Marketing aspects of the grocery hunt

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Suddenly you can’t find your favoured brand of breakfast muesli? Of course not; it’s deliberately been moved to confuse you. The conventional wisdom used by the non-thinkers that run supermarkets is that moving products around to confuse customers has a tendency to increase sales.

Thus it is that eventually I found cling film with the pet food this week; kitchen towels in the “seasonal” aisle and chilled puff pastry next to the butter. Where else?

The trouble with the way this rule has evolved is that there is no effective control group. It is impossible to have two stores on the same site at the same time, one relocating goods, the other not, to give any true comparison.

So sales go up on the confusingly located product, or the one that took its place – would they have done so anyway? There is no way of knowing. And what about related products sales; how have they been affected? Brainless in marketing has no idea because what constitutes a related product is peculiar to each shopper.

This received dogma, this unexamined conformance to an out-of-date rule ignores some basic commonsense contrary indicators:
1) If this rule is so great at increasing sales, why are all the soup tins together? Why not put some with the cereals, some with the cakes and some with the soap powders? Why not simply throw all the products onto the shelves in a totally random and haphazard manner? That would really bump up the volumes – not.
2) Familiarity increases spending. I personally spend more in stores where I feel more comfortable and less threatened by the child-level psychology in use and for which, I suppose, the retailer pays handsomely.
3) Confused customers become frustrated customers. They will take out their aggression on your staff, leading to higher staff turnover. Confused customers will also give up the hunt, even abandoning goods they have already put into the trolley, and go elsewhere. Total sales go down.

Sometimes stuff has to be moved around for good reasons of space and changes in product mix. We know that. In which case:
1) Provided handy, current, printed store guides at the entrances, so that we can still find stuff;
2) Make the aisle signs reflect what is on the shelves – or simply take them down;
3) Place a bright, eye-catching (you know how to do that) re-direct label on the shelf-edge at the old location, directing us to the new location.

Isn’t it about time our retailers stopped treating us – their customers – as dim-witted cattle and accorded us a little respect?

It would certainly improve their image among the general population.

What would that do for sales?