Amazon.com
In an effort to determine why people buy, Paco Underhill and his detailed-oriented band of retail researchers have camped out in stores over the course of 20 years, dedicating their lives to the "science of shopping." Armed with an array of video equipment, store maps, and customer-profile sheets, Underhill and his consulting firm, Envirosell, have observed over 900 aspects of interaction between shopper and store. They've discovered that men who take jeans into fitting rooms are more likely to buy than females (65 percent vs. 25 percent). They've learned how the "butt-brush factor" (bumped from behind, shoppers become irritated and move elsewhere) makes women avoid narrow aisles. They've quantified the importance of shopping baskets; contact between employees and shoppers; the "transition zone" (the area just inside the store's entrance); and "circulation patterns" (how shoppers move throughout a store). And they've explored the relationship between a customer's amenability and profitability, learning how good stores capitalize on a shopper's unspoken inclinations and desires.
Underhill, whose clients include McDonald's, Starbucks, Estée Lauder, and Blockbuster, stocks Why We Buy with a wealth of retail insights, showing how men are beginning to shop like women, and how women have changed the way supermarkets are laid out. He also looks to the future, projecting massive retail opportunities with an aging baby-boom population and predicting how online retailing will affect shopping malls. This lighthearted look at shopping is highly recommended to anyone who buys or sells. --Rob McDonald
Book Description
Is there a method to our madness when it comes to shopping? Hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as "a Sherlock Holmes for retailers," author and research company CEO Paco Underhill answers with a definitive "yes" in this witty, eye-opening report on our ever-evolving consumer culture. Why We Buy is based on hard data gleaned from thousands of hours of field research -- in shopping malls, department stores, and supermarkets across America. With his team of sleuths tracking our every move, from sweater displays at the mall to the beverage cooler at the drugstore, Paco Underhill lays bare the struggle among merchants, marketers, and increasingly knowledgeable consumers for control.
In his quest to discover what makes the contemporary consumer tick, Underhill explains the shopping phenomena that often go unnoticed by retailers and shoppers alike, including:
- How a well-placed shopping basket can turn a small purchase into a significant sale
- What the "butt-brush factor" is and how it can make sales plummet
- How working women have altered the way supermarkets are designed
- How the "boomerang effect" makes product placement ever more challenging
- What kinds of signage and packaging turn browsers into buyers
For those in retailing and marketing, Why We Buy is a remarkably fresh guide, offering creative and insightful tips on how to adapt to the changing customer. For the general public, Why We Buy is a funny and sometimes disconcerting look at our favorite pastime.
Customer Reviews:
Interesting.......2007-09-22
Interesting and insightful with some good tips for people setting up an interactive environment like a shop or a library. It seemed more like an ad for his services and/or his other books but it was a good introduction to the principles behind his business.
Good Retail Intro..........2007-09-16
A good read if you are a marketing or advertising professional who wants to get some insight into the retail psychology and its operations. However, there is no magic formula or scientific methodology given in this book.
Besides making a lot of publicity for his company, Paco Underhill gives a lot of very interesting & practical examples of the consumer's shopping psychology and how it all translates in the retail environment. Paco will tell you why shoppers intuitively steer to the right upon entering a store and how retail managers can use that information to increase their revenues. Overall, not an extraordinary book by any means, but full of interesting examples and stories that could come in handy for any business professional.
Excellent Example of Observational Market Research.......2007-07-21
Not only is this book interesting to the lay reader, it is a must read for retailers, marketers, and market researchers. There are gems within the pages!
Why We Buy is a must buy for retailers........2007-05-24
This book gives you concrete suggestions for increasing sales.
Interesting Findings.......2007-05-14
It was a really easy book to read and it gives you insides on strategies to set a retailing space, having a lot of things in mind, that might seem obvious when you read it, but they really aren't. It was a great; I highly recommend it for people on the retiling industry.
