How To Learn Marketing From The Shopping Cart

I’ve been feeling a little confrontational lately picking at some of the branding missteps of some big brands (see Avis and Jet Blue)… so today I want to step back to “how to” marketing basics with –of all things— the shopping cart!!! 

All of us take the shopping cart for granted, but before 1937 it didn’t even exist!  If you wanted to carry things around a store you lugged them like the lady pictured above with the basket!  Then Sylvan Goldman, a successful self-service retailer, realized that people would have a better experience in his stores and buy more things if they had a cart.  He made the first one out of a folding chair (picture above middle gives us an idea of that beauty!)

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how to market products that fulfill needs that your target market doesn’t even know they have (see Drive-In Movie).  These days we call it guerilla marketing –outside the box thinking about getting your target market to embrace your products.  Fact is, smart business people have been doing guerilla marketing all along! 

Goldman did it with the shopping cart.  He saw a need and sought to satisfy it but at first there was a hiccup.  No one used the carts!  His guerilla marketing answer: hire models to use them in the stores.  It worked.  His customers saw how the carts worked and copied.  The clinical psychologist in me stands up and applauds Goldman’s insight into social pressure and the marketer applauds the idea of rolling up your sleeves and actually teaching your target market how (and why) to use your product!  Shopping carts caught on fast after that!  But that isn’t the end of the story.  The next two decades saw the evolution of the shopping cart into the current version (see the Life cover above) that could carry a child and for the singles without child could use that space for extra merchandise carrying.  Other refinements were the extra space underneath for more stuff and that they stacked into each other to save floor space.  Talk about doing research – this is marketing at its best!

Yes, research!  People sometimes say to me: it seems that all you’re saying is do research!  And, fact is, they’re absolutely right!  But there’s a twist.  Research isn’t just some throw-away concept that means I can’t bother to give you a specific answer!  Research is about being engaged with your customer and going to bring you the facts that will give you the answer. 

There is never a one-size-fits-all answer to a marketing question –anyone who tells you that doesn’t know what they’re talking about.  Research is an art and a science (boy, did I say that?)!  And, usually, the answer that research gives you is simple rather than complex (marketing types like to call it the parsimonious explanation)!  Like the shopping cart you start with the observation that there is a need that you can probably satisfy.  Then you figure out how to satisfy that need.  But, really, that’s just the start for any brand.  A successful brand is always reaching out to its target market, observing and listening to what it wants and needs and then making brand “course corrections” both large and small in response.  Research is what gives you reality.  Good marketing isn’t smoke and mirrors –it’s the exact opposite.  Cutting through the smoke and mirrors so that you can profit from the reality.

Like Goldman and the shopping cart, research is about observation and acting on your observations again, again and again! 

And, remember, it’s always easier when you keep branding in mind!

Here’s more on the history of the shopping cart:

http://www.unarco.com/unarco/carthistory.html