Me, shopping

Last Sunday night my fiancée Kate and I got a babysitter and went to Park City to cash in our Christmas gift cards. I don’t usually shop retail (especially for clothes), but the after-holiday specials cut out most of the markup.

On our way into the mall we got coffees at Starbucks. BTW I usually hate shopping. But shopping + caffeine was actually exhilarating and productive.

My mind raced the whole time. I pounded out the ideas on my BlackBerry and, after decoding them later on, I had tons of ideas for new blog posts!

They all have to do with the tricks retail stores use to get you to spend more. The first realization came as we visited Forever 21.

Create Value through Scarcity

Fendi Store - Nothing's in There?

When you go into a high-end specialty store (like Fendi or Gucci) you never see tons of clothes. All of the products are spaced out and sparse. It feels almost…empty.

Forever 21 Store - Packed with Goods

Then go into Forever 21. It’s packed to the gills with merchandise. There’s something for every style, trend, and fashion. And there’s a much longer line at the checkout register.

Which wins?

Well both, but for different reasons.

You expect to see quality stuff when you shop at Gucci and Fendi. And they lay out the store so sparingly to give you the (subconscious?) impression that there is a limited supply of product.

It’s Econ 101 to know that as supply decreases the value per item increases. Pre-entrance branding has already primed to expect product quality. You’ll be a little more willing to shell out $200 for those shoes when you only see 3 pairs in the whole store.

Forever 21 has no international branding to support a perceived-value game like the big boys. So they slash the per-item margin and load the store up with tons of clothes. More choices at less cost means that you have a great chance of finding at least one thing that suits you.

They make their money when a ton of people buy one or two things. It doesn’t matter that you only spend $20 (rather than $200) because 1 in 3 people that walk in will do the same. At Fendi it might be 1 in 10. Or 1 in 20.

The Difference

Forever 21 gives you the choice to find what you want, and Fendi says “Here’s what we have, and there’s not much to go around, so it’s worth paying a premium for.”

All of this, of course, is communicated subconsciously by the store layout.

Manipulations of your decision making process make it easier to part with your money. And there are tons more subtle ways retail stores do it.

Next week we’ll cover the sensory tricks stores use to lull you into a highly-suggestible state. And I’ll share my experience with being ‘brainwashed’ at the Gap.

As most of you know I’m a huge fan of TED talks. They’ll change your life.

Susan Blackmore’s presentation on memes and temes struck me to the core and altered my perception of reality and marketing.

She talks about memes and how they influence the world around us. In the most basic sense, memes are units of culture. Earrings, computer monitors, cars, any idea that is passed along and copied is a meme.

You might have heard the term in relation to internet memes (see Kanye West and the Star Wars Kid). People take the central idea and share it all over the place.

Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene as a way to explain the spread of ideas and culture. He observed that these memes work just like genes in their “desire” to be multiplied.

So your need to tell your best friend about the coolest new website works just like your sex drive. Genes make their hosts want to copy them and memes make their hosts want to share them. Human minds are prime meme-replicators because we have the brain capacity to understand and communicate abstract ideas.

Memes and Marketing

Now I’m not doing Blackmore or Dawkins any justice in my explanations. But if you think of brands, products, and brand narratives as independent entities that want to be spread and want to go viral you can come to some pretty exciting conclusions.

A great idea influences the behavior of its host to share it. It has agency. It wants to get out and tell the world.

If your product sucks nobody shares it, obviously. But maybe it’s because your meme is evolutionarily deficient. If your product/story/mission/meme is worthy, people actively try to spread it. Hugh Maccleod calls this the social object. Seth calls it the purple cow. Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell call it fostering word-of-mouth marketing.

They all reflect the same idea: your meme needs to be good enough to thrive in the cutthroat world of ideas. But once it is, it makes people share it.

Is yours?

What’s the best-selling, most-wished-for, most-gifted item on Amazon?

It’s gotta be one of the Twilight books. Or an iPod. Or maybe this year’s Cabbage Patch Kid / Tickle Me Elmo / Furby – the Zhu Zhu Pet.

Nope.

It’s Amazon’s own black-and-white electronic reading device: Kindle.

The Kindle currently sells for $260, which is a lot considering that for $40 more you can get 1 of 17 fully-functional netbooks at another part of the store.

So how in the world does this happen? How can they outsell every single other product (all 51,255,815 of them) with a $260 glorified paperback?

