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Fuzzy Signalsextracting the signal from the noise |
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Fuzzy Signalsextracting the signal from the noise |
NPR's Fresh Air Radio program just featured the retail anthropologist, Paco Underhill. [What a wonderfully apt name, digging underneath the perceptual surface of things, as he does.]
From the radio show, Thursday May 6th, 2004:
"Underhill studies and tracks the habits of shoppers in order to learn the best way to lead them to make purchases. His retail consulting firm, Envirosell, has helped big-name companies such as McDonald's, Levi Strauss and Blockbuster to study their customers' browsing and buying habits. He's the author of the book Why We Buy, and the new book Call of the Mall."
In his new book he observes "somehow how the glorious history of commerce has culminated in a sanitized architectural cliché in which you typically find not exquisite treasures and exotic wares but rather eighty styles of sneakers or sixteen varieties of chocolate chip cookies."
On the outside, malls are often aesthetic abominations. "Boxes with mouse holes in them," said a colleague of Underhill. They are so damned ugly, he explains, because of how they are conceived, starting with a leasing agent, a spreadsheet and lawyers and thinking about aesthetics much further down the line. And once built, they become part of our environment, sunk infrastructure, and thus hard to tear down or remove from our visual consciousness.
Most developers never really thought about how long these malls would last—or should last; part and parcel of the short-termist culture in the US. Most malls are about 20 years old right now, in decay and dying. And you don't see anyone rushing out to grant them landmark status, nor are likely to win any architectural awards. Contrast this with Europe: when the Grand Magasins du Bon Marche was first built in Paris in 1876 by Gustave Eiffel—the first department store in the world—the designers had longevity and beauty in mind. And sure enough, it is still a lovely landmark, a physical asset to its' surroundings, a pleasure to behold and be in. We need much more of this longer term mindset in our designers today.
In pure business terms, the opportunity to fill some evident vacuums are ripe for the taking. As Underhill observes, no one is building a shopping mall to service new markets, but rather, they are being built to steal someone else's market. We know that the best business opportunities, the best margins, are those where you don't compete with other competitors, but rather where you create an entirely new marketspace. Home Depot and Quicken are classic examples. In business literature, this is known as "value innovation." (You can check one Value Innovation article describing these tools here.) Other factors that make this ripe for new entrants include changing demographics, especially the role and shopping patterns of women, for whom malls were built around. Women now have multiple roles: breadwinners, mothers, spouse, purchasing agent. Why not create something much more conducive to her new needs? Also, watch where the boomers flock to in the coming years. As a rule, retail follows housing, which means when the baby boomers start deciding how they want to spend the last third of their lives, this is likely to put significant pressure on how malls are conceived today.
Out of the decaying malls, however, we are seeing signs of renewal. Malls become "ethnicized" or get taken over by churches. The New Urbanism ethos is also having an impact. New malls tend to be more integrated into communities and part of larger redevelopment visions. Malls are also being repurposed into interesting experiences like London's Selfridges and its latest controversial Bullring store in Birmingham. Selfridges' business model is also quite different, sharing risk with its merchants and giving them much more autonomy. This is smart because as Underhill notes, independent merchants make department stores interesting because they bring goods that are not found in other places. The dilemma for most mall owners, however, is that independent merchants can't afford to pay the steep rents. Perhaps some clues to resolving this dilemma and innovating a new value proposition can be found in experimental places like Selfridges. And, it should be noted, Selfridges's HAS won heritage status and awards.
Why is such a reflective researcher so intently focused on malls and the science of shopping? Apart from where he makes lots of money, Underhill believes that shopping is the "dipstick of our culture." Much of human civilization is wrapped up into the exchange of goods and money. This is what drove us to the New World, built the Silk Route, and tracks the evolution of the human condition (especially the Western-version of this story.)
Malls have been a place where commerce and community interact, where social capital was built. They performed this social role for while, and perhaps not as well as the agoras or small village markets before them. This is why the return of small markets and focus on local production in North America is such an interesting sign, with California leading the way. Of course in Europe this way of shopping never went a way, and is one of the reasons why we love living in Paris, our open-air market full of amazingly fresh produce is just 50 metres away from our front door. But even in Paris, these markets have dwindled. In the suburbs, most families hit Carrefour and other Supermarchés.
Underhill started out studying environmental engineering. Perhaps he feels that by influencing the future of malls, and how we design them, he can make a dent in improving how we live by improving the quality of our consumption experience. In a resource-constrained future where global consumers can't possibly consume the same quantities of goods and services—especially as China and India hit their growth targets— this kind of thinking will be sorely needed.
