Business-proven ways to sell more Downtown
And it's not a Message conveyed by a "branding" slo-
gan. It's a Message delivered by the Physical Environment with Downtown and, within and outside Downtown, by the Marketing Environment.
Change Shopper Behavior
Author and retail consultant Paco Underhill and others made a science out of observing shopper behavior. He showed that of you change the Physical Environment inside a store in certain ways, that store will sell more.
But stores in our older Downtown business areas face two problems in making that happen.
We cannot respond to the Physical Environment inside a store if we don't first go into the store.
And we can't be in a Downtown store if we're not Downtown.
Underhill showed that a store's interior Physical Environment can send a "Buy something" Message.
In a new manual, John shows that the Physical Environment of a Downtown also sends a Message that affects whether people go into it stores and get that "Buy something" Message.
And what he calls the Marketing Environment also sends a Message both to "Go into our stores" and to "Be Downtown" in the first place. And action on both of these Messages is necessary of the in-store "Buy something" Message is to have any effect.
So this manual applies outside the store the influence of the Physical Environment Underhill found to work inside the store. And it goes beyond that to explore the Marketing Environment needed to get people inside the store and get them Downtown as well.
In The Downtown Message: What Your Business District Says Can Make It More Successful (paper-
bound, 54 pages, 35,000 words), John shows business-proven ways Down-
towns can manage their Physical Environment to boost sales in their smaller stores.
He cites top retail authorities and describes not what Downtown programs do but what successful businesses do. And he gets to the bottom line without a lot of superfluous verbiage in a way busy businesspeople can appreciate.