Book Description
The butt of endless jokes and the focus of considerable anguish, shopping offers significant insights into contemporary social relations and their nuances. This book is about shopping for ordinary things. It is also about love and devotion manifest within families and about the nature of sacrificial ritual. A significant contributor to material culture studies, Daniel Miller is an acute observer and an exceptional storyteller. He approaches shopping not as an end in itself but as a means to discover what people's practices, closely observed, reveal about their relationships.
The ethnographic sections of the book are based on a year's study of shopping on a street in North London. This provides the basis for a sensitive description of how shoppers develop and imagine the social relationships most important to them through the medium of selecting goods. Among the characteristics of these shopping expeditions are the concept of "the treat," and the centrality of thrift. Miller juxtaposes on his account of shopping various theories that anthropologists have brought to bear on the ritual of sacrifice, including that of the French philosopher George Bataille. He then integrates these elements to postulate his theory of shopping as sacrifice in terms as original and as utterly engaging as the stories he tells of individual shoppers.
Customer Reviews:
A theory.......2002-02-22
This book contains a personal theory of shopping based on an ethnographic study of household provisioning in a North London neighborhood in the mid-1990s. Miller begins by describing some of the households and some of the results from his interviews on shopping. In the second chapter, he explores the literature on sacrifice, and in the third final chapter, he makes an argument that shopping and sacrifice, if not the same thing, can at least be considered comparable. His reasoning, if I understand it, is that both acts involving giving something of oneself or one's resources for the greater good.
I remain unconvinced, however. I've never given much thought to sacrifice before, but it seems to me that sacrifice involves giving something back to the deities as partial payment for a unearned favor. On the other hand, shopping seems more to be choosing to trade earned resources. For me, the comparison between shopping and sacrifice just doesn't go through, and since two thirds of the book is spent arguing for the comparison, I was a little disappointed.
Some minor quibbles: the book is definitely written from a British point of view, and some terms or expressions used in the book to describe living situations or shops will be unfamiliar to North American readers. Also, Miller puts great emphasis on the fact that most of his shoppers tend to be women, and that shopping in the environment where he did his work is an activity associated with the female gender. He relates this back to his sacrifice theory and also to feminist studies of housewives sacrificing themselves for their families. He gives very brief consideration to the fact that a predominance of female shoppers may be culturally-based, but doesn't seem to consider it seriously. Nevertheless, there are many cultures, particularly in Muslim areas and parts of Asia, where it would be unseemly for a woman to appear in the marketplace, and where men do all of the shopping, even for their families' clothing. Much of Miller's argumentation would not hold in such an environment. Thus, even if he does have something with his sacrifice/shopping comparison, it is only an artifact of the culture where he did his study, and should not be generalized beyond the shoppers of this North London neighborhood.
WOOFY SOCIOLOGIST RAMBLINGS.......2000-02-12
This book is about ten good pages and the remainder is a stream of rambling woofy ideas with very little to hold it together.
Beyond the first chapter, the content varies from the social impact of social sacrifice to how the Greek philopshers would rate modern thoughts on mass consumption.
It has very little to do with WHY people would go to a supermarket and HOW they act while they are there - nothing on causality, just lots of words joined together.
Be careful about buying this book. It's a waste of space as far as a text book to assist anyone in business - it's a first year university book for liberal arts time wasters.
An extremely accessible academic text.......1998-08-28
I couldn't believe it when I laughed out loud whilst reading this text. A strong theoretical base supports this amusing ethnography of shopping - the sort that is done week in, week out, rather than 'leisure' shopping. I highly recommend reading it from cover to cover, rather than trying to skim it as one might other academic texts. It will be of use to anyone studying material culture, social anthropology, and sociology, in that it indicates clearly not only its specific content, but also its methodology. Reading this text makes Miller's classic "Material Culture and Mass Consumption" a lot more accessible to those of us who are just starting to research this area.
