Siemon Scamell-Katz - Why do shoppers buy?

Why Did I Want To Learn From Siemon Scamell-Katz?

I reached out to Siemon Scamell-Katz shortly after I created my first product - Planniness, a journal that was designed to help people live more balanced and stressfree lives.

My team and I put a great deal of effort into the invention of this behavior technology and we were excited to get feedback from customers so that we could create an even better journal out of it, so we uploaded it to amazon and waited... and waited... and waited.

After one entire month, we had one sale, and that sale came from my mother( shout out to you mom for always believing in me x).

That month taught me something - no matter how good the product, people need to learn that it exists.

I knew that in order to help people to change their behavior at the scale I first need to understand how to reach them.

Being the lazy bastard that I am, I reached out to one of the foremost authorities in the field of shopping psychology in order to understand why people buy stuff.

Why learn everything yourself if you can just ask people who already have the answer to your problem right!?🤷🏻‍♂️

That expert was Siemon Scamell-Katz, the author of the bestseller - The Art of shopping.

Siemon was one of the very first practitioners of shopper research, being the first in the world to conduct eye-tracking in-store, to research shopper behavior in Virtual Reality, and to conduct shopper marketing fMRI and eye-tracking studies.

This man isn't an expert, he is a pioneer who invested decades of his life into observing us, filming us, and tracking our eye movements in order to predict when people buy.

Whether you are a producer who sells stuff or a customer who buys stuff, the information that Siemon collected is pure gold and this Podcast is a must-listen.

What Is This Episode About?

-How to get people to buy stuff
-Siemons journey of success
-His pioneering work in consumer psychology
-His early entrepreneurial pursuits
-How to create a bestselling book
-Why most marketing is a waste of money
-Why Supermarkets make the life of customers miserable
-The power of environment and placement

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CEO of TBU

Daniel Karim

Podcast Host

SPECIAL GUEST

Siemon Scamell-Katz

Instead of starting as an artist, by a circuitous route I started a business in my mid twenties that researched human behaviour. One of the techniques that we pioneered was eye tracking, equipment that allowed us to see what people look at. I became a specialist in how we see and how specialised the human brain is in interpreting icons and symbols and how those symbols are the stimulus to memory and thus interpretation of meaning. Any landscape painting is interpreted through a learnt “frame” of viewing, one that reaches back to Claude, and any composition, through our visual memory of paintings, art direction in film and television, etc. thus creates a cultural frame of unspoken meaning. Any viewer of paintings will also be from a world saturated with images, many of them with commercial interpretation and any symbol or icon will stimulate memory sated with other messaging. My process aims to remove both the frame and the icon so that the viewer is asked to look without seeing but feeling.