The local grocery store is a better planning model than SimCity

Design influences behavior. Retail giants understand and exploit that fact, and urbanists would do well to learn how it’s done.

You want to create public spaces that are intuitive, inviting, and encourage people to engage with their surroundings. The best place to perfect these skills might be the grocery store.

Fine art of persuasion

Grocery store layout is all about creating an environment that encourages customers to buy more products as easily as possible. Any parent knows this, but it’s not just about candy at the cash register. Stores large and small invest time and money understanding human behavior, so they know which techniques work the best to influence buying habits. 

Applying success stories from non-urbanism parts of life is one of my soap boxes. Too many urbanists are quick to say things like “we aren’t for profit” or “we’re not a branch of capitalism.” I understand a local government is not a for-profit enterprise, but your community would certainly profit if you had a better grasp on human behavior. I think the disconnect comes from two places:

1. We weren’t taught about psychology & neuroscience as part of our planning, design, or construction curriculum.

2. We weren’t taught about how psychology & neuroscience directly relate to everything we plan, design, or construct.

Design influences behavior. Retail giants understand and exploit that fact, and urbanists would do well to learn how it’s done. A game like SimCity removes a player from reality. Maybe the real world will embrace your on-screen idea, maybe not. A grocery store is a real place where influencing behavior determines whether a business thrives or dies. 

I know there’s something (or several things) you can apply to your work. 

Creating a sense of urgency

This is done through limited-time offers or special promotions that make customers feel like they need to act quickly in order to get a good deal.

Using scarcity

By highlighting limited stock or limited-time availability of certain products, grocery stores can create a feeling that you’ve got to buy now or risk missing out.

Cross-selling and upselling

Stores often suggest additional products that complement or enhance the product you’re already buying, or encourage an upsell to a bundle. Think “customers also bought” on Amazon, and the plethora of buy this, get that.

Emotional appeals

The more expensive the store, the more inviting and comfortable the atmosphere. The music, colors, scents, shelving style, lighting, artwork, signs—they want to evoke positive emotions.

Influencing customer flow

The layout of the store itself is designed to encourage customers to buy more. And once this nut is cracked, all locations of a store implement the layout. The essentials like bread and milk are at the back of the store so you have to walk past other products, increasing the chances you’ll add more to your cart. Strategic displays also draw attention to certain products or bundled upsells.

From aisles to streets

While I do like connecting dots, I’m sure you can think of far more applications of grocery store success than me. I’ll name a few, and I’d love to hear ideas you come up with.

Nudging people towards certain behaviors

Nudge people towards behaviors that fit the context. Covered bicycle parking right up by a building entrance sends a much different message than a flimsy rack out in the parking lot. (No more “bike lanes” on 45mph racetracks of doom.) Seating and lighting encourages people to linger and socialize in public spaces, but only when the locations are intuitive. And of course I have thoughts about nudging drivers to slow down.

Creating an emotional response

This might involve using color schemes, lighting, and landscaping to create a sense of calm or excitement, or incorporating public art and other aesthetic elements that appeal to people's emotions. Please check out this post if you haven’t already, because the field of neuroscience has tons to teach urbanists.

Creating a sense of place

Chain stores work hard to create a sense of place that’s tied to their branding strategy. What’s interesting or special about your place? Design treatments can make public spaces more inviting and memorable for visitors. Get rid of your traffic engineering Level of Service metrics and use something like a Flirtability Index. A “successful” place is far more likely to feature public displays of affection than it is low-delay vehicular traffic. 

Read non-urbanism books

I’m not afraid to check out a book from the library just to glean a few chapters before returning it. Same for white papers I find online. If you’re intrigued by the meticulous work that goes into steering us through retail stores, here’s some reading material:

• Atmospheric Effects on Shopping Behavior: A Review of the Experimental Evidence by Rui (Juliet) Zhu and Joan Meyers-Levy. This paper examines how different atmospheric factors, such as music, lighting, and scent, can influence customer behavior in retail environments.

• Consumer Response to Shelf Layout in Supermarkets: A Cross-Cultural Study by Shukla, Rayner and Rieple. This study looks at how shelf layouts in supermarkets can influence consumer behavior in different cultures. Gets into things like product familiarity and shelf position, which have a significant impact on purchasing decisions.

• A Comparison of Visual Merchandising Elements for Fashion Apparel Between Luxury Department Stores and Fast Fashion Stores by Jee-Young Kim and Jihyun Kim. Ok, it’s not groceries, but it has insights into how visual merchandising techniques can influence perceptions and behavior.

• The Impact of Crowding on Store Choice and Purchase Intention by Gevaar, Vantomme and Brengman. This study explores how store crowding can influence customer behavior, and finds that high levels of crowding can decrease customer satisfaction and make them less likely to make purchases. One big connection to urbanism is that a walkable place filled with activity feels great, but bottlenecks or overcrowding are lousy. 

Are the creative juices flowing? Tell me everything!