The Inscrutable Shopper Consumer Resistance in Retail

Traditional retail marketing theory has aimed to assist retailers with ideas, suggestions, and methods to attract shoppers and encourage them to spend, and ideally engender loyalty. Attracting shoppers, and encouraging them to purchase, has traditionally involved a range of marketing tactics within the retail environment, such as hanging banners, engaging barkers, playing music, designing elaborate store environments, and spending a continually increasing amount on advertising. We take a different approach with this book and ask the retailer to strategically consider and understand its customer base, particularly the issues surrounding why some customers may, or may not, choose to purchase (or shop) at all: what we define as the inscrutable shopper. While some retailers will not need to do any more than let the customer know that they exist (they have their formula just right), the reality for many retailers is that they are caught up in the business of day-to- day retail operations and lose sight of customer shifts, let alone have the time to consider why customers may not be purchasing. Hence the focus of this book is to provide an understanding of the different customer types that exist today, as a challenge of resistance to consumption.