Habit: The 95% of Behavior Marketers Ignore

Positioning in the Retail Environment

According to my publisher, a book has somewhere between three and ten seconds to grab your attention in the bookstore. A single copy of a book that is spine out on a shelf with 30 other books in a section of several hundred books in a store of thousands of books is unlikely to be discovered. The odds that you found this book in a bookstore without prior knowledge are directly proportional to its placement and the number of copies available.

The science of merchandizing tells us the value of products being at eye level, the colors most likely to be noticed, and why items on end caps sell so well. These findings reflect both a customer’s habits and sensory processing. As mentioned earlier, our senses evolved ...