The Miss­ing Mil­lions: How Super­mar­kets are Acci­den­tal­ly Giv­ing Away Millions

Jo Ever­shed 0:00  

But first of all, we’re going to talk to Gareth about how super­mar­kets are acci­den­tal­ly giv­ing away mil­lions to our ben­e­fit, of course. Over to you Gareth!

 

Gareth Har­vey 0:12  

Hel­lo. So, as I said, I’m Gareth Har­vey. And I used to be a pro­fes­sor of con­sumer psy­chol­o­gy at ASHRAE in Gene­va. But now I am a direc­tor of behav­iour­al sci- try that, again, I’m the direc­tor of behav­iour­al sci­ence at Decide which is a mar­ket­ing and cre­ative agency. And unlike most of you guys, my world is not like­ly doing through we say the aca­d­e­m­ic research, but it’s tak­ing all the great find­ings that we have out there in the world. So things that you guys are work­ing on now. And to put it real­ly crude­ly find­ing a way to make mon­ey from it. So there’s so much great research out there, but it just stays in the aca­d­e­m­ic silos. So my remit is to try and read about that, and work out how it can be used for brands.

 

So my par­tic­u­lar inter­est is in super­mar­ket design. So I do a lot of work design­ing super­mar­ket lay­out. So if you can’t find the baked beans or the bread, it’s prob­a­bly my fault, or some­one like me. Or on the oth­er hand, I do a lot of work, which is eye track­ing and look­ing at prod­uct design. So mak­ing sure that prod­ucts stand out on the shelf.

 

Now today, I was going to talk a lit­tle bit about actu­al­ly how super­mar­kets end up giv­ing away a sil­ly amount of mon­ey. Now, if you go around any super­mar­ket, you’ll see all sorts of spe­cial offers. Lots of them that look some­thing like this, some will be two for five pounds, some­times you’ll be see things buy one, get one free, some­times 50% extra free. And if you look at these, some of them will be, shall we say? Not so great offers. So for exam­ple, some of them is it said at one and the bot­tom, one pound each, or two for two pounds. Peo­ple often think that this is a case of super­mar­kets being, shall we say delib­er­ate­ly try­ing to manip­u­late you. And the sim­ple truth is most of the time, it’s not that. It’s a sim­ple case of human incompetence.

 

Human incom­pe­tence explains a lot. But when we look at it, actu­al­ly though, there’s such a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent offers, and in effect, they’re giv­ing away more mon­ey than they actu­al­ly need to. If we think about it, it’s a sim­ple case. So what’s more effec­tive, buy one, get one free, 50%, extra free, half price, what grabs atten­tion. And actu­al­ly, a lot of the time when we actu­al­ly analyse data in the store, we realise it’s, the offer itself is kind of irrel­e­vant to a cer­tain extent. Con­sumers are so busy, are so busy try­ing to look and work out what stands out what’s on spe­cial offer.

 

And just to show how big an effect this is, I’ll talk about an exam­ple I did instal a num­ber of years ago, we’re work­ing in the alco­hol sec­tion, look­ing at beers, we col­lect­ed our base­line data. So we record­ed some­thing in the region of about near­ly 10,000 shop­pers, going down the alco­hol sec­tion. And then we made an inter­ven­tion, we made some changes. And we want­ed to see, could we increase the sales of a par­tic­u­lar type of beer. And sud­den­ly, after our inter­ven­tion, a beer we did noth­ing to we did no work to, it’s sales increased by some­thing like 50%. And we thought, what the heck has hap­pened here. And actu­al­ly it was a sim­ple case of peo­ple noticed the one prod­uct that was by a sign on the shop shelf. That sign it sim­ply said shoplifters will be pros­e­cut­ed. Noth­ing to do with actu­al any­thing to sales. But it grabbed peo­ple’s atten­tion. Peo­ple looked at it, and they end­ed up see­ing it. And then they looked at the beer that was next to it. They saw the beer that was next to it, or just above that sign. Oh, I might as well get that one. So they end­ed up buy­ing it. And actu­al­ly this kind of goes to show such a key point when we work in the super­mar­ket. Visu­al salien­cy is key. Visu­al salien­cy is prob­a­bly one of the biggest fac­tors that pre­dicts whether some­one’s going to buy some­thing or not. So we need to design prod­ucts that stand out and shelf. And it’s the same for spe­cial offers. So although super­mar­kets are great, all of these dif­fer­ent offers, actu­al­ly mak­ing sure the prod­uct stands out onshelf, and that spe­cial offer stands out on shelf, is prob­a­bly the most key factor.

