While it is established now that marketing strategies are major factors in influencing your buying patterns especially when it comes to food, see how supermarkets compel you to bag up more items than you actually intended to. If you walk around a departmental store or a supermarket keep your eyes open to these observations:

• When you first step into any standard supermarket what do you notice? ---The ambience obviously! The attractive layout along with an audio of your favorite artist playing in the background is enough to set your spirits on cloud nine regardless of your mood when you entered the store. Another noticeable factor is that visually appealing stuff is always put in the first block of the supermarket. Don’t you commonly come across marvelous gift pieces like glassware or statues or bouquets as soon as you step into your favorite mall?

• So you think you’re going to return back home with only your favorite staple food items? Wrong assumption! Have you observed that bread, cereals, wheat, sauces and all other essential items that you need are widely dispersed throughout the store? Do you know why? The clever markets know that while you walk down from one essential item to the other, your roving eye will spot items that will dictate your heart into buying them even though these items are not a necessity. For example, that is how you end up purchasing a pack of new cookies.  

• Did you know that children are potent weapons used by the marketers to direct their selling onslaught on you? If you take your little one on an outing to the supermarket, better go loaded with a few extra dollars because anything and everything to attract kids is arranged in shelves right in their eye levels. Well, if you can understand what I mean, haven’t you seen a lot of toys arranged in the middle shelves and the more serious items in the top shelves of the shops?

• Another observation is that people usually enter a store to the right and come out from the left. So, for selling articles that move very slow, they are placed in the right side of the route the visitor takes.

• Added to all this is are the huge discounts and payment facilities that allure you to make more purchases. Correct?

Apart from these five factors that are about the layout of articles, I would like to say that customer satisfaction is another thing that makes you fall for the sales tactics. Haven’t you noticed the way the staff make you feel when you enter a store? You are no less than a celebrity at many of these stores, till you purchase their booty. Supermarkets and retail stores are competing with each other to attract customers through customer satisfaction measures. Well, they are justified in using their promotional strategies. But if you fall for them, who is to blame?

I thank AllSands.com for their very valuable input.

Image credit :Shanghai I know This City