Book Description
Shoppers can express their values as they search for value. Political consumerism is turning the market into a site for politics and ethics, as consumer choices reflect personal attitudes and purchases are informed by ethical or political assessment of business and government practice. In such forms as boycotts, when consumers refuse to buy, or buycotts, where consumers shift their purchases, the ostensibly apolitical marketplace is a site of contestation at the intersection of globalization and individualization. This book opens readers' eyes to a new way of viewing everyday consumer choices and the role of the market in our lives, illuminating the broader theoretical and historical context of concerns about sweatshops, responsible coffee, and ethical and free trade.
Amazon.com
As one toy-company executive put it in the early '90s, "The color of money is green, and you get it from whatever skin tone has got it." Accordingly, with the annual buying power of minority customers exceeding $1 trillion, U.S. companies now spend $2 billion each year on advertising specifically designed to attract and engage these "New American" consumers. Who are they? More importantly, who do they think they are? And how are they expressing that self-identification through what they buy? In Shopping for Identity, Marilyn Halter explores these and other questions with an academic's critical eye and illustrates her research with an engaging variety of statistics, examples, and anecdotes.
Until well into the second half of the 20th century, America was seen as a cultural melting pot. Immigrants were expected to assimilate into the mainstream culture, and cultural pluralism wasn't officially recognized, let alone encouraged. That changed significantly with the passing of the Ethnic Heritage Act of 1974, which contributed to the growth of "ethnic celebrations, a zeal for genealogy, increased travel to ancestral homelands, and great interest in ethnic artifacts, cuisine, music, literature, and, of course, language." At the same time, corporate America began moving away from mass marketing and toward segmented marketing techniques, and these newly demonstrative ethnic constituencies quickly became one of the most targeted and profitable marketing segments. Multicultural marketing experts have proliferated and act as their companies' in-house ethnographers, learning and responding to the cultural nuances of their audiences. At the same time, ethnicity in itself is becoming increasingly optional and malleable, as individuals choose to take on certain identifying aspects of their cultural group while rejecting others. Halter's book poses some interesting questions: How does commercialism both enhance and make a commodity of ethnic identification? And what is authentic ethnic identification? Consider the non-Jewish. fourth-generation Irish leader of the organization for fostering Yiddish culture and education, who has immersed himself in living and promoting a Yiddish identity; or the way that certain ethnic peculiarities have become so ingrained in the culture that they've lost their obvious differences. Demonstrating the extent of cultural hybridism in the U.S., Halter quotes a Newsweek article as stating that "As the United States' Muslim community grows, so does the availability of halal products and pro-Islam tchotchkes." The Yiddish term for knickknacks hardly seems appropriate for pro-Islamic merchandise, and yet today's cultural hybridism often blinds us to such ironies.
Halter's extensive research calls attention to these everyday marketing techniques, which no longer seem strange in our pick-and-choose cultural milieu. In its examination of how Americans express their ethnicity in and through a commodity-driven, consumer culture, Shopping for Identity is a revealing study of how far we have come from the days when Margaret Mead could pronounce that "Being American is a matter of abstention from foreign ways, foreign food, foreign ideas, foreign accents." As Halter shows us, money does indeed talk in many different languages; her examination of both sides of the ethnic dollar is informative, provocative, and surprisingly entertaining. --S. Ketchum
Book Description
In America today, you can connect to your ethnic heritage in dozens of ways, or adopt an identity just for an evening. Our society is not a melting pot but a salad bar--a bazaar in which the purveyors of goods and services spend close to $2 billion a year marketing the foods, clothing, objects, vacations, and events that help people express their (and others') ethnic identities. This is a huge business, whose target groups are the "hyphenated Americans"--in other words, all of us.
As immigrant groups gain economic security, they tend to reinforce--not relinquish--their ethnic identification. Marilyn Halter demonstrates that, to a great extent, they do it by shopping. And their purchasing power is enormous. How has the marketplace responded to this hunger? Instantly and wholeheartedly: tweaking old products and inventing new ones; launching new brands in supermarkets, new music groups, vacation itineraries, language courses, toys, greeting cards, et cetera. This nexus of business and ethnicity is already seen as the hottest consumer development of this decade, and Halter is uniquely qualified to describe its origins, the exponential growth of products and advertising, and the phenomenal sales of items from salsa to Chieftains CDs.
