The prying game: the psychology of shopping

Integer doesn't represent the most glamorous branch of the marketing game. Where advertising creatives like to see themselves as the poets of the industry, shopper marketers are more like the plumbers, doing the nitty-gritty work of keeping the cash flowing. But there is a kind of longshoreman pride that goes along with this.

“We change attitude into action,” Evans says. “You can have the most beautiful branding in the world, but if people don't pick your product off the shelves, it's a waste of time.”

The foundation of the work Integer does, Evans says, is research, and that research is rooted in psychology. He's interested in exploring how people's values, temperaments and living situations affect their shopping habits. This involves rooting around in their homes, following them as they shop, asking endless streams of whats and whys. Then, using the stuff he learns, he advises clients on things like placement, packaging and logo design. And when he's out shopping for himself, Evans is still watching, paying special attention to what he calls “the hovering hand.”

The hovering hand is a recurrent theme with Evans, enough so that you wonder if the image keeps him up at night. “You'll see a shopper standing in front of a shelf and their hand will hover over a product,” he says. “Then that hand will move somewhere else.” Evans has spent the bulk of his 22-year career trying to pick apart the entanglements of human behaviour – at least as it exists in the point-of-sale environment – so that he might in some way guide it. “What we need to do is understand the processes the mind goes through,” he says, “so we can make the hand not only hover over a product, but pick it up.”

Right now, Evans is conducting research into the lifestyle preferences of a particular brand's target consumer. The idea is to create promotional displays that evoke the social settings in which these people might consume the product – a ploy, he hopes, that will generate an unconscious desire to buy it. If this sounds a little Clockwork Orange-y, Evans insists that he has the consumer's interests at heart. “We're not trying to alter people's behaviour drastically,” he says. “We're trying to make it easier for them to do what they want to do.”

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