00:00:01
we're here today with Wharton professor Barbara Kahn to talk about her new research which takes a look at how store
00:00:07
display design can impact choice by our thanks for being with us today it's my
00:00:11
pleasure so first of all can you give us kind of a brief overview of the research well
00:00:15
this is part of a general stream that I do on perceived variety so I'm interested in assortment and one of the
00:00:21
key variables of an assortment is how much varieties in an assortment but my little take on it is instead of looking
00:00:27
at actual variety I'm interested in the perceived variety and so in all the experiments that I've done recently I
00:00:33
hold the actual variety constant and I change the perception of variety and measure that I mean I think I was like I
00:00:40
think perceived variety is probably really the key there because if even if the store would have lots of things for
00:00:45
sale if people think they have very little it doesn't really matter how much
00:00:48
they and now what are kind of a key takeaways you found that there's a pretty significant difference between
00:00:53
vertical sort of sway and horizontal well so this actually just to go back to your point for a second is that is what
00:01:00
what's interesting about perceived variety versus actual variety so sometimes as you are alluding to the
00:01:04
actual varieties too much they can't take it in so I would argue in that case
00:01:08
the perceived variety is smaller than the actual variety but in other cases the actual variety is small and you
00:01:14
might want to do something to increase the perceived variety and this research is more in that stream and so what we
00:01:20
found is if you take the exact same number of items the same items the same number of items the same actual variety
00:01:26
and array them either horizontally or vertically it changes the perception of variety now talk a little bit more about
00:01:33
what people see when they see a vertical display versus what they see when they see a horizontally and this is a very
00:01:39
very very subtle effect and it doesn't last for a long time but it lingers and
00:01:44
so what we found is when it's horizontal since your eyes are horizontal what we
00:01:48
call binocular vision you can take in the items in the assortment more easily it's called higher perceptual fluency
00:01:55
and that because it's just a little bit easier to take in the items when it's
00:01:59
horizontal you think there's more variety there with invertigo because your eyes aren't arrayed horizontally
00:02:05
you can't take as much in at once and also you tend to move your head a little
00:02:10
bit which is just that much harder and so initially the ease of processing the items
00:02:15
the vertical assortment is harder than in the horizontal brook and that gives you this illusion of more perceived
00:02:21
variety now clearly after a few seconds the effect goes away I think the effect lasts less than three seconds so it's
00:02:28
not a big effect but because people don't care that much and they don't overthink this their initial perceptions
00:02:34
linger and they think there's more perceived variety so even if they've looked a little harder and realized oh
00:02:40
there's more here than I thought they're still gonna sort of have that initial
00:02:43
impression stuck in their head which I would think would then could potentially impact their buying decisions right and
00:02:49
that's what where we're going with it right so the idea is if you think there's a little more percent perceived
00:02:54
variety you tend to seek more variety in your choices and when you seek more variety in your choices you tend to
00:03:00
overall purchase more so we ran a number of experiments sometimes we held constant or we controlled the number of
00:03:07
items they could choose so we'd had a raise of candies that were horizontal or
00:03:11
vertical we said pick three and in that case we were just measuring whether they
00:03:15
picked three different ones or four fewer than three different ones I mean we found in the horizontal they tended
00:03:21
to choose more variety holding the number of items constant than they did in the vertical one but in
00:03:27
a store experiment we read we didn't hold anything constant we just observed
00:03:30
and we arrayed the display either horizontally or vertically and we found in the horizontal assortment they chose
00:03:37
more different types which resulted in more purchases overall and so they chose more items when the when they were
00:03:43
arrayed horizontally than when they were raid vertically and they had no difference in the perception of the
00:03:48
design of the assortment that wasn't what was driving it now with key takeaways for this for businesses I mean
00:03:53
is it necessarily that everybody should be changing their displays to horizontal
00:03:57
or is it more complicated yeah it's more complicated so it's part I guess the
00:04:01
idea is if you want people to choose more than one in the product category then it might be better to array them
00:04:06
horizontally and you might think a lot of times stores just kind of get to this finding themselves but you know they
00:04:12
don't really understand why but a lot of times if you're looking within a
00:04:15
category and you're choosing more than one type they are arrayed horizontally
00:04:19
and then if you're only going to choose one like your favorite or something like
00:04:22
that that tends to be arrayed more vertically so we noticed that stores kind of followed this rule almost into
00:04:28
it bleh but it does depend if you want people to choose the most preferred or be brand loyal to something then a
00:04:34
vertical assortment might make more sense now these days I mean we're making
00:04:38
our purchases not just in a brick-and-mortar store but also online now does this research only have
00:04:44
implications for the brick-and-mortar store are there also implications here for how a display might be set up on an
00:04:50
online website even though they don't really use shelves per se yeah no it's
00:04:54
definitely in fact most we did run experiments in stores from physical displays but we also ran them online and
00:04:59
there we use graphic design to kind of make the assortment look like it was horizontal or the graphic design and
00:05:05
make it look vertically and we definitely found these effects online now what would you say would be kind of
00:05:11
if I am a customer I mean are there implications there for me as well I mean just to sort of check your perceptions
00:05:17
when you come in or I mean anything like that I guess it doesn't matter that much
00:05:21
you know it's just I mean a lot of the things that I do don't affect choice
00:05:24
that that much it's on the margin affects the market are actually a little bit more because I don't think there's a
00:05:30
mistake here you know sometimes some of the things that we find were tricking the consumer
00:05:34
but in this case I don't think we're tricking them we're just arraying it in
00:05:38
such a way that it's more pleasing and what's next for this research what are
00:05:41
you going to take are you going to take this further or is there another sort of
00:05:44
similar like related stream to this that you're also working yeah I do a lot of
00:05:47
work on this notion of perceived varieties so I've looked at things holding everything constant whether if
00:05:51
it's visually depicted or verbally depicted how that affects perceived variety I've also looked at what you
00:05:56
were talking about earlier the idea if there's too much choice what can we do
00:06:00
to make it simpler and you're seeing in retail kind of a trend particularly on
00:06:05
the online and stuff like that to find these curated assortments so more is you know less is more kind of the idea
00:06:11
because people get so overwhelmed with choice but I find that if one of the advantages of online assortments is you
00:06:18
can have really big assortments and so you can you know cater to the heterogeneity of preferences with a very
00:06:23
large assortment and so if you can learn some of these cues about how to make the
00:06:27
variety seem less or more depending on what your goal is you can still have big assortment so that's kind of where I
00:06:33
like to go with it thank you so much for being with us today sure it was fun thank you
00:06:52
you