Paco Underhill
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Paco Underhill is an environmental psychologist, the author of the books Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping and Call of the Mall: The Geography of Shopping, and the founder of a market research and consulting company called Envirosell. He is someone that employs the basic idea of environmental psychology, that our surroundings influence our behavior, to find ways of structuring man-made environments to make them conducive to retail purposes.
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[edit] Notability
Underhill was given coverage in the New York Times as an author of note in the field of retail and shopping. He was also consulted in a 2001 article in that newspaper by David Kirkpatrick on the phenomenon of the demand for books decreasing as the price of them increased[1]. He is also on record as having the capacity to get righteously angry about retail failures[2]
[edit] Significance
He is significant as someone who introduces us to new ideas of how markets work. Traditional economics analyze the prices of products as they are on the market and looks at the costs to offer those products. Then the analysis would look at the consumer and his or her willingness to spend their money on that product with its given quality and use value. Underhill finds a new way of analyzing a large swath of the American economy by supplying the model of aesthetics. His explanation is not so much in the field of economics as it is in the field of psychology as applied to retail environments, but its implications are that businesses must not only provide a product, they must also supply a mood or atmosphere. This model would explain why, for example, a used bookstore owner who is completely convinced of the intellectual value of his or her product cannot manage to sell any of it. Upon looking at the bookstore, an environmental psychologist might find that, while the books are superb treasures, the store's mood is inhibitive of consumer spending. The isles are cramped, the furnishings are old and suggestive of basement storage, and there aren't signs breaking up the stock of books into categories, making it hard for a consumer to go from genre to genre. In contrast, environmental psychology is well applied when a bookstore makes isles navigable, easily identifiable, plays music that encourages movement from isle to isle, and presents books aesthetically instead of as a mere collection of books.
[edit] References
[edit] Links
A link to a description of Paco Underhill's career on his company's website