She addresses her subject with an abundance of anecdotal evidence, telling examples of ethnic marketing, and interviews with entrepreneurs (many of them immigrants) who are vigorously seizing the opportunities offered by the business of ethnicity.
Shopping for Identity is provocative, intriguing, and farseeing, illuminating an important aspect of our contemporary way of life while validating the yearning we all feel for connection to our roots.
Customer Reviews:
Fabulous.......2003-05-21
Shopping for Identity is a great book. It has humor embedded into a well-documented research about culture diversity. It leads right to the heart of issues that we are dealing with in our society. I learned so much from it. What does make it more exhilarating while you are reading through the chapters, is that it applies automatically to our real life. True, the concepts are sophisticated, but the writing is so accessible. Even though an academic has written it, it can be read by all of us. Highly recommended.
Great idea, lousy execution.......2003-05-16
There is little doubt that Marilyn Halter has hit upon an important concept: the part-time indulger in ethnicity, who buys products that resonate with her/his heritage. Halter shows how many companies ally themselves with new marketing schemes to appeal to an increasingly diverse American market. This is a solid sociological insight, and Halter's work mines this theme for all its worth.
However -- many of the chapters are nothing but an endless list of examples; and because the thesis of her work is all-pervasive, what you end up with is an entire book of near indistinguishable chapters. There seems to be virtually no progression to the writing here. I'm not sure if this is a new strain of pop market sociology, but this is not an example of good writing. Where the main thesis should be explored, there is instead a barrage of examples that shift rapidly (e.g., one moment it is the kosher foods market, the next it is new wedding services), and IMHO real analysis is sacrificed in favor of bowling the reader over with a collection of information that is supposed to be hard research. Yes, it is impossible not to ask important questions about one's own ethnicity while reading the book; but, this seems to come at the expense of Halter really digging in to some meaty cultural analysis and instead surrending to more journalistic approach.
While I am deeply interested in this topic, I have to express an overall disappointment with 'Shopping for Identity.' It's a book that reads like chaotic mush.
An important look at consumer culture........2001-05-03
This is an excellent study of consumer culture. Many investigations assume a monolithic "consumer" and Halter adds subtlety and nuance by looking at the ways ethnicity impacts consumption. Highly recommended.
questions for mom???.......2000-11-17
I read Mariyln Halter's book, Shopping for Identity and found it fascinating. Not only is the book about the marketplace but it touches the emotions of being an American and loving your own heritage. After reading about the Boston Irish firefighters I called my mother and asked very specific questions about my forebears and the struggles they had overcome. Shopping for Identity gave me permission to explore my own personal ethnic identity. I have shared the book with others because it is a great read and an important contribution to understanding the current trends in American culture.
Serious and enjoyable reading.......2000-10-29
I read Marilyn Halter's Sopping for Identity and liked it so much I couldn't keep myself from sharing my enthusiasm with others. First of all because it is really enjoyable reading. I read the book as I would read a good novel, in spite of being the outcome of serious research. And this is rare. Then I liked it because it helped me understanding American society. As an European who admires American culture, reads a lot of American books and sees a lot of American films the book was an eye opener. I can now understand things that didn't make sense to me for lack of knowledge on a changing society. In this global world we tend to think it's enough to read some books and watch CNN and we'll know what is going on. Reading Marilyn Halter I realized that's not enough, but one book can make the difference. And Shopping for Identity made the difference for me. I hope it will be translated soon, so more people in this part of the world can enjoy it the way I did. Congratulations Marilyn, it's a great book!
Book Description
Departing from those who define postmodernism in film merely as a visual style or set of narrative conventions, Anne Friedberg develops the first sustained account of the cinema's role in postmodern culture. She explores the ways in which nineteenth-century visual experiences--photography, urban strolling, panorama and diorama entertainments--anticipate contemporary pleasures provided by cinema, video, shopping malls, and emerging "virtual reality" technologies.
