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grow: mark healy

What is mystery shopping? It's a powerful tool in your market-research kit. It's an opportunity to get out and experience what customers go through during their research, browsing, purchase and post-purchase processes. Your customers or the customers of your competitors.

The first question, when it comes to mystery shopping, is why do it in the first place? You'll find the answer to that here, in the first instalment of this series.

The second question about mystery shopping is "what are you looking for?"

The answer should be: everything. It can be a lot to take in, so I usually bucketize what I'm investigating into three areas:

1. The arena

2. The products

3. The people

Let's start with the arena, the context for the situation.

I try to observe and capture as much as possible about the environment, whether it's a big box store or a fast food outlet. Size, colours, construction and decorating materials, signage, marketing messages, music playing in the background, volume of ancillary noise, smells in the air, lighting, aisle width and traffic flows, including entrances and exits, line length at check out, and cleanliness are all valuable to note. Details really matter here, as everything can have an effect on sales.

When it comes to products, there are fairly obvious attributes to record: brand, product size and format, packaging, pricing, model numbers, any promotions or special offers, and ingredients or features where appropriate. But just as important can be contextual product traits, such as placement on the shelf and in the store, or on a website, placement relative to other similar and dissimilar products and brands, and on-premise and point-of-purchase displays and materials.

Most important is observation and engagement with, if possible, people. I love watching how people shop, and discovering their decision making criteria and processes. I did a study a couple of years ago on magazine buyers in grocery stores. How complicated can that be, you ask? It turns out it was fascinating. The location of the rack in the store was crucial – it had to be line-of-sight from a high traffic aisle to attract browsers. And people would walk up only to be overwhelmed by the colours of the different titles, seen as one giant blurred mosaic from five to 20 feet away – so the insight there was: divided racking and title repetition helped people consume information, select and ultimately purchase.

Also important is observing and engaging with staff and on-premise reps, who contribute greatly to the experience through their interactions with customers, and with each other. You can learn a lot by asking a sales rep a lot of dumb questions.

Which brings us to "how."

How is mystery shopping actually carried out? There are two scenarios:

1. The mystery shop is "blind," in other words nobody knows you are there or what you are doing.

2. The mystery shop is "green lit," meaning you're there with full knowledge of the management and other staff.

In the first scenario, there are a spectrum of approaches, ranging from behaving like a standard shopper (going through the experience like anyone else would) to more aggressive techniques such as timing elements on a stopwatch, to writing notes on a pad or in a BlackBerry, to snapping pictures on a mobile phone camera (this is normally against regulations, by the way – so first understand what is acceptable and what is not).

This can be stressful, and it normally helps to pick on a number of locations, focusing on different things (products, people) at each location.

In the second scenario, a much preferable situation, you have free reign to set as much context with reps and customers as you like before engaging them in a mini interview or "shop along," in addition to all the observation you want to conduct. I usually choose to set maximum context, challenging people to be part of the process and to help solve the problem I'm tackling. Consumers are smarter and more observant than you might guess, and they can often offer up insights you'd never get by simply walking up and launching into some questions.

In any event, here you have the opportunity to get past "what?" and into "how?" and "why?" This is where you're going to find out from a rep that even though product X has the lowest price, no one buys it because the reps won't recommend it – or that shoppers order nothing off the value menu because it is "plain and ugly."

If you run or market for a business-to-customer company, and you haven't spent any time in the field lately, it won't be a waste of time for you.

Special to The Globe and Mail

Mark Healy, P.Eng, MBA, is a partner at Satov Consultants – a management consultancy with practice areas in corporate strategy, customer strategy and operations strategy. Mark's focus areas inside the customer strategy practice include consumer insights, customer experience, innovation and go-to-market strategy. He is a regular speaker and media contributor on topics ranging from marketing to strategy, in telecom, retail and other sectors. Mark is known as much for his penchant for loud socks and a healthy NFL football obsession as he is for his commitment to Ivey and recent Ivey grads. He currently serves as chair of the Ivey Alumni Association board of directors. Mark lives with his wife Charlotte and their bulldog McDuff in Toronto.

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