I was recently called up short in a conversation by someone who asked why I insist on being manipulative of customers in this way. Is that what my phrasing is suggesting? I wondered to myself. Do people think I am attempting some Madison Avenue style subliminal chicanery here?
The reality is that the things I do that have "some psychology" behind them are not directed from the business to the customers, but are the consequence of the business seeking to better understand and anticipate the decisions of the customers. I am not a tail trying to wag a dog.
Yes, we want to make money, but we are doing it fair and square. I am not telemarketing extended warranties here. I sell games and entertainment products. I don't feel any need to justify the product itself; my customers are interested because they want to play that game. It's a real game, and you can really play it. And if the game sucks and turns out to be a dud, I'll have to clearance it because nobody will want it, so I am highly financially incentivized to order duds as seldom as possible.
If there is any high-budget manipulative marketing going on, it's publisher-to-consumer. And even that assertion is at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek; the publishers make extensive use of focus groups, market research, and design fundamentals to create products that players will genuinely want. It is possible to "push" product through the industry's digestive system to some extent, especially shovelware games on a flash-in-the-pan hot IP license. But nothing provides authentic, sustained profits in the hobby game industry like a great game that plays well and makes people want to own it for themselves. It's not an accident that after the new shiny miniatures wargame dulls out, the players gravitate back to Warhammer. It's not an accident that after the hot fad TCG fizzles, the players dig out their Magic: the Gathering decks again.
So why am I regularly doing things that have "some psychology" attached? Because we are (mostly) rational, observant creatures, and our subconscious minds pick up on things that our conscious minds may not, and we interpret a daily bombardment of tiny signals and make up our minds to do something or not do something, and I want people to find my store and my products delightful, a pleasure to shop, fun to consume, and eager to return to again. Red Letter Media, the movie review channel, uses this as a trope of sorts: You may not have noticed it, but your brain did.
The most obvious one is the "power display," the store putting as much merch as possible into each display and building up big stacks of hot new items. This projects abundance. It's well understood as a way to build customer confidence in both the store and the item: the customer subconsciously sees that the store is sufficiently stable to be able to afford lots of merch, and the store is confident enough in the demand to bring in a lot of this item specifically. This practice contrasts with the highly successful display model that the Apple Store uses, where there is one of each item out for customers to examine, and the rest of stock is "in the back" and out of sight. When DSG first started, ownership thought we would do the Apple Store model. What we discovered is that logistically it's more taxing than it looks. It takes a lot of extra labor, the kind of labor Apple can afford more easily than a small specialty retailer, to keep product moving to where it needs to be. And that back-room stock has to be truly enormous to avoid having a miss rate that will discourage customers from asking to purchase. Finally, by setting up displays-out and product-locked-away, the store is denying customers the opportunity to shop, and shopping is something many people actually enjoy doing. (Sometimes a bit too much, in fact.) In essence, a luxury product category like jewelry is more appropriate for what Apple is doing. Stores like ours need to take a cue from the conventional mass market and show the goods.
Another common bit of merchandising psychology is known as Good, Better, Best. In the absence of at least three options of different grades or trim levels of a similar product, a buyer has a natural inclination to assume they are not being given all the options. Due to fear of missing out, they may buy nothing at all. Wherever product lines allow it, such as with dice or modeling supplies or TCG sleeves, I try to stock an option that's good enough at the entry level, an option that's better that most players will choose as a good compromise between quality and price, and a top-of-the-line indulgent option that might be overkill for all but the most devoted players, but that a highly invested player will demand. This isn't manipulation, this is us trying to have the goods people are going to want. I can't sell things I don't stock.
Product depth, breadth, and assortment figures into the psychology as well. Within a given quality tier, studies have shown that people want to see three to seven options per configuration. With fewer than three, that fear of missing out comes up again. Our brains doubt that we are seeing all our options, and envision some other store somewhere having a bunch of other colors or versions or sizes on the rack. When you move too far beyond seven, it becomes too much. Our brains find the decision too broad and the product assortment to be too much of a mess. Part of the success of the Eclipse sleeves, I believe, is that Ultra-Pro has kept the color count down. I know it's not actually seven, I think I counted a dozen or so colors last time I restocked. But if you eliminate black, white, and grey as colors the brain doesn't always "count," the remainder is kind of a Roy G. Biv with light and dark variants. It's comprehensible and "feels right" to the buyer. See also: Magic: the Gathering sets in Standard; colors of any given version of the Nintendo DS or 3DS; any TCG accessory that follows the WUBRG wheel and perhaps has a "gold" or "Planeswalker" sixth option.
