A data-based method for periodically rearranging products enables retailers to optimize new store layouts based on customer familiarity with where their favorite things used to be. 

The Washington State University-led research leverages past customer transactions to provide brick-and-mortar stores with a degree of the personalized shopping experience online retailers such as Netflix and Amazon use to promote impulse buying. 

“What’s new here is that we designed our model so that customers walking down an aisle they normally peruse will notice products they will likely be interested in based off associations with what was there before,” said Chuck Munson, a professor in the WSU Carson College of Business and corresponding author of a study appearing in Expert Systems with Applications. “Our analysis shows that if you are a store that likes to rearrange periodically this would be a smart way to do it.”

Gihan Edirisinghe, study lead author and a former WSU PhD student now at Western Kentucky University, came up with the idea for the research on a Saturday evening trip to Walmart a few years ago. As he and his wife perused the aisles, they quickly realized something strange was afoot. 

“We found ourselves walking the aisles we normally do but all our stuff had moved.” he said. “So, I started wondering if the Walmart folks had put a lot of thought into the rearrangement. When I got home, I checked the literature and it turned out there was a lot of research on one time store rearrangements but literally nothing data-driven on the best way to periodically rearrange products.” 

Edirisinghe discussed his findings with Munson and the two researchers decided to tackle the knowledge gap. They developed and tested a product allocation model that uses data mining techniques to extract profitability and product affinity details from tens of thousands of real customer transactions contained in the Microsoft database ‘Foodmart.’ 

Their model then uses a three-step process to determine ideal product placement for stores that periodically rearrange their wares. 

First, it identifies a store’s most profitable products so they can be placed in highly visible locations. Next, it determines which items tend to be purchased together so they can be placed in a way that customers will notice something interesting next to a planned purchase. Finally, the model utilizes what the researchers call past-aisle impulse to take advantage of customers’ familiarity with where products used to be to determine future store layouts. 

“This last step is designed so that people looking in a familiar place for, say, potato chips will notice something new that our data tells us will interest them,” Edirisinghe said. “Every rearrangement can then be used as the basis for the next. To the best of our knowledge no previous research has considered this effect.” 

Munson and Edirisinghe ran numerical simulations to compare the potential profitability of their new model to previous work on product placement. Their model significantly outperformed allocation methods that rely solely on visual rearrangement as well as other modeling techniques that use data association. 

One important factor they identified that influenced potential profitability was the nature of the retailer’s target market. 

“If it is more like a gas station store next to a freeway where people don’t really have too much familiarity with the layout, we found that a one-time optimization of products was superior to our method of periodic rearrangement because there is no real strong past impulse there,” Edirisinghe said. “However, for a Whole Foods kind of crowd, where there is a higher discretionary income and familiarity with the store layout, our method outperformed one-time optimization.”

Moving forward, the researchers said their hope is that their study will attract enough interest from commercial retailers to put their method to a real-life test. 

“Our allocation method could ultimately be something that store managers could install and use with a little training,” Munson said. “When you take into consideration the fact that 80% of shoppers don’t make a list before visiting a brick-and-mortar retailer, it is easy to see how important something like this could be to maximizing profits and helping physical stores compete with online retailers.” 

Researchers from Oklahoma State University and University of Florida published a new Journal of Marketing article explaining how marketers can capitalize on the power of perception through the structure of visual communications to influence beliefs about brand performance, which ultimately influences product interest and choice.

The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled “Marketing by Design: The Influence of Perceptual Structure on Brand Performance” and is authored by Felipe M. Affonso and Chris Janiszewski.

Brands are constantly updating their visual identities. Intel recently went through its third visual brand identity refresh in half a century and its new logo has iconic symmetry, balance, and proportion. The underlying geometry is apparent in the design. Could visual design characteristics influence consumers’ perceptions about the brand?

This new study finds that a sense of order and structure can reinforce claims about a brand’s utilitarian benefits. Intel’s visual marketing not only communicates the company’s vision and positioning, but also reinforces them through specific design properties. The researchers identify a variety of design properties that can influence perceptions of structure in visual elements, including symmetry, balance, geometry, regularity, proximity, and similarity.

It is well known that customers are subliminally influenced by visual marketing tools such as logos, packages, and retail displays; they use them as a basis to make judgments about brands delivering on their promise. We find that for brands that promise utilitarian (functional, instrumental, and useful) benefits, consumers are encouraged by visual designs perceived as more orderly and structured. This suggests marketers can capitalize on the power of perception to influence beliefs about brand performance, which ultimately influences product interest and choice.

Utilitarian vs. Hedonic Brands

At the other end of the spectrum are brands, such as Pepsi, which promise benefits related to enjoyment, pleasure, and experiences—collectively referred to as hedonic benefits. In this case, marketers can benefit from using visual design properties that convey lack of structure. The visual elements of Pepsi’s marketing communications are relatively more asymmetric, free-flowing, unbalanced, and irregular. The research suggests that these characteristics reinforce consumers’ beliefs about the performance of hedonic-positioned brands.

As Affonso explains, “We find that visual design characteristics that encourage structured perceptions of visual communications, such as high proximity, high similarity, and symmetry, can reinforce beliefs about utilitarian-positioned brand performance. On the other hand, visual design characteristics that encourage unstructured perceptions of visual communications, such as low proximity, low similarity, and asymmetry, can reinforce beliefs about hedonic-positioned brand performance. These reinforcements occur because structure and lack of structure have specific associations that consumers use to make inferences.”