 

Now, as I said, we’ve got all these dif­fer­ent offers. But we can still find ways to opti­mise it. So basi­cal­ly find ways that they can actu­al­ly get you to buy a prod­uct with­out giv­ing away more mar­gin than they need to. Because if you think about this, and we take it from a very, shall we say cog­ni­tive approach, we’re com­ing back to just notice­able dif­fer­ence. What the super­mar­ket is try­ing to do is try­ing to actu­al­ly work out what’s the biggest dif­fer­ence or biggest change they can make to the price that you’ll notice. They just want to go over just over that thresh­old and then stop.

 

4:55  

Now we do all sorts of con­joint analy­sis for brands try­ing to work out how much we can do that, how big a change do we need to make. But actu­al­ly what we found out a lot of the time, we can actu­al­ly make dif­fer­ent changes to the way that we’re pre­sent­ing these things, we can change the way these offers are pre­sent­ed. And actu­al­ly, we can get some­times the same effect with­out actu­al­ly hav­ing to give any mar­gin away. So just the obvi­ous one, we start off with charm pric­ing, the idea of reduc­ing the dig­it by one, every­one knows that cog­ni­tive­ly, it’s the same thing. But mak­ing that a slight change makes a dif­fer­ence. If you look at some of the stats here, if a prod­uct is placed, or priced at 99 pence, con­ver­sion rate online is about 3%. For some of the brands we’ve worked with, if it’s a pound it’s about 1.88. So you’re get­ting vir­tu­al­ly a 1% increase in sales. Now does­n’t sound very much, but it’s a huge effect when we start to look at these, the sam­ples we col­lect in the com­mer­cial world, we’re look­ing at sort of hun‑, or 10s of 1000s. So you start to see these big dif­fer­ences. So these lit­tle changes we’re going to talk about today have some pro­found effects.

 

So here’s some lit­tle tips that we use, when we actu­al­ly try and design some­thing, some­thing we saw in the aca­d­e­m­ic lit­er­a­ture, and we’ve test­ed it in stores or super­mar­kets, the brain gets con­fused between size, numer­i­cal size and visu­al size. So these two spe­cial offers exact­ly the same thing, by chang­ing how we present them makes one actu­al­ly sell a cou­ple of per­cent bet­ter than the oth­er. So the one on the top is actu­al­ly the one that sells bet­ter. By putting the price in a small­er font than the ref­er­ence point, it actu­al­ly the brain feels like it’s a small­er price. On the one on the bot­tom, actu­al­ly, what you’ve got going on there is you’re mak­ing the font, the price feel like it’s more expen­sive, you’re mak­ing it feel like it’s more expen­sive, because it’s big­ger than the ref­er­ence price, oh the ref­er­ence font, the new low price. So just chang­ing how you present that makes a dif­fer­ence about 2 or 3% in terms of how many peo­ple are going to buy a prod­uct, all with just chang­ing the graph­ic design, the sort of lit­tle things that we can do.

 

Some­times where you can use exact­ly the same tech­nique, and what actu­al­ly what we’re try­ing to do here, we’re try­ing to make, not nec­es­sar­i­ly the price, but we’re try­ing to make a num­ber field big­ger. So on the first one on the left, is it say­ing we’re mak­ing the prices, the big thing that grabs your atten­tion $19 a month, $49 a month, or 99, it’s big­ger than all the ref­er­ence fonts. So we’ve changed it in terms of we’ve just reframed in terms of the bronze pack­age, the sil­ver pack­age and the gold one. So that’s the big thing that catch­es your atten­tion, the prices slight­ly smaller. 

 

We’ve changed it here, this is try­ing to make the, there we go, if you try to make it the size of how much data you get with an online inter­net pack­age, we want the num­bers to feel as big as pos­si­ble. So this times we’ve made it big­ger than the ref­er­ence of the thing. And it does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly need to be a font, you can do exact­ly the same thing in terms of a visu­al or graph­i­cal ele­ment, although the effect is slight­ly small­er. So by mak­ing the num­ber big­ger than ref ref­er­ence point, it feels like it’s either big­ger or more expen­sive, depend­ing on what you’re try­ing to do.

 

Like­wise, when we’re design­ing price tick­ets, real­ly sim­ple tricks you can end up doing to make the spe­cial offer or the dis­count feel like it’s bet­ter. So in the top one, if a prod­uct was 100 pounds, and you now reduc­ing it down to 50, you can make that field big­ger by sim­ply increas­ing the space between those two num­bers on the tick­et and actu­al­ly chang­ing it graph­i­cal­ly. So if we put the new price in a dif­fer­ent colour font, or a dif­fer­ent colour font, and a dif­fer­ent actu­al font, it actu­al­ly changes that and peo­ple feel like the price is going to be an even greater one. Some­where in the region, again, about one, one and a half per­cent when we’ve done this in brands. But again, that one and a half per­cent change actu­al­ly starts to add up con­sid­er­ably, espe­cial­ly when we’re look­ing at this at a super­mar­ket level.

