Shoptimism: Why the American Consumer Will Keep on Buying, No Matter What (1st ed.)

Citation

Reinecke Flynn, L. (2011), "Shoptimism: Why the American Consumer Will Keep on Buying, No Matter What (1st ed.)", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 28 No. 1, pp. 92-92. https://doi.org/10.1108/07363761111101994

Lee Eisenberg has worked both at Esquire and Lands End, and he lives essentially on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. It does not take a marketing professor to see that alone suggests a breadth of experience with things consumer.

Shoptimism is a book in two parts. The first part looks at the world of retailers and the second at consumers and their behavior. At least that is how the book purports to be arranged. In actuality there is a lot of blurring of the lines in the book, but if one looked it as course material, the first half of the book would be “retail management” and the second, “consumer behavior”. Another way to look at it is that the first half is very much Paco Underhill, who was interviewed for the book, and the second is Russell Belk, whose work Eisenberg cites throughout the consumer half of the book. There is overlap but the points of view differ.

In the “sell side” section of the book Eisenberg takes us on a tour of Target, where he spent a few weeks as an associate on the sales floor; to visit the National Retail Federation's “Big Show”, for a chat with Underhill at Envirosel; and along on investigations of psychographic methods and the use of functional MRI's in marketing research. What makes these research methods part of the sell side is that retailers are using them to gain insight into what makes their customers buy. For readers, especially marketing professors, the most interesting parts are the inside views of some of the research vendors promoting their wares at the Big Show. In addition, the retelling of a speech from a trend specialist to the trade show attendees is particularly fun. The latest retail jargon is revealed!

Scattered in this first half of the book are also random walks through the history of retailing and consumer research. We read about Dichter, Maslow, and the importance of electric light to retailing. While this is not new to marketing academics, it is fun to read about.

In my opinion, the most interesting part of the sell side discussion is in Chapter 8, which covers a company called MotiveQuest. This group of consultants uses search engines to comb through the web and collect, categorize, and analyze buzz. MotiveQuest essentially measures the emotions we are expressing when we chat or blog or comment about products on the web. The procedure analyzes huge amounts of data and reduces it to interesting multidimensional graphs (not unlike perceptual maps) of emotions around and about a company and/or its offerings.

A discussion of anti‐consumption tendencies opens the second half of the book. Why do some people crowd the stores on Black Friday and some (not very many) stay home as a sort of protest against consumption? What follows are chapters on branding and the meaning of brands to consumers, a historical treatment of motivation to buy beginning with Veblen, and then separate chapters on what Eisenberg classifies as the main types of buyers: “classical” and “romantic.”

The classical buyer makes purchases that are economic in nature. He balances price against needs and makes what he thinks to be the rational choice. Eisenberg points out that even these classical consumers are fooled or manipulated by sellers making use of things like price lining or odd pricing. The romantic buyer is primarily motivated by how shopping and buying feel. This shopper is an emotional buyer. Here Eisenberg draws from Belk's work and uses words like “fetish” and “dreams”. Marketers play on this tendency in buyers by using atmospherics, colors, and even the P‐A‐D model.

Following upon his general classification of all buyers into the two broad groups, the author spends the rest of the book on impulsive/compulsive shopping and the differences between men and women in the retail world.

Overall, Shoptimism is a light coverage of retailing and how people respond to it in the USA. It would make a good additional resource in a graduate course in consumer behavior or retailing. For academic scholars in the field, there is not much new. (If you are as tired as I am of Maslow's triangle, its discussion was a strike against the book.) But it is a well‐written and fairly comprehensive coverage of both the history of the study of consumer behavior and of how that knowledge is applied in the market today. It is light reading and anyone teaching retailing or consumer behavior would enjoy Shoptimism.