It’s your first time walking into the retail store of a brand you’ve never bought from. How do staff members perceive you? What do their perceptions tell them about you?
Image: DuxX / Shutterstock
I don’t mean how they treat you. That’s different.
I mean how they perceive you. How they perceive those attributes that provide them with clues—before they’ve even spoken with you—to the goals you have for entering their store, and to how best to interact with you to help you achieve your goals to the mutual benefit of you both.
As it turns out, we humans very rapidly notice and evaluate key attributes when we’re meeting someone for the first time. We assess a person’s perceived gender within 50 milliseconds (1/20 of a second). It seems likely that we make further judgments about their age, attractiveness, grooming, and attire within 100 milliseconds (1/10 of a second). Those are vanishingly short durations to make so many judgments, but we’re wired to do so.
Starting from your perceived gender, luxury retail staff might look to research suggesting that if you’re a woman, you tend to be communal (socially oriented), so they should focus on the relationship aspect of your encounter. As a professor of fashion marketing who started her career at L’Oréal put it:
The first thing I was taught when I started working in marketing for a well-known and luxurious luxury brand was “Retail is the detail, and in luxury, it’s the people who take care of the detail.”
That same research also suggests that if you’re a man, you tend to be agentic (goal oriented), so they should focus on the core service—they understand you’re on a mission, they’re going to help you succeed, and they’re going to be efficient about it.
We can bundle together attractiveness, grooming, and attire into an overall category of appearance. Luxury retail employees often form their opinion of a customer based on what their appearance, and may choose whom to help and whom to avoid based on appearance.
That leaves your age. What does your age tell the staff about who you are, about your intentions, about how you’re likely to respond to various sales approaches? This is where it gets especially interesting. As it turns out, luxury retailers may infer quite a bit about you based upon the generation in which you were born—and not all of what they infer may be accurate…