 

Some­times you can even tell peo­ple, and if you tell what that dif­fer­ence is, say some­thing like say 50%, it works real­ly well. The chal­lenge for this is if you change it and it’s saved, save 23%, or should we say a non round fig­ure. At that point, peo­ple start to feel like the dif­fer­ence is small­er. So if you’re actu­al­ly going to tell them on the tick­et, what the dif­fer­ence they’re sav­ing is in terms of a per­cent­age. We only want to do that when we actu­al­ly have a nice round fig­ure. Typ­i­cal­ly, there’s not done though, because it just makes up that mess­es up the look and feel of a spe­cial offer sign. And it makes it look more clut­tered. And actu­al­ly the big­ger thing we’re using nor­mal­ly to dri­ve sales is visu­al atten­tion. visu­al atten­tion is the key thing that we’re look­ing for.

 

9:43  

Oth­er things that you can see here, we’ve got one offer on the top, but it’s sim­ply changed and we change the order of where those that infor­ma­tion is pre­sent­ed. So in this one, all I’ve done is change it instead of it being in hor­i­zon­tal, we’ll put the change in prices ver­ti­cal­ly. A real­ly, real­ly small thing, but it makes it so much such a big dif­fer­ence of three to 4% in this case. Why? Well, it’s actu­al­ly eas­i­er for us to do the maths, it makes it more obvi­ous what the dif­fer­ence we’ve made it.

 

Anoth­er thing we’ve done here is we’ve actu­al­ly made sure that the change is dif­fer­ent for all the dig­its. So both the right hand col­umn and the left hand col­umn, each one is small­er. If they’re not both small­er, some­times peo­ple get a lit­tle bit maybe not con­fused, but they’re slow­er to process. And eye track­ing research in store typ­i­cal­ly shows that peo­ple are going to be look­ing for about half a sec­ond max­i­mum at a prod­uct. So it’s all about try­ing to max­imise the time peo­ple are spend­ing look­ing at the prod­uct, and mak­ing it eas­i­er and quick­er for them to make it to make a decision.

 

The oth­er thing that their bot­tom tick­et does, it gives them a rea­son of what that why the prod­ucts on dis­count rather than just say­ing it’s on dis­count. So this one just use the clas­sic exam­ple of a Jan­u­ary sale. And the rea­son that’s impor­tant is it stops or at least reduces the like­li­hood that anchor­ing is going to occur. So anchor­ing is the idea that the dig­it you see is it anchors or sets your expec­ta­tion of how much you’re going to pay. And this is always the risk, when you put a prod­uct on spe­cial offer that peo­ple start to think that, oh, it’s not real­ly val­ued at 79 pounds, it’s real­ly only cost 63. So by so by giv­ing them a rea­son, it just reduces the like­li­hood that anchor­ing occurs, and that they still val­ue the prod­uct at what its full price should be. So it’s just one of those lit­tle tricks we can play around with to try and try and stop that hap­pen­ing. So it’s a real­ly sim­ple thing that we start to do.

 

Anoth­er thing that you’ll often see some­times done, is actu­al­ly start­ing to start­ing to change the pre­sen­ta­tion of the price itself. This is some­thing that typ­i­cal­ly is more like­ly to occur, I sup­pose on a restau­rant menu. And again, I do a lot of work design­ing restau­rant menus. But it’s a sim­ple case of we drop the cur­ren­cy sym­bol. Now on restau­rant menus, when you drop the cur­ren­cy sym­bol, you can start to see about a some­where between 12 to 15% increase in the amount of mon­ey peo­ple spend on on an item. And like­wise, we’ve also dropped the dec­i­mal point. So rather than just say 89 pounds, point 00. This time, we’re actu­al­ly say­ing 89. And the rea­son this works is it helps to make the price less salient. Basi­cal­ly, we don’t want peo­ple to be con­cen­trat­ing on the price, we want to be con­cen­trat­ing, espe­cial­ly in a restau­rant set­ting where it’s a real­ly hedo­nis­tic expe­ri­ence, we want them to be con­cen­trat­ing on what they’re going to be enjoy­ing. We want them to con­cen­trate on the food they’re about to be eat­ing. So it’s all about try­ing to focus on that, we real­ly want to down­play the idea of price.

