The tricks of the retail grocery trade have been exposed. Eye level is buy level - products placed below the knee or above eye level don't sell well. Necessities such as milk should be placed at the back of the store to generate shopper "traffic" throughout the supermarket. Baked and pre-cooked foods do not look good if surrounded by the colour blue.
Most of these retail rules are well known to shoppers, the secrets having been revealed by investigative documentaries, retail science books, and constant consumer exposure. More often than not, the customer knows the enormous "SAVE!" sign is there to encourage them to spend, not save.
It's not that devices such as product placement no longer work: the most accessible or boldly presented item is still the one most likely to be chosen. But this is no longer enough.
Most of the large supermarket chains have developed reasonably consistent high standards of produce and store appearance, as demanded by the customer. To make your supermarket the one the customer comes back to, you need to work harder: you need to show the customer you love them.
"People don't like to feel manipulated," says Eamon Quinn, marketing director of Superquinn. "We always ask customers what they want and have constant panels to get customer feedback."
Quinn admits competition for customer loyalty is becoming increasingly intense, but that their approach is to make their stores more user friendly.
"People are in different shopping modes at different times of the week," he says. In response to this, Superquinn has moved the deli counter to the front of the store. "We're not going to force people to walk around the store when they only want a sandwich."
Quinn says artificial smells are never pumped into the store. However, he says, air vents may be strategically placed to allow the aroma of baking bread to reach the customer before the customer reaches the store.
Superquinn, he says was the first supermarket to remove sweets from the checkout. The issue is hotly contested in the retail propaganda war as the Tesco group claims it was the first to make the move.
Tesco has 75 stores in Ireland and says 60-65 are currently being refurbished "in response to customer demand". A spokeswoman for Tesco claims there is no mysterious or ulterior motive to the way their supermarkets are designed. "This is quite a simple business," she says, "the customer tells us that they want wider more comfortable aisles, so that's what we do."
Dermot Ferris, business unit director for Unilever, which has diversified from cleaning products to salad cream, believes things are a bit more complicated. "There is a whole science behind it," he says.
He maintains that music is still used as a motivator rather than just background noise. "A strong musical beat to get people moving through the store, a soft beat if you want them to linger in certain areas," he said.
Ferris's main area of interest is product placement, or category management. "In category management, retailers and suppliers agree where products will go on the shelf." These negotiations are, says Ferris, very important to the manufacturer. "Most companies will try and persuade supermarkets that their products justify premium placement." The percentage of shelf space should be "somewhere in relation to the market share".
Dr Tim Trimble is a consultant psychologist who advises one large Irish supermarket chain on staff recruitment and customer relations. Quality, freshness and presentation are vital values of this chain, but, says Dr Trimble, the traditional retail buzz words of traffic generation (getting the customer to move around the shop) and product placement are being supplanted by new, sweeter, terms such as harmony, affiliation and customer orientation.
"You've got to leave the customer wowed," he says. "In assisting the store with recruitment I've put together a set of values for their frontline employees and those would include very generic things like harmony and affiliation." Harmony is the term Dr Trimble uses to describe concern for the environment and the world in general, affiliation is a bit more specific. "Affiliation to the customer is one of the core values. Staff must be able to build and develop relationships with the customers, but there's also an internal thing where they must like their job, like doing it and achieving in it."
He admits his theories have been described as "Disneyesque" but he says forced smiles do not beguile Irish customers. In Australia, for example, checkout staff are instructed to ask people about their shopping experience and wish them a good day. Trimble has his doubts about this approach. "It has to be genuine if it is to work. The staff must genuinely care and want to help the customer."
Although the idea of promoting caring and sharing may seem a rather ambiguous notion, Dr Trimble maintains that the approach he is following in research, which started six months ago, is very scientific.
"There was an awful lot of American ideology there, but the research we're doing at the moment is more a robust psychometric approach."
He uses the science of psychometrics to measure values in potential employees. "It narrows it down to a specific type of personality factor," he says. "We need to find employees who are ethically orientated and will be able to influence people in a kindly way, people who are able to understand a customer's concerns and develop a friendly relationship with them and make them feel at ease."
In the highly competitive retail world he believes caring for and nurturing the customer is what will become the defining characteristic of the market leaders.
"It does come down to the boomerang principle of getting the customer to come back. It's not hard to get a customer into the supermarket but it's hard to get them to come back. That was the idea of customer loyalty cards, but now we've moved on to a whole lifestyle orientation such as the whole alliance with banks." Dr Trimble envisages a future where the whole spectrum of people's needs, physical and psychological, are catered for in one store.
"People are nurtured and looked after by the supermarket brand name. The only thing that's missing is spiritual orientation, a chapel at the back of every supermarket, but it's probably not far off."