ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, February 12, 1997 TAG: 9702120050
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALMENA HUGHES FOOD EDITOR
The woman, who asked that her name not be used, looked at the contents of her four plastic bags, shook her head and chuckled. She had entered the store intending to buy just a few necessary items.
But need had little to do with the two bags of chips, the package of cookies and the tabloid newspaper she'd purchased along with the eggs, flour and milk.
As subtly and surely as a skillful lover, marketing strategies had induced her to buy more than she'd planned. Yet, as any Don Juan knows, seduction - even of the supermarket kind - takes the cooperation of two.
"It looked good. I wanted it, so I bought it," the woman said. "I always buy more than I planned to. The only way I won't do it is to stay out of supermarkets."
That, of course, is not a practical option for most people.
Besides, "There's really not much retailers can do to make you buy. There's very little subterfuge," said Duncan Herrington, a Radford University assistant professor of marketing.
Yet Herrington, an expert in consumer behavior who has worked in the marketing field for 17 years, has found that few things about a store's atmosphere are accidental.
"Usually, the music, colors, lighting and even odors of a retail environment are carefully calculated to induce consumers to buy, buy, buy," he said.
A recent stroll with him through Kroger at Tanglewood Mall and Harris Teeter at Towers Shopping Center showed plenty of supermarket seduction under way.
"The ultimate goal is to create a pleasant atmosphere where you'll want to stay and continue to shop," said Kroger public relations man Archie Fralin.
To achieve this, all of the shopper's senses are brought into play.
At both Kroger and Harris Teeter, the ambience was underscored by soft strains of generic easy-listening music with a nice, unhurried tempo, good for aisle-browsing and shopping-cart pushing.
Was it our imagination, or was the volume of the music a little louder in the Kroger deli and other high impulse-buying departments?
"Just a quirk of an old speaker system," Fralin assured.
In the center of one of Kroger's spacious aisles sat a table covered with a red cloth. Plump brown loaves of homemade-looking bread beckoned shoppers to pick them up, feel their freshness, and, as long as they were holding them, put them in their shopping carts - which, incidentally, also are scrupulously maintained to roll smoothly and quietly as part of the overall pleasant atmosphere, Fralin said.
Red, as in the table cover or many of the signs and display racks throughout both stores, draws attention, Herrington said.
"It stimulates the appetite. It excites," he said. "Red has more impact than cool colors, except in the produce department, which has a whole different color scheme."
Indeed, both stores' produce, dairy and frozen food departments emphasized blues and greens, with Harris Teeter's extending to the carpeting and to the frosty-looking blue and white signs above the frozen food aisles.
Fralin said Kroger's spacious, uncluttered aisles help create an impression of cleanliness that demographic samplings have found is very important to food shoppers.
As for the piled-high merchandise, consumers have been found to like having a quantity from which to choose, unless they think the product is plentiful because people don't like it - in which case displaying just a few of the item might be better, Herrington said.
Large quantities of a product also denote a special buy or good value, which is a good impulse-buying incentive, Fralin added.
Whatever the perspective on quantity, what you see is what you're likely to buy, so a great deal of care is given to the lighting, the men said.
"At one time, stores were brightly lit. But now, we keep it a little dimmer throughout, with different levels of lighting on different displays," Fralin said.
Natural-looking lighting, even if created with specially filtered fluorescents, is preferred, he said.
For a product to really be seen, it needs to be at eye level and in the center of the shelf, a location often occupied in both stores by their private brands.
"The market nets about 2 percent, pretax," Herrington said. "They stand to gain the most if they make their products visible and remind people that they're there."
The store-brand products generally were shown next to national competitors' with emphasis on the store brand's savings. Often products were grouped together so the purchase of one - such as a box of spaghetti - prompted the purchase of several others items, such as tomato sauce, parmesan cheese and garlic bread.
In the cereal aisles, the focus shifted slightly, placing sugary, kid-appealing packages at the lower levels and health-and diet-conscious adult grabbers on the upper shelves.
If seeing didn't persuade you to buy a product, the strategy was that perhaps smelling, or even sampling, would.
As the morning wore on, a Kroger employee set out pots of steaming hot Millstone coffee for free, help-yourself sampling.
The Cinnabon roll shop at the store's entrance began emitting enticing aromas. Herrington thinks men in particular are physiologically responsive to the scent of cinnamon buns.
Other smells - fresh baked goods, fresh flowers, even fresh fish - accumulated within the stores as noon approached, probably reaching their highest intensity between the peak shopping hours of 3 and 8 p.m., Fralin said.
Was the seduction working on this particular day?
Yes, a little, for Kroger shopper Debbie Hutton and her 2-year-old son, Taylor, who had unplanned packages of peanut butter crackers and cookies in the cart.
"It depends on my budget," Hutton said. When she succumbs to supermarket seduction, it's usually snacks and especially chips, she said.
No, for Harris-Teeter shopper Emmett Lambert, who bought only the baby diapers he'd come for. He said that he's not easily supermarket-seduced.
"I keep a mental list of what I need, and if I find a good sale on something I use anyway, like bread or meat, I might buy it and freeze it for later," he said.
Even Herrington, who has been interested in supermarket marketing since the early 1980s when he worked at Jitney Jungle supermarkets during his college days at Mississippi State University, sometimes falls under the supermarkets' sweet sway.
He laughed that his wife, Karen, probably spends three hours in the store buying food for him and their children, Shelley, 5, and John, 2, while it takes him only about 30 minutes to shop for groceries.
Studies have found that the longer consumers stay in the store, the more they're likely to buy. So, by getting out sooner, Herrington figures he saves at least enough to pay for the unplanned loaf of fresh-baked bread or bag of gourmet coffee that occasionally makes its way into his cart.
LENGTH: Long : 131 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ROGER HART/Staff. 1. The National Enquirer proved tooby CNBtempting to Marci Podlecki of Roanoke, who was shopping at the
Tanglewood Kroger. 2. Duncan Herrington, a Radford University
marketing professor, shows how children's cereals are stocked on
lower shelves - at a kid's-eye-view - at the Tower's Harris-Teeter
store. color.