At the macro level, human beings tend to keep track of collections of only about 100 to 150 of a thing. It's not an accident that there were 150 original Pokemon. Since product lines that get that broad tend to be a lot of work to manage on our side, the publishers usually save us all a lot of trouble by breaking things up into sub-units that eventually contain the requisite number of things, 100 to 150. You don't believe it? How many cards per rarity in a Magic: the Gathering expansion? A set seems too big to memorize in one gulp when we view it as 265 cards, but separate 100 commons and 80 uncommons, and divide the rest further between rares and mythic rares... and that's some bite-sized mental ingestion available! Check out the Warhammer Citadel paint rack. Check out the Chessex Dice catalog. You'll see it over and over.
The above rule holds even when the publishers don't or can't cooperate, as in the case of video game systems. There are many hundreds, sometimes thousands, of games for each of many common console systems, but when you ask people to summarize the best ones on a given platform, they'll sputter out before they hit 100. Buuuuuut, for those who are invested collectors, divide a given system's games by genre and you start seeing sub-150 chunks again and people remember more of them.
That's product-based stuff. What about facility-based psychology, and marketing psychology, and so on?
I don't think I have to revisit the issue of clean restrooms. Everyone knows it's no longer optional. Most female customers and many other customers will resist returning to a place that has restrooms they found unclean. But beyond merely cleaning the restrooms, we have signs posted in both of them inviting our patrons to inform the staff if we've run out of anything: toilet paper, soap, paper towels, et cetera. This sort of invitation creates reassurance and a positive impression even if a particular customer reading it sees nothing awry in the restroom at that moment. Many folks resist being "that guy" or "the one to complain" or otherwise don't want to be seen as interruptive of the Commerce Going On and might not feel comfortable telling the staff that there's something wrong, especially that there's something wrong regarding a (possibly dirty) bathroom. But after seeing the sign they feel empowered because instead of "bothering" us, they know they're helping us. Their information helps us keep things clean for everyone.
I am using the phrase "marketing psychology" to refer not to slick ad campaigns but to the underlying branding and positioning fundamentals. Like left-digit dominance, something I am not fond of but I cannot fight the tide on. The reason the product is $9.99 instead of $10.00 is because consumers buy more at $9.99, and testing has proven that they see the price as substantially less than ten bucks. Even though we all know it's not. Similarly $199.99 is way, way less than two hundred dollars... except it totally isn't. Look, I tried to be the good guy. For the first year DSG was in business, we had smooth-up pricing including tax, and we set prices so that it would end up at an X.00 price. Within zero minutes (essentially) of giving up on that plan and adjusting everything to X.99, we saw a huge sales boost that has never gone away since.
Marketing psychology and facility-based psychology collide where it comes to the arrangement of the store. There is a reason that the entire retail floor is a circle. There is a reason the check-out station is on the left, and product is on the right. (DSG's particular room shape is not optimized for this, but we approximate it.) There is a reason we merchandise the racks to minimize the likelihood of a shopper having to bend over to examine it and be brushed from behind by someone passing through. It's one of those things that psychologically upsets shoppers, especially women. There is a reason we have the two checkout lanes separated instead of together, to minimize total wait duration by anyone ready to purchase. That's another of those things that psychologically upsets shoppers, especially parents. Those two things are preventative, so they seek to avoid a negative psychological effect rather than to generate or reinforce a positive one.
It would take the space of an entire book, or several, to show how deep this rabbit hole goes. To give only one deeper example, displays arranged dynamically instead of in efficient identical rows, create opportunities for shoppers to encounter items with an instant of discovery. That feeling is not conscious but subconscious, and you may not have noticed it, but your brain did. That's why last Q4 we had the entire board game floor broken up into dynamic displays. That's why we will do it again this Q4. And that's why we use a herringbone pattern that creates angles and added facing exposure in the meanwhile. In a simplified sense, it makes shopping the store more enjoyable. And at the end of the day, stores like mine are in the entertainment business.
So that's it. It's all about recognizing that commerce psychology already exists, and positioning ourselves to be on the favorable side of its interface points. This is derived from understanding how our clientele experiences our businesses, and tailoring our processes and offerings accordingly. It's not manipulation in the deceptive or malicious sense at all. It's not the flea-market haggler or Craigslist swindler who talks up one part of the deal in your favor while quickly, silently, and deftly fleecing you on the rest of the deal. It's not the commission car salesman trying to get you to drop half a grand on True-Coat rust sealant. It's not some nefarious subconscious message to get you to join the Navy. Rather, we expect our players to have a sense already of what they want to do for fun, and we're going to be reactive and create a compatible environment. From having a bathtub full of dice for players to treasure-dig to framing up a beautiful tryptich of posters for the latest and greatest Magic expansion, our use of "some psychology" ranges from the immediate to the periphery, and our visitors' brains notice.