Comparing the visual practices of shopping, tourism, and film-viewing, Friedberg identifies the experience of "virtual" mobility through time and space as a key determinant of postmodern cultural identity. Evaluating the theories of Jameson, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and others, she adds critical insights about the role of gender and gender mobility in the configurations of consumer culture.
A strikingly original work, Window Shopping challenges many of the existing assumptions about what exactly postmodern is. This book marks the emergence of a compelling new voice in the study of contemporary culture.
Average customer rating:
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Shopping, Place and Identity
Daniel Miller
Manufacturer: Routledge
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ASIN: 0415154618 |
Book Description
This book engages in key debates in contemporary consumption and identity studies, yet presents a firmly grounded study that will complement the more speculative writing about shopping, place and identity that has developed in recent years.
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The Shopping Experience (Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society)
Manufacturer: Sage Publications Ltd
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A Theory of Shopping
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Material Culture: A Research Guide
ASIN: 0761950672 |
Book Description
The last decade has witnessed a clear and steady rise of interest in consumer culture. Many commentators now argue that consumption rather than production is the axis of personal identity and meaningful social actionùa situation that reverses the traditional view of consumption as an incidental, trivial feature of contemporary culture. This shrewd and probing book seeks to develop theories of shopping as an autonomous realm of experience. It aims to avoid both the reductionism characteristic of economics and marketing and the moralizing tone of many contemporary discussions of shopping and consumption. The book uses an interdisciplinary resource base and comparative data to build up a convincing analysis of the meaning of shopping today. It includes chapters by Mary Douglas on the importance of shopping; Mica Nava on women, the city, and the department store; Rachel Bowlby on supermarket features; Cecilia Fredriksson on the cultural construction of shopping; Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen and Pasi MSenpSS on the ethnography of shopping; Colin Campbell on shopping, pleasure, and the sex war; and Pasi Falk on the "scopic" regimes of shopping. The Shopping Experience provides the first comprehensive overview of the modern phenomenon of shopping. As such, it will be essential reading for students and researchers working in the fields of sociology, cultural studies, and anthropology.
Book Description
This digital document is a journal article from Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
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Previous studies of online stores have concentrated on identifying various attribute and benefit dimensions important to customers and neglected delving into underlying motives of customers engaging in shopping online. The current study identified personal values as underlying motivations, which have received less attention but carry important meanings in explaining customers' loyal behavior. From the perspective of means-end chain theory, a hierarchical cognitive structural model consisting of personal values, attribute evaluations, and loyal behavior has been proposed. 353 questionnaire data were collected from the experienced online shoppers in South Korea and put into structural equation model to investigate the hierarchical effects of personal values, evaluations of online store attributes, and loyalty. The results show that three customers' values such as matured society, happiness, and esteem life are the underlying beliefs motivating and/or deterring customers to shop online. But their impacts were diverse. Even though esteem life value had a positive effect on attribute evaluations, values for matured life and happiness had negative influences on loyalty. In addition, the results also demonstrated that customers' favorable evaluation of product assortment eventually guides customers to be loyal to an online store.
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Hollywood Goes Shopping
Editors,Garth S. Jowett
Manufacturer: University of Minnesota Press
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ASIN: 0816635137 |
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This digital document is a journal article from Journal of Public Economics, published by Elsevier in 2007. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Description:
This paper provides a simple but general theoretical framework for analyzing simultaneous vertical and horizontal competition in excise taxes, which includes several previous contributions as special cases. It allows for both elastic individual demand for the taxed good, and cross-border shopping (and smuggling). It then estimates equations informed by the theory on a panel of US state and federal excise taxes on cigarettes and gasoline. The results are generally consistent with the theory, when the characteristics of the markets for the goods are taken into account. Taxes in neighboring states have a significant and large effect in the case of cigarettes. The possibility of smuggling cigarettes from low tax states also plays a role. In the case of gasoline, taxes in neighboring states do not play a significant role; however, there is evidence in this case of vertical competition.
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