These suggestions are supported by a series of carefully designed experiments, both in the lab and in the field, and an analysis of industry data. First, in a large-scale field experiment when a perfume was positioned as utilitarian (“Long-lasting. Great for work and everyday occasions”), consumers were more likely to click on the advertisement depicting the perfume with a visual design perceived as more structured than its unstructured counterpart. When the perfume was positioned as hedonic (“Delightful. Great for special and fun occasions”), consumers were more likely to click on the advertisement depicting the perfume with a visual design perceived as more unstructured than its structured counterpart.

Second, when consumers made choices considering functional goals (such as choosing a restaurant that provides a fast and reliable experience), they were more likely to pick a restaurant perceived as structured. However, when the choice involved hedonic goals (such as choosing a restaurant providing an entertaining and exciting experience) they were likely to pick the option perceived as unstructured. Importantly, the research finds that these effects, across a variety of visual marketing communications, induce a structured versus unstructured perception in different ways.

Finally, for brands perceived as more utilitarian, structured perceptions are associated with greater financial brand valuation and customer-based brand equity than unstructured perceptions. The opposite is true for brands perceived as more hedonic.

“Our research offers actionable insights for marketers and visual design specialists working with design, advertising, social media communications, visual merchandising, and the appearance of retail environments. Specifically, the findings suggest that perceptual structure can be used as an efficient marketing communication tool. And it can encourage consumers at the point of purchase, being a relatively costless way to reinforce brand positioning,” says Janiszewski.

Lessons for Chief Sales Officers

• Brands may want to consider using design elements that encourage structured/unstructured perceptions of logos, products, product packaging, and retail store design if their brand is primarily associated with utilitarian/hedonic benefits.
• The implications extend to many other visual marketing communications, including print advertisements, website layouts, and app user interfaces. Marketers can take advantage of our findings and anticipate the consequences of key visual design decisions.
• Brands could benefit in the long term from shifting the structure of their visual marketing communications to align with their brand positioning.

Researchers from University of Nevada Las Vegas, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Arizona State University, and KAIST College of Business published a new Journal of Marketing article that examines when is the right time for businesses to send review reminders to customers. The study is titled “Ask for Reviews at the Right Time: Evidence from Two Field Experiments” and is authored by Miyeon Jung, Sunghan Ryu, Sang Pil Han, and Daegon Cho.

Popular websites such as TripAdvisor, Hotels.com, and Booking.com send notifications to customers immediately following checkout, requesting reviews about their recent experience and other feedback. Many firms send automated emails or mobile push notices after a purchase to learn about customers’ recent experiences with the product. This raises the important question: When should companies send out review requests?

The research team examines how the timing of review reminders affects the likelihood and quality of product review postings. Issuing review reminders immediately or shortly after purchase of a product or vacation experience may threaten a consumer’s freedom and prompt an adverse reaction. Therefore, some companies send review requests at a later point to revive customers’ memory of their experience.

“Consumers’ reactions and memories are influenced by the temporal distance between a product experience and reminder. The likelihood of writing a review decreases as time passes because consumers’ recall becomes blurry. This is more of a reason for companies to find the fine balance between asking for reviews too soon and waiting too long, both of which affect the quality of reviews,” says Jung.

Sooner Is Not Necessarily Better

The researchers performed two randomized field experiments with over 300,000 consumers from online marketplaces offering different types of products. The first experiment involved consumers from South Korea’s largest online travel marketplace where consumers can book flights, hotels, and guided tours using the company’s website or mobile app. Four distinct timing classifications for review reminders were used: next day, five-day, nine-day, and 13-day intervals after the product experience. Consumers were randomly assigned to the treatment group (which received a review reminder) or control group (which did not receive a reminder) for each timing classification.

The second field experiment studied consumers in a major South Korean online apparel marketplace. Four distinct timing classifications were again used, but with different time intervals than the first experiment. Across both experiments, the team investigated the temporal effects of review reminders on the quality of the reviews.

Ryu states that “Our findings demonstrate that requesting a review as soon as possible is not the best strategy. We find that reminders cause problems when they are sent faster than the number of days it takes, on average, for customers to write a review.” For example, if a customer orders clothing online, it is too early to send a review reminder the day the product is delivered because people need sufficient time to try the item on and evaluate its quality.

Lessons for Chief Sales Officers

1. Even though the standard for when it is too early may vary by product type and customer heterogeneity, it may be acceptable to send an early reminder in the case of search goods (e.g., paper towels, bottled water, and canned soups) because consumers have a clear understanding of the products and a high degree of certainty that it will be useful after an initial trial. In contrast, for experience goods (e.g., restaurants, beauty salons, travel), it may be prudent to provide consumers enough time to evaluate the product before sending a review reminder.
2. “Our results indicate that overly quick reminders are particularly detrimental for businesses with young consumers,” says Han. For example, Generation Z has always used digital platforms and is independent and pragmatic. In this sense, prompt reminders may be prone to violating their autonomy and freedom. In other words, the negative impact of an immediate review reminder may be disproportionately greater for younger individuals.
3. Cho explains that “As for the impact of review reminders on review content, we find delayed review reminders can alleviate the poor quality of delayed reviews. However, except for review specificity, the timing of review reminders has a negligible effect on review content such as ratings, sentiment, or length.” In other words, the content of reviews does not change between those who wrote them after the reminder and those who wrote them without the reminder.

The lesson for online marketplaces is that it is counterproductive to blindly adopt “faster is better” or “one-size-fits-all” approaches. Instead, companies should reevaluate their current practices and adjust the timing of review reminders to specific consumer target groups in order to elicit more consumer feedback.