up their hands, caution their buyers to avoid that manufacturer like the plague in the future, and move on. If it takes deep, deep discounts to get the duds off the sales floor, so be it—that space needs to be freed up for more profitable, appealing merchandise.
That doesn’t really solve the mystery. Worse than that, you have no guarantee that it won’t happen again. You have no methodology or mechanism in place to prevent your buyers from choosing another non-starting line. You could be in the exact same spot six months from now.
Unless, of course, you have a Brand Model. The truth is that your customers don’t really know why they don’t like your great new merchandise—or why they’ll happily buy the exact same item from your competitor but turn their nose up at it when they find it in your store. Up to 90% of all customer purchasing behavior is unconscious. Your customers shop on auto-pilot: they move through your store guided by deeply ingrained habits and steered by collective cultural pressures that they’re not even fully aware of.
When merchandise sells for your competitor, but not for you, it’s because your competitor is presenting that merchandise in a way that is in alignment with the ingrained habits and cultural pressures of their customers. Your customers might have a completely different set of ingrained habits and cultural pressures influencing them. You won’t know, until you do the hard work of delving into your customer’s psyche and discovering what drives them. Armed with this information, you’ll make better buying decisions, and your customers will buy more from you.
Mystery solved!
Want to learn more about how this works? See how all the pieces come together here.