Many of you will have seen the latest attempts by Marks and Spencer to promote their food range, with soothing sounds and a rather emollient woman describing the hot dripping food stuff. Alternatively there are the extravagant Honda adverts, where a simple sentence “isn’t it nice when things just, work” sums up a genius advertisement. Then there are the latest Strongbow advertisements on television, deliberately promoted as the “total first pint refreshment", a result of extensive research which showed that people tended not to drink it for more than one pint. It is examples like these that demonstrate how indeed business studies is everywhere and how there is real psychology behind the way businesses promote their products to stimulate demand. Moving away from the world of visual TV marketing, it is time to look at an emerging phenomenon known as “stealth marketing”.

Stealth marketing is one of many terms, others being undercover marketing, buzz marketing or roach baiting, which are used to describe a marketing technique, whereby the consumer is not aware that they are being marketed to. One such example can be witnessed in Sony Ericsson’s marketing strategy. Sony used stealth marketing in 2002 when they hired 60 actors in 10 major cities, and had them “accost strangers and ask them: would you mind taking my picture?”. The actor then handed the stranger a brand new picture phone while talking about how cool the device was. And thus an act of civility was converted into a branding event. Unbeknownst to the stranger who had been confronted, the actor had planted a sufficient demand for the product, leaving the victim in desire of the phone.

It is not always so overwhelmingly confrontational however. Infact, this sort of seemingly invasive marketing can occur anywhere. Karl Mckeever is one of Britain’s leading visual merchandising consultants, and his job is to advise stores on how they can maximise sales in a variety of ways. Whether it be by organising how things are arranged on shelves or playing with the lighting in the shop, it all has a great effect on what we buy, and how we spend.

For instance, when you are shopping on a cold winter’s day, you want to enter a shop, feel warm and at home, hence many shops have heating right by the doorway. Furthermore, many of the shops which Karl advises, employ another enticing tactic. Within the shop are sights, sounds and smells all combined with the intension of making you feel comfortable with your surroundings. The “dwell zone”, which is the area just inside the shop entrance, is designed especially to entice you further in to the shop, or for those products bought in a hurry. As a result, in most supermarket stores, as you enter, you will be confronted by the comforting yet interesting sights of a flower stall.

Once you have entered a store, your body and all of its related decisions have now been taken over and are controlled by the store. One such technique is called “triangular balance” whereby the display of goods is organised to form a triangular shape, whereby the biggest, tallest and most importantly expensive products are found at the centre of the triangle. This is based on the fact that it is a human natural instinct to be attracted to the centre-most point of a picture for example, and so our attentions are drawn to it regardless. As a result, having seen this promoted product, when we eventually look around at the other products we are inclined to return to purchase the first product, thereby ensuring higher profit margins for the store.

Furthermore, supermarkets in particular have ways of making you spend your money, and the most common appearance of this is in the effective use of aisles and promotions. These are deliberately in high traffic locations, which are likely to be seen by the most people possible, and are often decorated with all of the latest promotions. Everyone knows that when shopping at a supermarket, the key objective is to get in and out as quickly as possible, whilst having got all that was required. Thus “eye-level” product placement works like a charm. Supermarkets have latched on to research which shows that when going down the aisle we look primarily at eye level. Thus they are able to place all the most expensive products at that height, whilst leaving the cheap ones at floor level, where we would be required to actively find then acquire the relevant product from the lower shelves.

Many of you will also be aware of the latest refurbishments seen in Woolworth’s in Abingdon. As part of their research into how they should reorganise the store, they viewed customer buying patterns which revealed that the vast majority of the customers were those buying sweets and chocolates, or looking at CDs. Thus they relocated both of these ranges, with the sweets now well inside the shop, and the CD's right at the far end of the shop. Both of these are aimed at getting customers into the shop in order to maximise their exposure to various promotions, including big signs advertising 2 for £1.40 on drinks, or buy one get one free on Haribo, or chart CD’s from £7.99. All of these have an effect when you are inside the store, and the majority of you probably also buy that second drink just for the fact that it is part of the deal. Whilst the branding of the product is likely to have had an effect; we all know and love our favourite drinks, for example. Indiscrete messages have been sent to us from the moment we entered the shop. The fact is £4.99 means you get change from £10, the fact it’s a “new and improved flavour” prompts curiosity and makes you buy it, and the fact that they have “impulse buys" deliberately placed by the counter, are all there to constantly prompt you to spend money… they really do decide what you spend.

Is there one piece of advice to take from this? Yeah, watch out!