TakeAway: PepsiCo is learning how consumer psychology influences in-store shopping behavior. With these insights, PepsiCo has adjusted the shopping experience – the shape of end caps, design of advertising circulars – to appeal to the differences between male and female shoppers …
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Excerpted from cpgmatters.com, “Understanding Consumer Psychology Helps PepsiCo Improve Marketing and Display Tactics in Stores”
So far, PepsiCo’s research has unveiled three key learnings:
- The importance of the shopper’s unconscious
- Men and women respond differently
- Psychology influences behavior across the shopping cycle
PepsiCo’s goal is to understand the unconscious, engage both genders effectively, and develop best practices to ensure that its brands apply what they learn throughout the shopping process …
Take the importance of curvilinear merchandising … PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay brand is using more rounded fixturing in the store, including the configuration aisles and end caps.
“What we’ve found is a neurological preference toward rounded edges,” Michelle Adams, PepsiCo’s VP of customer strategy and shopper insights said. “Innately, humans avoid sharp edges and objects, and hot stoves. It’s a piece of who we are that we never really realized was going on, but is going on subconsciously.”
A design principle that appeals more to the female mind than male is scattering elements in, say a printed circular. “The more you break things up, the more females like it,” Adams said. “Whereas the male brain will gravitate toward the linear, toward block designs, the female brain will go toward angles and curves and different fonts.”
Another key point of differentiation between male and female shoppers is their reaction to “causes” in marketing, merchandising and packaging. Breast cancer and “sustainability” are particularly attractive causes to women.
“It’s not that appealing to sustainability will shut men down,” Adams said. “It just doesn’t get their attention. Men are about assuring that they’ve got the right brands and flavors, that this brand is for him and his family. The other thing is they want assurances around taste.”
Another area where men and women diverge is in the importance of all-natural products to them. However, overall shopper preference for better-for-you snacks has become important enough to Frito-Lay that it has influenced how the brand arranges its shelf space in supermarkets – typically in the front of the aisle and its more conventional products toward the back.
PepsiCo also rallies especially to the concerns of women with back-to-school “solutions” merchandising. “Our angle around back-to-school is to provide easy solutions to the problems that mom has,” Adams said. For instance, Frito-Lay promotes multi-packs of single-serve packages of chips that are handy for school lunches.
“We try to create sections in the store saying to moms: ‘Here’s your lunch solution, your dinner solution and your big-game event solution,’” Adams explained. “And with the brands we have, we can do that. It’s the advantage that PepsiCo has.”
Adams said that PepsiCo brands already have incorporated design changes in circulars based on psychological insights and already have been able to log greater engagement with consumers because of them …
Edit by KJM.
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