Lost in the Supermarket: Studying the effects of familiarity on consumer decision making

Abstract: What are the effects of being familiar with a supermarket? Many of us do most of our shopping in one supermarket. By doing so we memorize the location of products and different categories in the supermarket. By memorizing we are able to reduce the amount of time and effort needed to go grocery shopping. Participants’ eye movements are recorded when shopping three products (pasta, yoghurt and cereal) in their regular supermarket. Then participants are moved to an unfamiliar supermarket within the same chain and asked to shop from the same three categories. This is used to compare how they evaluate and choose products between supermarkets. A control group familiar with the second supermarket is also recruited to determine if the different shelves cause for a difference in grocery shopping. By measuring the total time, evaluation time, number of products focused on and the amount of return fixations to a product in front of a shelf the study aims to see if familiarity with a supermarket causes participants to be faster and use less effort when choosing a product. It is also investigated whether familiar participants feel more satisficed with their grocery shopping, feel that making a choice was easier and whether they do better choices in a familiar supermarket. The results indicate that participants did make faster decisions in their familiar supermarket and seemed to use less effort. But the data did not indicate it with a high generalizability. It would appear that shopping in an unfamiliar supermarket affects the amount of time and effort consumers need to invest in choosing a product but participants do not perceive it as being more difficult or less satisfying. Participants did not report a difference in satisfaction between supermarkets nor did they seem to choose a better product in the familiar supermarket.