Shop tactics: why we buy at Christmas

Saturday morning on Oxford Street. It’s just gone 10am and the pavements are rammed with sharp-elbowed shoppers. Outside a glittering Selfridges window, a throng gawps at a mannequin dressed as a modern-day Red Riding Hood, her scarlet minidress shimmering beside a menagerie of sparkling blue animals.

Christmas may be the most wonderful time of the year, but for retailers it’s also the most competitive. According to Mintel, a record £36.5bn will be spent in the UK by closing time on 24 December. On the high street, the battle to win our custom has never been so fierce. ‘Music, layout, pricing, display — it can all make a difference,’ says Patrick Fagan, consumer psychologist and my shopping companion for the day. As we make our way through the crowds, he calmly and method-ically explains how every detail of our surroundings gets us spending.

Take the windows. ‘While they may only go up for two months, they are the result of more than a year of planning and hard work,’ says Fagan. Selfridges’ theme — storytelling — was chosen in November 2013, confirms Linda Hewson, the store’s creative director. ‘We look at lots of different things, like fashion shows and art exhibitions and theatre — we saw this idea of trans-media storytelling coming back.’ Each of the store’s windows depicts a separate fairy tale — something, says Hewson, which ‘everybody can connect to at Christmas’. In all, decorating the store for Christmas involved 500 contractors and staff members.

A ten-minute walk away, at Liberty, the scene is just as spectacular. As well as windows, each representing a different type of sea vessel laden with gifts, the store commissioned digital music consultancy C-Burn to put together a soundscape of marine acoustics and festive music to play outside the store. Like Selfridges, it’s been planning this for the past year. The nautical theme has been chosen to capitalise on the shop’s history — its famous Tudor-revival premises were built using timber from disused ships, and next year marks the company’s 140th anniversary. ‘There’s a global demand for heritage brands right now,’ explains Ed Burstell, the store’s managing director. He estimates that half the annual marketing budget is spent preparing for Christmas — and it’s now that around 20-25 per cent of the store’s profits will be made. ‘It’s the most important period of the year. The six weeks in the run-up to Christmas are make or break.’

Liberty consults with focus groups before and after Christmas to gauge the reaction to its displays. No detail is too small to consider. ‘All our scented products are upfront, because that’s quite visceral — like cinnamon and orange. It just makes you think holiday the second you walk in,’ adds Burstell. It may sound exacting, but there’s good reason to get scent right. A pleasant smell encourages ‘dwell time’, or good old-fashioned lingering, by up to 26 per cent, according to research. It also makes us value things more highly. In one study, two pairs of identical trainers were placed in identical rooms, one scented with a floral fragrance, the other not. Customers preferred the scented room’s shoes by an 84 per cent margin and estimated their value to be £6.60 higher.

Used correctly, scent can also plant new desires in us. It’s all to do with subconscious ‘priming’ says Fagan: ‘We’re what’s known as cognitive misers. We don’t have a huge amount of brain power to make shopping decisions — most are made using non-conscious short cuts.’ At Harrods, shoppers are encouraged to get into the spending mood with the help of an in-store fragrance called Christmas Spirit, which combines vanilla and cinnamon. ‘Scent evokes memories so vividly, the aim of pumping Christmas Spirit throughout the store was to trigger fond thoughts of cherished times,’ says Alexander Wells-Greco, head of visual merchandising.

But the tactics don’t stop at pretty windows and evocative fragrances. A reported £200bn has been spent in the US and UK measuring our response to similar ‘neuromarketing’ variables. As we walk into John Lewis, Fagan notes the brass band playing classical music by the door. According to a study earlier this year, listening to classical music makes us view products as higher quality. Likewise, research indicates that we’re more favourably disposed to stores when Christmas music is playing (particularly when paired with those Christmassy scents). Although, in something called the ‘mere exposure effect’, if we hear too much of it, it can be off-putting, so getting the balance right is a fine art. ‘Every department in Selfridges has a curated playlist and we change all of those for Christmas,’ says Hewson. ‘In some areas, like the Christmas emporium, it’s non-stop Christmas music from mid-November, but in some of the fashion areas we might balance out more sophisticated festive tunes with current music.’

Like scent, music can also influence ‘dwell time’ and, by extension, how much we buy. In one American study, shoppers were found to take approximately 17 per cent longer browsing supermarket aisles when slow music was playing (an average of 60 beats per minute) than fast (108 beats per minute). Sales increased by 38 per cent, so don’t expect any EDM remixes of ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’.

Another way of boosting dwell time during the Christmas rush is the use of what Fagan terms ‘retailtainment’. ‘Because we’re able to shop online, stores are doing everything they can to get us through the doors, and part of that is creating entertaining added extras,’ he explains. Come Christmas, retailtainment reaches its peak with the arrival of grottos such as Harrods’ fourth floor Enchanted Forest, featuring optical-illusion mirrors and a snow tunnel. Selfridges has an in-store Everyman cinema and a pop-up Alpine restaurant, Le Chalet, serving mulled wine and hot chocolate cocktails.

Likewise, stores that offer exclusive access to products stand to gain, says Fagan. ‘We innately find scarce things more valuable; if it’s unique, we see it as a way to express our identity.’ In this vein, Harrods has commissioned a line of rocking horses, at £1,400 each, by London designer Squint; Liberty has several exclusive jewellery pieces it is expecting to be bestsellers, including a collection of Annina Vogel Victorian charm necklaces from £350; and Selfridges has a range of exclusive Christmas beauty crackers designed by Lancôme and Clarins for £54 and £39 each, as well as an exclusive Kenzo Eiffel Tower sweatshirt for £230.

But if stores can make the most of music, smell and entertainment to ‘prime’ customers, and use exclusive offers to draw them in, just as important is adapting to how we naturally behave. Here, layout is crucial — and it’s the supermarkets who are king. Midway through our trip, Fagan and I pop into M&S. Although the aisles are tightly packed, the entrance is clutter-free — with good reason. It’s thought we take between five and 15 paces to slow our speed after stepping off the street, so shops have devised a ‘decompression zone’, a spacious area that eases us into the shopping process. We also deliberate longer over the first purchase than others, picking up ‘shopping momentum’ as we go. As a result, retailers place special offers towards the front to coax us into making that first step. Staples such as milk, bread and meat are usually at the back of the store (forcing customers to pass other tempting goods) and luxuries, such as champagne and mince pies, are saved for the end. Psychologists at Bangor University pinpointed 23 minutes as the point at which our brains stop devoting full effort to calculating the value of special deals. At 40 minutes, we begin purchasing entirely emotionally. I reach for a sample of Christmas chocolate; Fagan points out that samples, too, can get us to buy. ‘It creates reciprocity. There’s research that shows that if we’re given something, we feel indebted.’

It isn’t just where items are displayed that matters — how they’re displayed does, too. For this, shops tap into evolutionary psychology. In Topshop, we examine a rail of mismatching garments with the sign ‘Last chance to buy’ above them. This ‘jumble’ aesthetic is a common one, particularly come the post-Christmas sales. Humans, explains Fagan, are by nature pack creatures: ‘There’s a social proof element — if everyone else is buying something, we assume it must be good.’ The dishevelled rail appeals to something else in me. Less pristine than uniform displays of clothes, I feel more at liberty to touch it. Just as well — studies have found that shoppers are more than 25 per cent more likely to buy goods that they are encouraged to handle. The thinking is that when we touch something, we feel ownership; refraining from buying it becomes a loss.