There is an old saying about advertising – 50% works, 50% does not, the problem is no one knows which 50% works. In the book The Manipulators by Jeffery Robinson published by Simon & Schuster, London 1998, Mr. Robinson looks at the 50% that should be working.

In all retail environments, sales reports are generated and those items which seem to be not selling need to be fixed. Sometimes it is because the item is on a narrow item which means if the store is busy people may not stop and check it out. Moving the item to a different location fixes the problem. Logistics is often a obvious solution but it is overlooked. Logistics means looking at the location of the lines leading to the cash register what does it block? what impulse items does it enhance?  A simple example is at one store they catered to teenagers, but the racks were higher than average teenager could assess? lowering the racks resulted in higher sales. In terms of displaying items, how do customers approach the shelves – straight or from an angle? could the product be turned to result in higher sales?

Advertising has 2 prime objectives – one is to increase the number of customers who will buy the product and the second is to increase the amount of product those customers will buy. If we buy what we need, watching and understanding how people act the way they do, changing the behaviour can lead to more sales. For example, most people turn right, this means the displays on the right will do better. In the airport waiting area – people will walk across the aisle for food, they will not walk for a magazine. Next time you are in the airport look what is on both sides of the aisle.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, there are a wide variety of methods which companies try to understand people who will buy their products. No one has figure out everything yet but the methods to capture data increase every year. Those that pay more attention to targeting ads on the internet see it more often. While most of us tend to be interested in a few subjects, it does mean the focus of your ads is very narrow indeed. What that mean in the future is an unknown.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.