Gruen effect

     Casinos are designed to disorient visitors, causing them to lose track of time and where exactly they are. There is also a similar strategy behind the design of shopping malls. 

     It's known as the "Gruen transfer" or "Gruen effect" and is named after Austrian architect Victor Gruen, who identified how an intentionally confusing layout could lead to consumers spending more time and money in a mall. To be fair, in a speech in London in 1978, Gruen disavowed shopping mall developments as having "bastardized" his ideas. 

     In shopping mall design, the Gruen transfer is the moment when consumers enter a shopping mall or store and, surrounded by an intentionally confusing layout, loses track of their original intentions, making them more susceptible to making impulse buys. 

     Between 1970 and 2015, the number of malls in the United States grew at more than twice the rate of the population. Their popularity does trace back to Gruen: It's not about the items you sell, it's about the spectacle in which you sell them. 

     It was Gruen's firm that built Minnesota's Southdale Center, which opened in 1956 as the country's first indoor mega-mall. Its designers had one goal: to build an environment so alluring that consumers forgot what they came to buy and made impulsive purchases. M. Jeffrey Hardwick, Gruen's biographer, summed it up: "Shoppers will be so dazzled by a store's surroundings, they will be drawn—unconsciously, continuously—to shop." Nowadays, it's not just malls, but all stores have a variation of the idea. 

     The stores are designed to seduce you into filling up that grocery cart. Even online shopping websites use the Gruen transfer online. To put it simply, the Gruen transfer is the point at which shoppers become slightly confused when they are overwhelmed and entranced by multiple stimuli and so become more susceptible to advertising, promotion and persuasion. 

     A person walks into a shopping mall and there are bright lights, stores on multiple levels, moving staircases go up and down, signs, smells of coffee and food and shops, lots of them. As people wander around they will, hopefully, buy more than they intended. The idea is to create a sensory overload and confusion that puts people into a kind of a hypnotic trance. This is aided in malls by the shutting out of external distractions. A similar principle is used in Disneyland and Disney World where a great deal of attention is paid to creating an experience where visitors are not distracted by the outside world. 

 

For further reading: 

Marketing Psychology: 10 Revealing Principles of Human Behavior-HERE

Using Marketing Psychology To Influence Consumer Behavior-HERE

The definition of marketing psychology and how to use it-HERE