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Ecommerce's Monthly Talking Point: May 1999 The Displaced Body Archimedes is credited with leaping out of his bath one day, having noticed that his own body displaced an equal amount of water. Someday soon, someone is going to rediscover that the physical world, and the way we humans bump around in it, also has a deep influence on the way commerce gets done. The implications for mass market, business-to-consumer ecommerce are profound indeed. How does retailing work in a world where bodies no longer make dents in space? Most ecommerce sites major on the stuff that is difficult to achieve in real-life stores, like huge product ranges, consumer reviews, and full product specifications. They take good advantage of the web's media capabilities to provide that 'rich' and 'compelling' experience we've all become used to. Ecommerce sites are also pretty good at taking your payment, and are often pretty hot on keeping in touch after you've left. But they don't provide the physical, social stuff that shopping is all about. They don't provide crowding. Or multi-sensual confusion. Or standing in line. Or peeking at what's in other people's baskets. Retail psychologists specialise in these subtle influences on our decision-making, and their origins. For example, it was reported recently that the UK's leading supermarket, Tesco, has reduced the size of its melons in line with consumer preferences for… smaller breasts. Focus group exercises yielded this insight, and after it was implemented, sales of melons increased dramatically. I have a different theory, which is that British people don't actually eat melons. They think they ought to, which is why they buy them. But then they throw them away. And people feel less guilty about throwing away small melons than big ones. (Now, if I were a member of a retail psychology focus group right now, I'd probably be tossed a fish.) But what if these guys are right, and people buy fruit because of some connection with body image? Are feelings about bodies, and shapes, and the physical rightness of things contributing to our buying decisions? Just ask yourself whether the shape of a car matters when you buy it. I'm not sold on the melon theory, but I am prepared to believe that our behaviour is underwritten by our physicality. No matter how cerebral we get, we've still been living in these bodies (or their precursors) for millions of years. We make unconscious decisions based on the proximity of potential threats and comforts. None of this is reproducible in the current ecommerce world. But maybe its intellectual analogues are. When organisations struggle to create a sense of community online, a feeling that real people inhabit the space, they're reaching for a substitute for the displaced body. They're pouring the bathwater back into the baby.
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