What makes people buy?

When you walk into almost any store, you're immediately overloaded with sights, sounds, smells, and various things to touch. This barrage on your senses are hand-picked for one goal: to make you spend more.

It shouldn't be surprising that the main sense that retail stores go after is your sense of sight. What is surprising are the subtle cues they leave around to get us to spend more. These are small symbolic cues that have a big impact on what we decide to buy, and how long we're willing to stay in a store.

Color has a big impact on our shopping choices. Each color often evokes or reprerensent a feeling. For example red is almost the color associated with sales which makes us buy more because we think it´s cheap.

Another interesting strategy I found was that the retailers want you to get lost in the store so you will see more of their products. Take Ikea, for example. The store is structured in a way that you're bound to get turned around and lost. This causes you to see more than you need to, and in turn you end up with a couple more items in your hand. We were discussing this problem in our team because we also thought that it´s easy to get lost in Sokos too.

The sounds you hear in a store also complement the overall image a store is trying to produce. A lot of retailers pipe in music specific to a store. Places in the mall targeted at teens tend to play high-volume pop music, whereas a high-end jeweler might play classical music.

One study from the European Journal of Scientific Research suggest that music at a loud volume gets people to move through the store quicker, whereas slower and quieter music makes them stay longer. Slow tempo pop music might make you spend more on impulse purchases and the effect of tempo and key might affect mood enough to alter shopping choices as well.

The perfect scent makes us willing to spend more money. Our senses bypass our conscious mind so if we smell something nice or something that evoke our memory is it more likely we spend more money. Scents in stores can indirectly affect our view of a product's quality, and when done right gives us a more favorable experience of shopping as a whole.

Have you ever thought about  that all those carefully designed stores aren't structured just to assult your eyeballs with shiny objects. They're also about forcing you to touch more things. Why? Because touching tends to lead to purchasing for most of us. Essentially, the more time an item spends in your hand, the more likely you are to purchase it. 

I have never thought about these things how a store in a way manipulate their customers. Actually I have to admit that it´s also true, at least for me. I think this is one way to  try to understand the customers and why they buy.

http://lifehacker.com/how-stores-manipulate-your-senses-so-you-spend-more-mon-475987594