In 2019 Beautiful Clarity set out to investigate the role of human touch of products in stores and how it is linked to the purchase decision.
How often do shoppers touch products? What aspects influence the propensity to touch products? Does touching drive choice and ultimately sales?
People use their senses in all decision-making processes, as humans and as consumers. In marketing and sales, eye sight has always been regarded as the most important sense. But what about our other senses? What role do they play when we make decisions? Touch has traditionally been ignored when investigating how customers move forward in their shopper journey.
But scientific research has made great progress in this area. Findings include that the use of tactile senses effects our conscious and subconscious perceptions and have shown a clear connection between touching and emotional bonds (Peck, J., & Childers, T. L. (2006).
By using our proprietary sensor technology, we were able to measure customer interactions with products in real time. For this project, sensors were placed on hundreds of products in 19 different stores across Spain, during a period of three months. By the end of the data collection, the sensors had observed over 100 000 human interactions.
As previous research suggested, touch has a bigger impact on sales than mere footfall in stores. And this result is independent of campaigns or promotions.
By correlating touch with other important influencing factors such as POS marketing, placement and sales, we could analyze and map how touch affects the shopper journey and how it drives choice and ultimately sales. And find that the biggest factor leading to a customer touching a product is how the store employees behave.
From this, we worked out clear recommendations based on the data, that will help our client grow their market share over time.
And finally.
100 000 human interactions can´t be wrong: touch does increases sales.
We managed to confirm that 1% increase in touch leads to 0,22% increase in sales. For a global company with a turnover superseding a billion Euro this means that with not too big an effort it´s possible to increase sales substantially.