WHY ICECREAMS🍦ARE PLACED NEAR CASHIER COUNTER?

Ever wondered why toffee, chocolates, etc. are usually available near cashier counter? 

It’s not a coincidence! It’s a part of STRATEGY, more precisely, STORE PLANNING! 📋

Store Planning is the process in which the store layout and placement of items are designed or arranged in such a way that it can attract the customers most!

Let’s say you visit a store. You are done with buying bread, curd, eggs, vegetables, etc. You go to cashier counter for the billing 💵 

Suddenly, you see those Snickers, Cornetto, etc. lying around 🤑 Your eyes start beaming even if you didn’t plan to eat. And guess what? You pick that chocolate/ice cream and get it billed too. 

More than half of the stuff gets billed this way. There’s actually a well planned strategy behind such placement! 

Store planners are usually aware of customer’s psychology and decide the layout accordingly. 

For eg: Usually, fresh items are placed on RIGHT. A study says people usually turns right when they enter a store 😱 

Other examples of store house planning are, 

📌 Items on sale are usually placed in less visited corner. They want fresh items to be sold first. 

📌 In malls, usually most attractive items are placed right in front of your eyes.

📌 You visit lenskart, first thing you will see is either Vincent Chase or Jacob Jones. 

📌 Same goes for Puma, addidas, etc. They usually place their high values items in front. 

If I talk about Target, it does an incredible job with its merchandising mix, particularly when it comes to seasonal periods. During the winter months, Target sets up the Wondershop — a section in its stores that’s dedicated to holiday merch.

 

Meanwhile, during the summer months, Target’s merchandising efforts are focused on products that people would need for summer activities, such as going the beach. In the display below, we see Target cleverly cross-merchandising kids’ sunscreen and swim diapers, because the team knows that parents are likely looking to purchase these items together. 

This, all is a part of strategy 🤭 

You now understand why we usually end up buying things which we haven’t even decided to shop for? 

 

Store Planning as an Apparel Retailer 

Store planning can lower down your heads if you’re a fashion retailer. After all, you need to understand your customer psychology upto the level of aesthetics, atmosphere, etc. You know why there’s always a soft music, classical bulb lights, etc. in the fashion retail store? Yes, that’s to keep them in the store for as long as possible in the hope of them making a purchase. 5 tips suggested for a fashion retailer: 

1. Understand your retail space: That means optimizing each corner of the space for apparel, display space for product, shop fittings, fitting rooms, checkout space, etc. 
2. Store layout options: Different types of store layout that can be considered are Grid layout, Free Flow layout, Loop layout, etc. 
3. Deciding the appropriate fixtures: For example, clothing pieces can be quite large in size and accessories can be very small in size. Therefore they are displayed in different ways to optimise the use of space. 
4. Study your customer path through the store: It is important to note that some areas in a store are more important than others as they are more likely to receive higher traffic. That could be because a product is on sale or currently in fashion. You can look at your data to determine both high traffic areas and cold spots. 
5. Know Your Product Assortment: A white collared shirt and a yellow kurti would always in trend but few products will always change with trend. Ex: High waist jeans. Thus, a retailer needs to be up to date with seasonal trends and plan accordingly. 

So next time, you visit some big store, watch out more such examples from nail polish at trends billing counter to choco chips at Jio Mart counter. You’ll correlate more 😍

Shoot in the comments, if you want more such discussions!

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