The typical UK household spends £4,726 per year in the supermarkets.
But why do we spend so much in supermarket stores?
Well, have you ever just nipped in for some milk and bread and left with much more?
If you have, you aren’t on your own and you aren’t fully to blame.
It’s all down to the sneaky psychological tactics which are designed to influence you
to spend more money and make lots of impulse purchases during your visit to the supermarket.
It all starts before you even enter the supermarket when you collect your shopping trolley, which is often much bigger than it needs to be,
which influences you as a customer to think you haven’t spent as much as you really have.
When you enter the supermarket, the layout is then designed to increase the
chances of you having to walk around the entire store. For example, everyday items such as milk, bread,
and eggs are commonly separated and placed towards the back of the store meaning you pass 100s of
additional products and offers along the way, which increases the chances of you making impulse purchases.
Imagine if the most popular items were at the front of the store next to the tills,
you’d just walk in pick them up and pay, which wouldn’t be good for the
supermarket’s sales revenue and profitability. Put simply, the longer you are in store,
the more money you are likely to spend. Talking about the layout of a typical
supermarket, what’s one of the first things you see when you enter?
It’s often fresh fruit and vegetables, which provides you with an emotional response and
a subconscious sense of health and feeling good. Just imagine if the first thing you came across in
the supermarket was an aisle full of toilet paper, it would be very bland and believe it or not,
it would influence your mindset negatively. It’s been proven that happy customers tend
to spend more, so it’s crucial to get you feeling good from the start.
With this in mind, music is also used to influence your mood and the rate in which you shop.
During peak hours, supermarkets are likely to play faster paced music which in turn gets
you to shop faster and helps supermarkets to manage the flow of customers in store.
But in off peak times, this all changes as supermarkets play music with a much slower tempo,
influencing you to shop at a much slower and relaxed pace with the aim of keeping you in
store longer, which often results in you spending more money as you suffer from decision fatigue.
After supermarkets have used sound, they try to take advantage of another one of
your senses and this time its smell. Now smell reminds humans of pleasurable
memories and can leave you feeling somewhat nostalgic whilst in store
which encourages you to make even more impulse purchases, and this urge to purchase more
food items than you indented heightens if you go to the supermarket on an empty stomach.
Have you ever noticed that you spend more at the supermarket when you are hungry?
Put it this way, if you can walk past a pack of half price cookies in the bakery when you are
hungry, you are a better person than me. And this is exactly why supermarkets
often offer you free samples whilst you are walking around the store,
to take advantage of your sense of taste, which is a very effective way
to not only stimulate your appetite and remind you of how good certain food and drinks taste
but they can also subconsciously trigger you human instinct to reciprocate generosity as you feel the
need to give something back which is often in the form of buying more items whilst in store.
Supermarkets also want you to walk up and down each and every aisle which is why they have
very formal structures encouraging you to walk a certain route around the supermarket, the journey
you take around a supermarket is not by chance and is likely to be very similar every time you shop.
And if this wasn’t enough to convince you to browse each aisle, popular products such as
tea and coffee are typically placed in the centre of an aisle rather than at the end, meaning you
have to walk down the aisle and pass lots of other products and promotions along the way.
And It’s these promotions which are surrounded by bright colours to gain your attention,
that are likely to influence you to make an impulse purchase due to the fear of missing out
as they come in the form of discounts or special offers such as buy one get
one free and last for a limited time only. You could look at supermarket aisles as being
psychological funnels and it all starts with the plinth ends which are full of special offers and
can often get customers to stop in their tracks. This is prime space in a supermarket,
even if you don’t walk down each aisle you are likely to pass the offers on the plinth ends,
which often results in you acting on impulse and adding additional products into your shopping
trolleys they you didn’t intend on purchasing. This tactic is so effective that brands actually
pay to have their products featured on these end of aisle displays.
Alongside promotions, supermarkets often use psychological pricing strategies
which are extremely effective at making you feel that products are cheaper than they appear.
For example, a product might be priced at £4.95 instead of £5 and because we
are trained to read from left to right, we naturally associate the product with £4 rather
than £5 and are more likely to purchase item. Now there’s a saying in business, eye level is
buy level and what you will notice is the products which supermarkets want you to buy i.e. the ones
with the highest profit margins are likely to be around the centre of the shelf at eye level.
And this is no different for children’s products which are placed at a much lower
height to attract the attention of little ones who can ask their adults over and over
again for that sugary cereal, magazine, or toy. Supermarkets have evolved extensively over the
years, and one of the most notable changes relates to the size of the typical supermarket store.
They are often much bigger in size, with the aim of making you feel more comfortable
and relaxed in store which has been proven to results in you browsing for longer.
This combined with a much wider range of products such as household goods, clothing, and electronics
means you are more likely to come across an item that you might want to buy
as supermarket stores tend to have something for everybody. The convenience of everything being
under one roof plays a major role and influences the buyer behaviour of many
customers who visit supermarkets. And finally, after all that,
we get to the checkouts and what we do we find, even more special offers
and products which we might buy on impulse such as chewing gum, batteries, and chocolate.
So that’s it, a quick fire look at the strategies that
supermarkets use to get you to spend more money. If you’ve found the video useful, remember to hit
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