• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, August 16, 2007

A new study from Nielsen finds that when it comes to supermarket behavior, consumers more or less have four methods of shopping. What's more, their body language in stores provides valuable clues to what they're thinking about--or if they're thinking at all.

In many cases, people shop in autopilot mode. "Shoppers don't waste energy on everyday decisions," says Manjima Khandelwal, senior vice president, Nielsen Customized Research, who worked on the research, which followed consumer behavior and movement across 30 food categories.

"To simplify their lives, shoppers are often in grab-and-go mode, reaching for the brands they usually buy without reading the label or checking the price," she explains--and watching them, it's easy to see they are on remote control. "They're not checking prices or reading labels or looking at options--they're just tossing it into their cart and moving on."

That means that category leaders should be very reluctant to change either brand messages or packaging--"otherwise you may risk disrupting habitual behavior driving brand choice in your favor," she says.

But that's not always true, and researchers observed plenty of what they called "delta moments," when consumers shifted mode and actually focused on the products in front of them. Certain food categories (see Marketing Daily's chart on its front page) catapult shoppers into what Nielsen terms "variety shopping," whether it's for a new taste in food or a product innovation. "In this context, customers' decisions to purchase products were greatly influenced by informative and exciting packaging," she says.

"Buzz" categories also show consumers open to new brands and products, and cover the kind of purchases where consumers like to feel a little in the know. Energy and sports drinks, chocolate, ready-to-drink teas and yogurt drinks fall here. Ironically, she says, while sports drinks are among the most heavily promoted and discounted items, the consumers in the Nielsen survey rarely looked at price. "Marketers are really wasting their precious promotional dollars here," she says.

And finally, shoppers have an intense "bargain hunting" mode. "Consumers in this shopping mode are on a mission, and the mission is savings."