Retail
Why retail must always find some room for weirdness
Consumers are people, and people are odd.
People watch The Kardashians one night and The Brutalist the next, and enjoy both.
They eat bircher muesli and butter bean stews all week, and then drink pints and eat a McDonald’s.
They say they care deeply about sustainability – and they mean it. And hours later do something massively unsustainable.
And perhaps most of all, their shopping is all over the place.
They hate Amazon but shop there more than anywhere else. They buy dresses in two different sizes online that they can’t afford, and keep both because they can’t face a return process that isn’t actually that complicated.
They then walk into Sainsbury’s and get a genuine dopamine hit from scanning their Nectar card, and saving 50p on a £55 shop.
People don’t make sense because they’re driven by emotion, not logic. Freud figured this out a long time ago – but for some reason, we keep forgetting it.
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