To the untrained eye, the data presentation looks remarkably like an Etch-a-Sketch drawing, little more than a child's randomly drawn zigzag pattern on a favorite toy.
But to Wharton marketing professor Peter S. Fader, those seemingly random lines represent a new dataset showing the paths taken by individual shoppers in an actual grocery store. The data -- charted for the first time by radio frequency identification (RFID) tags located on consumers' shopping carts -- has the potential to change the way retailers in general think about customers and their shopping patterns.
In a new paper called "An Exploratory Look at Supermarket Shopping Paths," Fader, Wharton marketing professor Eric T. Bradlow and doctoral candidate Jeffrey S. Larson analyze this RFID-captured grocery store data, focusing exclusively on travel patterns without regard to purchase behavior or merchandising tactics. The results, they conclude, challenge many long-standing perceptions of shopper travel behavior within a supermarket, including ideas related to aisle traffic, special promotional displays, and perimeter shopping patterns.
Using a new "multivariate clustering algorithm," the authors identified 14 distinct grocery store travel paths during short, medium and long shopping trips. Based on this information, Fader, Bradlow and Larson conclude that:
· Grocery shoppers don't weave up and down all aisles -- a pattern commonly thought to dominate store travel. Instead, most shoppers "tend only to travel select aisles, and rarely in the systematic up and down patterns most tend to consider the dominant travel pattern."
· Once they enter an aisle, shoppers rarely make it to the other end. Instead, they "travel by short excursions into and out of the aisle rather than traversing its entire length.
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