You have the ideal placement in store. Your message has been tweaked just right. Your packaging pops. And that interactive display is going to put your product over the top. It’s holiday shopping season, and millions of shoppers are going to see and scoop up your product. But have you thought about everyone else? You know, your competitors sprinkled down the same aisle. Or even those far-afield products on other shelves across the store.
Hope so. Because their success has a direct impact on yours.
Regardless of what they may say, shoppers have more than a functional or transactional experience with individual shelves and aisles. They experience emotional highs and lows throughout the entire shopping experience. And as we track this emotional journey - independently and for our clients - we continue to find a very intriguing correlation.
Emotional engagement with each shelf, each aisle, has an impact on a shopper’s emotional engagement with other shelves and aisles in the store. And that emotional engagement has a high correlation with sales. Higher emotional engagement leads to greater sales, while lower emotional engagement leads to lower sales. The chart below shows some of our findings.
Emotional engagement can be impacted in many ways, from packaging, deals and end caps to sounds, smells and lighting.
As brick and mortar stores face mounting pressure from online retail, this is important for retailers and brands to consider. It’s not about individual products or small experiences. Success depends upon the totality of the experience. Retailers and brands alike must hold each other accountable. And those that get it, who fully understand how their shoppers emotionally engage, are best positioned to capitalize - during the holiday season and beyond.
