by Mimi Nicklin (@MimiNicklin) I am at the office. I know that I drove here (because it would have been impossible to walk!) but the truth is, I cannot remember the drive at all. An entire forty minute journey on auto drive. A scarily absent-minded, habitual, subconscious set of decisions that took me from A to B and achieved my set goal successfully, albeit without much conscious decision making. Not unlike the standard trip to the grocery store.
Auto drive. We shop in it and we buy with it. In fact we are so auto driven that up to 75% of the time people are so focused on their current outcome, versus the current reality, they totally miss changes or new news that is happening around them. Even when there are massive, gorilla like changes in the room, store or shopping environment shoppers often carry on without interruption. Take a look at this video:
Did you see the massive gorilla that walked across the screen or were you so focused on the task at hand that you missed it entirely? This is famously known as the “Invisible Gorilla Test” and it proved that our minds don’t work the way we think they do. When asked about the experiment, almost everyone has the answer “yes, of course I would see a massive gorilla walking across my screen” but the results are vastly different. How could something so obvious go completely unnoticed? When this experiment was carried out at Harvard University several years ago, over 50% of people who watched the video missed the gorilla. It was as though the gorilla was invisible.
The relevance? We think we see ourselves and the world as they really are, but we’re actually missing a whole lot as we auto drive and auto perceive our surroundings based on our focus at hand.We think shoppers are seeing our in store messaging, and indeed often they do physically see it, but are they actually deciphering it and seeing it as a valid input into their current shopping mission?
We spend many hours creating compelling POS that ticks all the rationale boxes but it is not having as much impact as we hope. The ‘failed’ reality sits in a phenomenon called ‘inattentional blindness’ and means that most people actually only take in about 1% of all the stimulus they see. Attention is a limited and valuable resource and the brain prioritizes – as marketers we are generally are not aware just how limited it is.
Some recent research by Accenture in the USA builds on this ‘auto shop’ behaviour by looking at gondola end shoppers. 
Whilst the shoppers knew (they have been trained over many years!) to shop the gondola ends (a set of island shelves in a self-service shop: used for displaying goods) for sales promotions and deals, they are not always consciously shopping the offer that’s there. The Accenture research filmed shoppers buying from a gondola end that had a “Buy One Get One Free” offer. Approximately 80% of those shoppers walked away with only one product! They approached, they shopped, they may have even looked at the headline offer but they grabbed on auto and walked away with the next purchase already in mind.
So is all lost? Absolutely not. Whilst we may over-estimate shoppers capacity to pay attention, there is still opportunity to manipulate the shopper to some extent! If we know it is difficult to capture the attention of someone who is focused on a very fixed shopper task at hand, what might be the best solution to interrupt this behaviour?
My opinion is that its not always the best solution to simply do something very different or unexpected. The established idea of disruption and ‘stand out’ may in the retail space not always be in our favour. When people are focused on a particular shopping goal, being different may actually make it less likely that you are noticed as shoppers are functionally blind to anything not directly related to their task. That’s why they might ignore your advertising or brand new packaging – its just not seen as ‘relevant right now’ making it just too much of an effort to focus on. There are reasons Coca-Cola, Heinz and Nivea haven’t messed with their packaging over their decades of brand life! These brands know that by keeping things consistent, recognized and relevant, the auto drive behaviour takes shoppers straight to them – habitually and with ease.
When the shopper is not in browse mode (i.e. not shopping for new clothes, new furniture, a new TV), and especially in the low engagement categories (think washing up liquid, kitchen roll) the best chance of getting noticed is to signal your relevance to their current goal. Leveraging category standard packaging formats and expected colours or visual cues which have more chance of being noticed than ‘new and different’, but unfamiliar, designs might be the simple solution. The difficulty of course is to continue to do this in a fresh and engaging way that communicates the shopper hook in an instant. No easy feat.
So, if I am correct in my belief that our shoppers are missing many of the million dollar changes to our brands at the point of purchase, have we as marketers all been as ‘asleep as the wheel’ as I was on my morning drive in? Have we missed the obvious and over complicated the shopping environment? And if so, am I arguing less creativity and innovation versus more?
Absolutely not and to borrow a phrase from Charlie Hiscocks at SAB, the answer from my POV lies in “fresh consistency.” Freshly representing those consistent cues that our ‘inattentionally blind’ shoppers want and need in a way that reminds them why they want to buy your product and not the one on the shelf below. Perhaps its time to wake up and shake up our approach, and start proving that we marketers are much wider awake to reality than our shoppers are!
Mimi Nicklin (@MimiNicklin) followed her passion and experience in the consumer, retail and shopper space from regional roles in Europe and Asia, to South African shores in 2010. Having led global brands through the line for Procter & Gamble, and two of London and Hong Kong’s top agencies, her background gives her an international perspective to add to her depth of SA understanding. She serves as strategic director and a partner at 34 Group. Mimi contributes the monthly “The Sell” column concerning shopper marketing to MarkLives.