Some interior design and architecture experts have described some malls as “jungle” or “maze”. Various users described their bad experience on Twitter As for finding outlets in department stores like El Corte Inglés or Ikea. All this leads us to talk about gray effectthis psychological phenomenon that people experience and that has been deliberately caused for years and makes them susceptible to impulse buying.

Dropped chin, slightly dull eyes, and a feeling of confusion are some signs that someone is experiencing it: for example zombieAs this mood settles, we begin to walk more slowly. Some psychologists describe it as an almost paralyzing condition. mind stops working because it logs a lot of information at the same time and it ends.

Gruen influence is quite common in the design of shopping malls. In fact, it is named after the architect Victor Gruen, who designed one of the first establishments. Gruen didn’t like the level of manipulation required to create this mood and tried to create a mall. to mislead consumers to buy things they don’t need.

A number of factors come together to create the effect, and almost all activating our senses: use of specific lighting and sound cues, ambient noise and spatial design of shops and displays. Even temperature and humidity are important, as are mirrors and windows.

Modern store and mall designers are well aware of this phenomenon and, as many mall visitors have noted, deliberately create spaces designed to trigger this mood. That’s why they have hard-to-find exits or hard-to-follow routes so that when consumers want to leave, they find themselves in another department.

How we orient ourselves (and how not) in stores

In shops in England in the 1950s, the shopkeeper would be behind the counter and cut a piece of meat if a person wanted meat. Then I would pack it and take the money or write a note and the person would take the purchased item to the cashier. When the supermarket was born, they had to train their customers on how to navigate the store and get items off the shelf without anyone’s help. For this they use an example of a librarywith different sections and corridors.

They found ways to get people through the store to sell more products. For example, placing commonly used items such as milk, at the other end of the store. Studies show, for example, that most people return soon after crossing a store’s threshold. This affects when choosing where to place the items with the most profit margins.

A labyrinth with no exit

Alann Penn, professor of architecture and urban computing at University College London, did some research on IKEA after describing his first stay at the store as “being lost in the woods”: He went to the store to buy a mattress for a bed. A few hours later, left with a mattress and many other things I didn’t plan to buy.

As you’ve discussed in your research, the way a store is laid out affects the way people shop. That’s why he decided to study the way humans interact with space by observing models in virtual reality to learn how the environment affects behavior. And that didn’t just explain How do people get lost in stores?but also why they chose to do it.

“They don’t want you to navigate the store efficiently,” he explained. There are three basic areas in an IKEA store: showroom, buying room and warehouse. According to his research, the first goal in the showroom is to surprise a customer so that he or she has to tell the store, “You’ll be caught losing yourself.” You can’t go without going all over the place, by then you’ll have already filled your basket with unnecessary things.

Impulse purchases are important to retailers: 60% of purchases at IKEA are not items found on people’s shopping lists. Store design is a key component of customer experience strategy and takes shoppers down a winding road that passes through every department and every product:To further mislead buyersThe road constantly oscillates left and right, and there are no windows through which direction or time can be felt.”

Customer heatmap at Ikea.

Also, this way, you don’t really need the store’s map, and that’s what most shoppers appreciate. They are happy to walk the path the store gave them. The long walk usually takes at least an hour, and usually an hour or two more, depending on how many people shop in the aisle.

By the time they arrive at the store, shoppers get tired and many just want to pay and leave, making them much more susceptible to impulse purchases. Decision fatigue drives people to make worse decisions. Because getting them takes energy, and by the time customers come to the checkout queue, their nerve reserves are already depleted. “Thank you for your purchase and see you soon”.