Retail Therapy

By now, we’re all familiar with some of the subtle techniques and signals that marketers and advertisers use to influence our perceptions and purchasing choices. The objective is to get the consumer to want the product, or to want to buy it right now.

“Early bird” discount prices on tickets for concerts and shows. Airline fares advertised as low as $9.99. Intimating how using this product can keep us, the consumer, healthy and youthful. Giving us a good laugh that not only makes the brand seem cool but that we just have to share with our friends (or on our blogs).

[Elizabeth Thomsen/Flickr]

In this piece from Fast Company, branding guru Martin Lindstrom presents an except from his new book “Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy”. 

It’s a case study of Whole Foods Market, the US natural and organic foods supermarket chain. Lindstrom reveals some of the smart, subtle ways that Whole Foods stage-manages its store environments in order to put customers into the most receptive state of mind to buy.

We learn from Lindstrom:

-  why there’s so much ice everywhere in the supermarket

-  why that apple you had for lunch might hold the secret of eternal youth

<  and why this colour is the absolute perfect shade of yellow for a banana.

You will probably recognize some of these very things from your own local shopping. There’s nothing wrong with what Whole Foods or any other grocer is doing, of course. It happens everywhere, not just at the supermarket: in the fragrance department of any major retail store; in the car showroom; at the Apple Store. Today, retail marketing is as much human psychology—and theatre—as it is commerce.

Read on: How Whole Foods "Primes" You to Shop.