Do You Want A Job To Line Up At Stores To Make Them Look Popular?
Aug 18, 2013 23:58
Queues are a powerful symbol, pretty much everywhere. It takes our curiosity nature and transcends it into a retail phenomenon. Because, surely, if the line is so damn long, something really good has to come from the end of the line, right?
In China, for example, passers-by have infallibly resorted to a most social way of guiding their shopping behavior and that is to pick the store with the longest queue outside.
Whatever the product being sold at their end, lines are a path to socially recognized quality and money well spent.
For years, shops have been hiring extras to queue in front, some for RMB 10 a day for an improved "social exposure" of their brand.
Though research does show that the queue only matter if you know someone that's queuing up.
A recent white paper by public relation firm FleishmanHillard revealed that Chinese women are increasingly the decision makers in households, feel overwhelmed by the availability of logos and shopping options in the market more so than in Western countries.
So much that social recommendation itself has changed, and evolved to more than just a share button on social media.
Would you want a product even more if you see ridiculous long queues? Let us know.