 

In an ide­al world, we’d love for peo­ple to pay for the food first and then eat it, it’s been shown that’s a much bet­ter way of doing it. The prob­lem is, we’ve kind of been trained, you pay for food first in cheap restau­rants, in posh restau­rants, you do it after­wards. But prob­a­bly the worst exam­ple of actu­al­ly where we get pric­ing salien­cy wrong is if you think of a Lon­don black cab, you get in a Lon­don black cab. And as you dri­ve, there’s not a lot to do. So you sit and watch that metre slow­ly tick­ing up, you watch it tick­ing up, it makes it real­ly real­ly salient. You final­ly get to your des­ti­na­tion, you get out. But the last thing you have to do is you pay. So you’ve made the pain of pay­ment, even greater. Con­trast that with Uber, but you take your phone, you pay vir­tu­al­ly so it feels less. So we know pay­ing by card is less painful than pay­ing by cash. So you can pay on your phone, you pay upfront. So you’ve actu­al­ly paid before the Uber arrives, and there’s no metre that’s tick­ing over so you can slow­ly watch it.

 

Now, the tech­niques we’ve got on the slide here, like remov­ing the pound sym­bol, or the cur­ren­cy sym­bol, yeah, I would­n’t rec­om­mend that for my clients in the super­mar­ket for the sim­ple rea­son. Well, typ­i­cal­ly, I just find it reduces clar­i­ty. We want every­thing to be as easy as pos­si­ble to process in the store, we’re real­ly try­ing to increase the con­cept of pro­cess­ing or per­cep­tu­al flu­en­cy. We want to make the pur­chase deci­sion as easy as pos­si­ble for the con­sumer, and pos­si­bly not hav­ing a cur­ren­cy sym­bol, it makes it a lit­tle ambigu­ous in store. But on restau­rant menus, and espe­cial­ly in the more classy ones. This is some­thing that typ­i­cal­ly gets done quite a bit.

 

14:28  

But we test all of these, these are not just things so that we’ve said and read in the lit­er­a­ture and we think works. But all of these have come from peer reviewed exper­i­ments. And we’ve test­ed them. And actu­al­ly, the rea­son we test them is I’ve test­ed lots of ideas that have been shown to work in lab based stud­ies, but I’ve nev­er been able to recre­ate them. Some­times things don’t quite work out. Now it’s not a case of pow­er, because gen­er­al­ly when we test some­thing in a super­mar­ket, we’re not talk­ing about a sam­ple size of a cou­ple of 100 we’re talk­ing 1000s to 10s of 1000s. So our datasets are far more pow­er­ful than any­thing I ever had in my PhD. But this is a clas­sic exam­ple it was taught at Nudge­stock. And they were talk­ing about which web­site design is going to be more effec­tive. Option A or Option B. Chose the snow­boards because try­ing to drop a hint to some­one. But does it make more sense to put the pic­ture of a snow­board on the left of the text or the right of the text?

 

Now there’s aca­d­e­m­ic papers out there that say we eval­u­ate things dif­fer­ent­ly depend­ing where you’re pre­sent­ing them. So if the stim­u­lus we put it on the left hand side, then we’re going to process it slight­ly dif­fer­ent­ly. How­ev­er, some would argue, or some neu­ro­sci­en­tists would say, well, the right hemi­sphere is slight­ly bet­ter for pro­cess­ing the pic­to­r­i­al infor­ma­tion, it makes more sense of pre­sent­ed on the one side. Now I’ve test­ed this in 10 dif­fer­ent con­cepts on dif­fer­ent online stores. And yeah, I’ve nev­er been able to show it. We’ve test­ed it with prod­uct pack­ag­ing design. And again, we’ve nev­er been able to show it. Now prob­a­bly it does­n’t work in prod­uct pack­ag­ing, because sure, you might have the image on the right, and the text on the left, got the wrong way around. But actu­al­ly, there are lots of oth­er stim­uli that are com­pet­ing with and grab­bing your atten­tion. So that pos­si­bly explains why the super­mar­ket side, but pre­sent­ing it when I can con­trol what image appears on the screen for an online shop. As I said across 10 dif­fer­ent online stores, the effect has nev­er worked for me, maybe I’ve got my exper­i­men­tal design wrong. But just because it’s in aca­d­e­m­ic papers, it’s been talked about in Nudge­stock, this year, a num­ber of years, we’ve still nev­er been able to get it right.

