For decades, they threw hand stores an infallible resource to make your customers buy: impulse buying. In fact, it is possible with doing it not for decades but for centuries, since the first commercial galleries, that first department store, and revolutionized the consumer world pushing consumers to take a lot more than they thought at first without really being aware of it. Come and decide to buy products at the moment. And so brands and firms make retail box.
The importance of impulse buying has been remarkable (and perhaps still is) and is what makes the spatial distribution of stores or associations of products on the shelves. Momentum is what makes consumers encounter stacks of chocolates and other tempting products when just completed the purchase or prices always mark a specific termination in order to encourage take the product home since it is not that expensive.
But is impulse buying endangered? Will brands and distributors to find a new formula to reach the buyer and make you take all these seductive products that for years have acquired an outburst last minute? Retailers have seen in recent times as its sales were not taking the pace they expected or they used and, as concluded a long story of The Wall Street Journal(which looked for it, besides talking to industry sources, a US media group buyers for their purchases in autumn), that impulse buying is mortally wounded.
To impulse buying is especially noticeable in supermarkets, but is not the only market that is down this type of behavior. Women’s wear stores had an average of 2 hour visit. Now they are more discreet about 45 minutes. In general, recall, store traffic is down and sales figures of retail firms are presented with weak growth.
The observations of the Journal indicate that buyers have become more disciplined in their visits to the supermarket. The new consumers are savers (and looking for bargains) and are limited because of time. But they also are also different to how they were before in relation to the time when they approach the store and the reasons why they do. Consumers today just go to the store when they need it (i.e. the visit to the supermarket is only when a product is finished and to replace it ) and carry a list of closed purchase. Maybe in the way they are with a very tempting product, but have learned to be strong.
Who is to blame for this situation? Two elements of the context have changed consumers. On the one hand, the economic crisis has made them much more economical and more aware of the limits that do not want to cross. Furthermore, the internet has become much more informed consumers and is much more aware of what they can find out and how they can get the best prices.
Internet has changed how we consume and has affected directly to consumers. As explained by several members of the industry to the Journal, consumers come to the store with the homework done. They have researched on the net what they want and the conditions in which it is offered, so they know where to go. But also internet is changing consumption patterns. Internet users have become accustomed to be done with specific products and not random and acquisitions marked by the point of sale. When leaving the network, they apply what has become their reality consumer purchases offline. And if only specific purchases are made, you end up with impulse buying.
Consumers also have become people with different priorities, as main concerns such as saving. And to save, one cannot leave out the first thing that comes to mind put in the shopping cart.
The Journal is not the first that has warned of the end of the impulse buy.An analysis of Bloomberg noted last year that sales of products on the shelves there next to the boxes (and they were the last impulse buying of grocery shopping luring consumers while queuing) had fallen remarkably. Buyers spend time in the queue to look at their mobile phones and have, therefore, time to be seduced by all these products. And studies of large distribution in the UK have also confirmed that consumers are becoming more organized and disciplined.
The shopper’s mission, those buyers who go to the store to grab a product and nothing else, were a surprisingly bullish trend back in 2011, when brands began to understand that they had to offer them the same as they liked to shop online outside network, but they could now be the tonic.
Although, as the alert economic news of the impending death of impulse buying and brands and retailers are wondering how to reorganize the sales space to continue to maintain their consumption figures, the numbers show a reality that is not exactly fits that shoe.
According to a study Credit Cards on the US market, 75% of buyers have made impulse purchases, although spending figures in them are not very high. 16% spent more than 500 dollars and 10% over 1000. “We do not realize that we need that magazine or that candy bar until we are minutes from payment, so usually we put in our shopping carts”, says the vice president of the National Foundation for Consumer Credit, Gail Cunningham, to Warc, he is lamenting that brands take advantage of that situation.
The reasons why those impulse purchases are made are purely emotional.49% buy by emotion, followed by boredom (30%), sadness (22%), anger or intoxication (9% each).