Here’s how:

Genius use of prime real estate

Amazon has had the Kindle front and center on their homepage for months. At about 70 million monthly unique visitors, that’s a lot of eyeballs seeing that shiny new product. With that level of exposure the word can travel pretty quickly.

Amazon knew that the product they highlight at the top of the homepage will automatically jump in sales. They benefit a ton from putting the Kindle there for a couple reasons:

• Bigger profits: they make it and sell it
• High price point: probably means high margin and you’ll reach influencers first
• Recurring revenue streams: you need to continuously buy books to use it

This also makes it easy for curious people to find what they’re looking for. If you know that Amazon sells the Kindle and you go to amazon.com, you see the Kindle immediately.

A book for a landing page

The Kindle product page is long. Really long. There’s a ton of text, video and images to show off the product and answer of the customers’ questions.

Since they obviously don’t have a sales staff selling these things they turn the product page into the salesman. You see a list of all the features and benefits, tons of product shots, and videos of the Kindle in use.

Throw in stock photos depicting your target market (educated middle-class females) and you’re golden.

Great brand strategy

Amazon’s in a unique position because they’re a mega-powerful company that’s made a name selling other people’s things.

The Kindle is their pride and joy and they can devote a lot of time an energy into making it succeed. This gives them a nimble advantage over similar products from big electronics manufacturers, like Sony and their Reader which is lost in the fray of big-screen TV’s and Blu-Ray players.

Amazon poured its core brand into the Kindle: fast, easy and full of everything.

So the next time you launch a product, take a page from an Amazon’s (e-)book and go all out.

I’ve noticed that you can think about competition one of two ways.

One group of people focuses their energy on besting the other competitors. The other obsessively improves their own behavior.

Here’s an example of each type:

Beat Everyone Else

Know what they’re doing at all times, then do one better.

When your competition does a promotion, you do one that’s 5% better. When they run attack ads, run attack ads right back. Monitor their every move to beat them at their own game.

If you’re better than all of your competitors then, by default, you’re the best.

Here’s an example:

Verizon isn’t communicating the intrinsic value of their service, just saying that it’s better than AT&T’s.

Beat Yourself

Improve until you can’t anymore.

You know how to do better. Focus your time on making that happen. Block out external influences.

Once you can perform at your best, ‘winning’ (as in beating an opponent) follows.

Now watch Kobe talk about competition:

Getting “better permanently” means perfecting yourself. He doesn’t mention the competition once. It’s all about performing at the top of his game.

Which are you?

The more personal the interaction, the better the outcome. Right?

New research by Penn State prof Jim Jansen points out that’s not always the case. He compiled data from millions of search queries and ecommerce transactions and came to some surprising conclusions about personalization on the internet.

It’s better to personalize based on the task, rather than the person. As Jansen puts it:

[Personalization] is just so hard to do. You know, Gord is different than Jim, and Gord today is different than Gord was five years ago. Personalizing at the individual level is just very difficult and may not even be a fruitful area to pursue.

As designers and internet marketers we’ve already drank this Kool-Aid.

I don’t care about the age or gender or soft-drink preference of someone who comes to webpagefx.com on the keyword [seo pricing]. They’re looking for information about this topic and expect it to be given to them.

It does not matter that our website is not their favorite color. That’s personal, yet unrelated to the goal at hand. And not worth the time to worry about.

So resist the urge to over-personalize. The internet is still a task-focused environment.

Focus on the tasks, not whims of the individual user.

Hat tip: Search Engine Land

You really don’t need an army of people to test your new design.

Just 5 people from your target audience will do.

Based on research from usability prophet Jakob Nielsen, the law of diminishing returns applies to usability testing.

In other words, more users equals more insights up to a point. That point, it turns out, is 5 people.

When you test 1 person you go from identifying 0% of the problems to identifying about 30%. The 2^nd user identifies some of the same problems as the first user, along with a bunch of new ones. This pattern holds until you test your 5^th person, at which point they identify more known problems than new ones and the effectiveness plummets.

So rather than test one design with 15 people, do 3 rounds of testing with 5 people each.

Then you can find most of your problems, fix them, and test for new problems in your optimized design twice. You’ll get much better results using an iterative approach than a blitz of 15 users all at once.

This method of optimization is people-centric and qualitative. You’ll observe user behavior and then act on it.

If you want quantitative and number-focused testing that focuses on your content rather than your users, a website conversion analysis would better suit you.