 

So all of these ideas, all of these con­cepts have talked about, they’ve come from the recent research and papers, prob­a­bly lab based stud­ies. But we always made sure they work first, nor­mal­ly start­ing off by pilot­ing it in small steps, small scale exper­i­ment, some­times it just one super­mar­ket, we test it in that one indi­vid­ual store, before we roll it out, after we know it works. So hope­ful­ly that’s giv­en you a few ideas about how super­mar­kets are acci­den­tal­ly giv­ing away mil­lions, and how they can actu­al­ly some­times get the same effect by mak­ing things visu­al­ly salient, mak­ing sure it catch­es your atten­tion and actu­al­ly putting it on on the shelf. And by care­ful design. So there are oth­er ways of doing it. If you’ve got any ques­tions, let me know my email address is on the screen there if I prob­a­bly actu­al­ly hide myself so you can actu­al­ly see it. Yeah, I will make sure my dress this I’ll dis­ap­pear in a sec­ond. But yeah, thank you, Jo. And any ques­tions, I will hap­pi­ly answer them.

 

Jo Ever­shed 17:35  

Gareth, that was fas­ci­nat­ing. Thank you so much. I feel a bit like with the last ses­sion, which was all about gam­i­fi­ca­tion. Nev­er see a game the same way now that Nick has shown how all these effects are cre­at­ed, I think it’s going to be the same now with walk­ing around super­mar­kets. I’m going to see all of these price labels, and be just notic­ing all the tricks that they’re putting on my eyes and also notic­ing all the things they’re not putting on my eyes going ha you could have done bet­ter there.

 

Gareth Har­vey 18:02  

Yes, some­times they get it right. Some­times it’s a sim­ple case of ah, we need to make a leaflet or some­thing very quick­ly and it goes out the window.

 

Jo Ever­shed 18:10  

Yes, I think often­times when we’re work­ing, we all know that feel­ing of hav­ing to just get some­thing out of the door. Now, does any­body in the audi­ence have any ques­tions for Gareth, please put them in the q&a. That was fas­ci­nat­ing. I’m try­ing to think of a good ques­tion for you. Gareth. Is there a ques­tion you par­tic­u­lar­ly like me to ask you,

 

Gareth Har­vey 18:34  

if you’re going rather than look­ing at super­mar­kets, the one area I think it’s the most fun is going to look at restau­rant menus is one of my favourite com­mer­cial jobs is design­ing restau­rant menus. So it’s a case of it’s not just try­ing to work out to get peo­ple to spend the most. But it’s often think­ing about well, which dish­es have the high­est prof­it mar­gin. So it’s try­ing to work how we encour­age them. So you’ll always thought hope­ful­ly, you’ll see anchor­ing is a com­mon thing. But you’ll real­ly see we dropped the cur­ren­cy sym­bol, we dropped the dec­i­mal point. There’s things where you play around with the fonts. Yeah, there may be the more com­pli­cat­ed of fonts more cal­lig­ra­phy based, the hard­er it is to process and from a per­cep­tu­al flu­en­cy, the more expen­sive it feels. Now, that may be a good thing if it’s a lux­u­ry restau­rant, if it’s a cheap­er one. Actu­al­ly, it’s not real­ly so great. 

Jo Ever­shed 19:19  

That is so tricksy, I am actu­al­ly a mas­sive fan of the new thing they’re doing in the UK where they show you the calo­ries as well as the price and it has com­plete­ly changed my behav­iour. I know some peo­ple aren’t a fan. They know it’s a com­pli­cat­ed dis­cus­sion point. But I feel like I am spend­ing both mon­ey and calo­ries on a day by day basis. And it’s amaz­ing because some of the dish­es that I thought were healthy turns out they’re not.

Gareth Har­vey 19:40  

Yeah, the oth­er one is some­thing they’ve strug­gled with with the menu design because in the past, they often put healthy sec­tions have a healthy sec­tion or a low calo­rie sec­tion. And they found that when they did that it gen­er­al­ly decreased the like­li­hood that some­one would order it part­ly because if it’s a low calorif­ic, or low fat, we assume it’s less tasty. So they actu­al­ly they had that was one neg­a­tive. So when they actu­al­ly put it in as part of the main menu and put the calo­rie infor­ma­tion in had a slight­ly bet­ter influence.

Jo Ever­shed 20:06  

Ah, very inter­est­ing. There was one ques­tion from the audi­ence, which actu­al­ly is a ques­tion I had as well. What’s this amaz­ing tech you’re using where you get to sit in front of your slides, it’s so much more engaging.

Gareth Har­vey 20:15  

I’m using OBS. OBS. So it’s com­plete­ly free. And it was a sim­ple case of it’s nor­mal­ly much bet­ter than this, but I’m work­ing at a friend’s house today and I did­n’t have time to set it up prop­er­ly, but um, OBS Open Broad­cast System.

Jo Ever­shed 20:31  

I will put the link into the chat for every­body else who might be interesting.