Cruising, Searching and Selecting

Herb Sorensen of TNS takes a scientific look at shopper behavior in their habitat: Deconstructing the Shopping Trip (so far!). Another excellent read.

He also reminded me of work at Wharton about how people efficiently (or not) shop retail spaces. I wrote about this in 2006. Their paper, The 'Traveling Salesman' Goes Shopping: The Efficiency of Purchasing Patterns in the Grocery Store by Peter Fader, Bradlow and Hui where they show that 'cruising' comprises about 60% of a shoppers behavior, as opposed to the other 40% comprised of 'search and select'. This was the first careful numeric and statistical analysis of tracks of grocery store behavior. Leads to lots of thoughts about what really occurs when an impulse buy is made. We need more of this kind of analysis in the lab and in real environments. Above and to the right a single shopper track from a large database.