Under the leadership of Customer Service Manager Eve Wittenmyer and Assistant Manager Melissa Little PVLD has been working to more effectively "merchandise" our collection by displaying more books face-out and displaying more books on the ends of the shelves. We started with the new book area, and are doing our best to apply these techniques elsewhere in the library in the face of space and shelving design limitations. Customers seem to love the face out display, but we haven't had it in use long enough to get real data about whether it is resulting in increased circulation.
That's why I was interested to read this article from the Wall Street Journal about Borders Bookstores' experience with face out displays. Sales went up 9% when books were displayed with their covers, not spines, facing out!
As we are experiencing, face-out display means more shelf space consumed per book, and Borders is anticipating that it will need to reduce the number of titles carried in its stores by up to 10% to accomodate the new approach.
This overturns a longstanding orthodoxy in the bookstore business that faced with competition from Amazon.com and its ilk the bricks and mortar stores need to carry more and deeper inventories.
However, as John Deighton of the Journal of Consumer Research notes "We can be overwhelmed or thrust into indecisiveness by the presence of a large number of temptations," Mr. Deighton adds. "People don't want choice, they want what they want. And what they want is sometimes constructed for them in the store by the attractiveness of what's on offer."
Interestingly, "Borders says customers visiting its prototype store said their impression was that more books were available." [emphasis mine]
Borders also intends to couple its merchandising strategy with a new online service that will give customers fairly ready access to titles that are not in store inventory.
Commenting on the Borders strategy Seth Godin makes the point that Borders is adopting the second of two potentially valid strategies:
1. "Order taking" where you try to stock everything so that the answer to "Do you have....?" is YES, or
2. Marketing and selling so that instead of trying to answer as many permutations of the "Do you have...?" question as possible you instead do the asking and the question is "Do you want...?" (and as Mr. Deighton notes in the quote above, sometimes wants are created by what people see when they walk through the door.)
As Seth notes, "Bookstores that follow this strategy need to be pickier about what they carry, organized differently (alphabetical order again!) and staffed differently as well. Don't put all the cookbooks in a little corner. Instead, put books for me (whether they are cookbooks or computer books) together and make me delighted I found you."
If the Borders strategy works there are some interesting implications for libraries -
Interesting stuff...and an indication that Eve and Melissa are leading us in a worthwhile direction.
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