e research with academics from Western Sydney University, the UNSW Business School, and HMC Open University (Vietnam), told Inside Retail Weekly that very little research has been done on the effect that other customers have on an individual’s instore experience. “When you walk into a store, you might see four people who work there and 30 other customers,” Northey said. Northey and the other authors studied the impact of three aspects of other customers – their similarity to the individual, their physical appearance, and their behaviour – on an individual shopper’s retail experience. “We asked ourselves, what is it about other people that you would actually notice and would influence how you feel about the place?” In a study of 184 customers at a luxury department store in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, the researchers found that all three characteristics directly influenced whether an individual rated their retail experience as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. Northey and his colleagues found that a positive retail experience had a strong influence on later word-of-mouth recommendations. “The more congruent the other customers are with how you see yourself and the brand, the better your experience is likely to be,” Northey explained. “We also found that the more physically attractive you find the other customers in the store, the more you will like the products and the brand. And if other customers are behaving according to accepted social norms, you tend to evaluate the experience more positively.” This study is the first to provide hard evidence that other customers affect an individual shopper’s retail experience, although keen observers of human behaviour may have already come to that conclusion based on anecdotal data. Most of us have walked into a shop only to notice that the other customers’ style is wildly different from our own, and walked directly out again armed with the knowledge that the brand is not for us. Some retailers are all too familiar with this effect, according to Jason Pollard, director of retail strategy at the Public Design Group. “We’re currently working with a large health insurance brand and one of the challenges we’re facing is that when a customer walks across their store and sees it full of disgruntled people waiting to be served, it has a very negative effect on them and on potential customers,” Pollard told Inside Retail Weekly. Influencing instore behaviour While retailers may be unable to control what type of customer enters their store, they can influence customers’ instore behaviour. Simple things such as telling people where to queue up at the register show customers what’s expected of them. “We used this idea with a telco in Singapore, where instead of being served at a counter, customers were served in leather wingback chairs. It created a world-class customer service experience that pulled in other customers,” Pollard said. At the same time, Pollard warned against relying too much on the influence of other customers to define your retail experience. “It’s a double edged sword. You’ve got to use it well otherwise it could work against you,” he said. It’s not enough to understand that other customers affect the individual consumer. Northey and his co-authors also looked at what was happening in a person’s brain when this impression is made. “When you’re in a retail environment, the decision-making process is very complex. There’s a lot of visual and auditory stimuli to deal with, in addition to your experience of other people,” Northey said. “People don’t just go into a store and easily make an assessment of the situation; they are also calling on their experiences and knowledge and individual traits to effectively and efficiently process the information they’re receiving. “We found that people were calling on their mindfulness trait to process that information about other customers in a retail environment,” Northey said. Mindfulness is frequently used in the corporate world, the media and everyday life to mean something vaguely related to mental health. But in this case, the buzzword refers to a person’s willingness to actively process what is happening around them. In other words, to shift out of the brain’s autopilot mode into more complex cognition. What Northey and his colleagues realised is significant: not only will people evaluate their brand experience in more positive terms if other customers in the store are similar to them, attractive and behaving appropriately, but also the effect is more pronounced for people who have a higher degree of mindfulness.   Mindfulness through design This finding dovetails with a growing trend to promote mindful shopping through design, according to Gary McCartney, creative director of retail design studio, McCartney Design. “I think mindless shopping is going to disappear,” McCartney told Inside Retail Weekly. “As we become busier and have less time to shop, we’re going to be more interested in having experiences, rather than just buying goods. When we do go shopping, we’re going to look for something that we’re turned on by.” McCartney pointed to supermarkets as the ultimate example of autopilot shopping today. Since many people buy the same items from the same brands every week, there’s little need to tap into higher-level thinking. “Engagement may be high in the fresh produce section, but by the time people get to the dog food aisle, their engagement is so low, they just want to pay and get out of the store,” McCartney said. The designer foresees a future in which mindless purchases like dog food and laundry detergent won’t even happen instore, but rather those items will show up automatically in people’s homes. Supermarkets then will become something more like farmer’s markets: a place where customers are fully engaged in the retail experience. Thanks to the Amazon and its Dash button, this future may not be all that far away.