Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing, Second Edition

6. Long-Cycle Purchasing

By James Sorensen

In this book, we focus mostly on fast-moving, frequently-purchased goods: products like cereal, carbonated soft drinks, laundry detergent, and cleaning supplies. These are routine purchases in which shoppers do not usually invest a lot of thought or effort. We discussed how the shopping and decision-making process shoppers go through when buying such items is highly habitual. We usually shop for these items on autopilot. In this chapter, however, I discuss the purchases that often require a much more engaged process: things like automobiles, apparel, computers, tablets, and home appliances. We call these long-cycle purchase items.

Shoppers purchase long-cycle items infrequently, and many things can change ...